“A man has only one death. That death may be as weighty as Mount Tai, or it may be as light as a goose feather. It all depends upon the way he uses it.”
Sima Qian, China’s most famous historian, and one of the greatest historians the world has ever known, wrote these words in a letter to his friend Ren An just before Sima was to be castrated on orders of the emperor. At a banquet in 98 B.C.E., Sima Qian spoke out in defense of a Han general named Li Ling whom the emperor and many others in court felt had disgraced himself on the battlefield. The penalty for speaking out against the emperor was death. Sima instead chose an even harsher penalty—castration—so that he might have the opportunity to finish writing his life’s work, the grand history known as the shi ji 史记. (Side note: It was also the family business. His father Sima Tan had been the court historian before Sima Qian and had made his son promise to finish his work after Sima Tan passed on.)
Sima Qian was one of many historians who stood up against the state during the imperial