Jottings from the Granite Studio

“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 period. As his story suggests, the penalties for doing so were severe but such was their devotion to learning and their belief that the study of history could provide wise counsel and insight into contemporary problems that court historians risked their lives simply to record history as they saw it.

In the 6^th century B.C.E., a historian for the Duke of Qi wrote in the official records about the sordid and venal events occurring at the court. When the Duke ordered him to change the record, the historian of Qi refused. In response, the Duke had the historian killed. And then another historian. And another. Finally one historian was able to write the events into the court diary without alteration. These records were eventually included in the zuozhuan 左傳 from whence the story comes. The historians of Qi chose death before they would satisfy their ruler’s demands to tamper with history.

The Tang dynasty historian Liu Zhiji used the historians of Qi and Sima Qian as examples when he wrote:

“There are three ways for a historian to fulfill his duties. What are they? To celebrate the good, censure the evil, and confront the powerful.”

History can be inconvenient sometimes. It doesn’t always say what we want it to say. It can make us uncomfortable when we realize that there might be things which we take for granted in the present that are rooted in the injustices of the past. It can make us angry when historical research challenges cherished national myths or exposes long held assumptions as hollow. Yet historians persist trying to sift through the records and to interpret the evidence as they see it.

When one begins the process of historical research with the possible interpretations limited by geo-political exigencies, national pride, or ideology, then the process has already been corrupted. And when history is used uncritically in contemporary disputes without regard to the record or the research, well….that’s just truthiness.

China’s grand historians were well aware of these things (though I wonder what the appropriate classical Chinese term is for “truthiness”) and they set a very high standard for all historians today, in China and around the world.

And if that’s not enough, you have got to love the bravado of Su Che (brother of the famous Song scholar Su Shi) who once wrote: “There are three authorities in the land: Heaven, the sovereign, and the historiographer (shiguan).”

I think I’m putting that right at the top of my next syllabus.

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All translations from Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume I. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).