Views from Within, Views from Beyond: Approaches to the Shiji as an Early Work of Historiography

Editors:
Hans van Ess, Olga Lomová, and Dorothee Schaab-Hanke

Publication Year:
2015

Publisher:
Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz Verlag

Abstract:

This is not simply one more out of the many works that have already been written on the Shiji, the “Records of the Scribes” or perhaps “Historical Records,” authored by the two Western Han historians Sima Tan (?-110 BCE) and his son Sima Qian (c. 145-c. 86 BCE). It is rather the joint effort of about a dozen established scholars of the field to approach this early masterpiece of both historiography and literature with some refreshingly new questions and working hypotheses.

The authors of this volume originally gathered at a conference entitled “Shiji and Beyond,” organized by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation International Sinological Center in Prague in December 2011. This was the third conference on the Shiji in a series started by Professor Lee Chi-hsiang at Fo Guang University in Taiwan in 2008. Its organizers have tried to bring together scholars who have been actively promoting Shiji studies in Taiwan, the US, Canada, and several European countries.

The majority of the papers presented at the Prague workshop are collected here. They are now divided into two sections entitled “Views from Within” and “Views from Beyond.” Such an arrangement seems plausible to the editors, because almost all of the papers either have their main focus on a reading of the text itself or look at its later reception.

Table of Contents:

Introduction 1

I Views from Within

Bernhard Fuehrer
Sima Qian as a Reader of Master Kong’s Utterances ……………………………… 9

Juri L. Kroll
Toward a Study of the Concept of Linear Time in the Shiji ……………………… 31

Chi-hsiang Lee 李紀祥
Sima Qian’s View of Zhou History in Shiji《史記》中司馬遷的「周史觀」………… 41

Hans van Ess
The Friends of Sima Tan and Sima Qian ………………………………… 67

Wai-yee Li
Historical Understanding in “The Account of the Xiongnu” in the Shiji ……… 79

Giulia Baccini
The Shiji chapter “Guji Liezhuan” (Traditions of Witty Remonstrants):
A Source to Look for Rhetorical Strategies in Early China ………………… 103

Michael Nylan
Assets Accumulating:
Sima Qian’s Perspective on Moneymaking, Virtue, and History ………………… 131

II Views from Beyond

Béatrice L’Haridon
The Merchants in Shiji: An Interpretation in the Light of Later Debates …171

Dorothee Schaab-Hanke
Inheritor of a Subversive Mind?
Approaching Yang Yun from his Letter to Sun Huizong …………………… 193

Stephen Durrant
Ban Biao, Ban Gu, Their Five Shiji Sources,
and the Curious Case of Chu Han chunqiu ……………………………………… 217 

William H. Nienhauser, Jr.
Takigawa Kametarō and His Contributions to the Study of the Shiji …… 243

Christoph Harbsmeier
Living up to Contrasting Portraiture: Plutarch on Alexander the Great
and Sima Qian on the First Qin Emperor ………………………………………… 263