| Chapter 1: | Inscribing the Past: A History of Chinese History |
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To outline Ban Gu’s historical and literary strategies, I have organized this book into five sections: This chapter considers two preliminary topics. I first provide a general survey of the traditional antagonism between minister and ruler and, second, I introduce Ban Gu’s general view of history. Chapter 2 traces the long history of the material text, the History of the Han, looking at how the work was written, rewritten, edited, and commented on from its early stages to the editions of the text extant today. History is layered—history of author upon history of text upon history of empire—and each subsequent layer of rewriting represents a newly nuanced view of the past. With each new commentary and each new recension, the Han and the author who represented it are recast in a new light. Chapter 3 outlines how Ban Gu’s postface (xuzhuan 
) inscribes his family with characteristics that depict them as wise and loyal ministers in the court who seem sometimes to endanger themselves by their remonstrations. Certain tensions emerge in Ban Gu’s account of his ancestors that reveal the anxieties and challenges of entering into court politics.
Chapter 4 outlines how Ban Gu’s History of the Han was written in the wake of a turbulent political period during which the Han court was temporarily displaced and under the control of a former intimate of the Ban clan. In this chapter, I consider the historical antecedents that influenced how Ban Gu viewed the Liu family’s role as the imperial clan. I also highlight the influence that the Ban family’s ideological views had on him as he wrote his history—their admiration for classical tenets and their long history of involvement in state affairs. Finally, in this chapter, I provide a biographical sketch of Ban Gu’s life and the already-precarious circumstances of his authorship of historical records in his younger years—that is, before his official employment as a court historian.
In chapter 5, I discuss one of Ban Gu’s strategies for framing his History of the Han within a theoretical paradigm that would appeal to the ruling Liu clan. Influenced by his father’s “Essay on the Kingly Mandate” 
, Ban Gu reconfigured the Heaven’s Mandate theory into one that marked the Liu clan as predestined to receive Heaven’s election.27 Ban Gu moreover restructured the Heaven’s Mandate paradigm into a form quite unlike its pre-Han form to please the ruling Liu clan by suggesting that their Mandate was divinely predetermined—not subject to moral requisites—while also being eternally granted.