Ban Gu's History of Early China By Anthony E. Clark

This book is a response to what I see as the unfortunate tendency to read historical records merely as deposits of information while relegating the authors of those records to the margins, if not to a place entirely out of mind. Early Chinese historians such as Sima Qian (145–c. 86 BC) and Ban Gu (32–92) did not simply write “objective histories” of past events; the object of history was never impartial to Han (206 BC–220) historians. For them, the past was often accepted as an irrefutably golden era from which human institutions had wandered; or in the language of early philosophers and historians, the teachings of the sages (shengren ) of high antiquity (shanggu ) had decayed (shuai ). There is, therefore, always a connection between the past one writes about and the present one lives within, for when one employs the events of the past to shed light on those of the present, one is always influenced by one’s historical context.

Despite this disjunction, I remain unconvinced by recent assertions that all records of the past are necessarily “mythologized” by the historian’s cultural present by which he or she is encumbered. Admitting the usefulness of much of Edward Said’s ideas—his argument that all narrative representations of history are merely a “re-presence” of the past, that is, that they can never truthfully recover an accurate view of the past—is not born out by the rather frequent archeological discoveries that enforce the vision of early China provided to modern scholars by ancient historians.³ I do, however, entertain Said’s point here and there nonetheless. In addition, to read someone’s work is to read their words, and barring textual corruptions precipitated by centuries of accretions and lacunae, by reading their words present readers are, in a significant way, accessing their thoughts and ideas. But even so, texts change over time either in the mind of their authors or in the hands of their editors. The goal of this book, then, is to carefully read the writings of the Eastern Han (23–220) historian, Ban Gu, in order to extract his personal ideas and, perhaps, also see some of his anxieties from the mass of his historical narrative.