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

Such judgments were also rendered by medieval writers such as the Benedictine, Matthew Paris (c. 1200–1259). Although praise and blame was, some suggest, expected of all imperial Chinese historians, there were certainly other motives behind writing history.

The Chinese historical impulse to judge must, moreover, be distinguished from the religious historians of the medieval West. Contemporary scholars often criticize this Chinese proclivity for its “unabashed and overt indenturing of history to ideological and political orthodoxy and moral-ethical edification,” resulting in the “ultimate ahistoricity of the Chinese way of recording and interpreting the past.”⁶ But ancient Chinese historians such as Ban Gu were not just writing history to praise and blame; such a reading discounts the unavoidable influence one’s life plays on his or her writing. Chinese historians were not merely machines of adjudication and impersonal arbiters of early Chinese classical morals. They were, as was Ban Gu, quite human, disclosing themselves between the lines, so to speak.

A second assessment made by some current critics of Chinese histories involves the “cut-and-paste” method employed by Chinese historians to produce texts. Western scholars have often viewed Chinese histories as a “mere mechanistic assemblage of congeries of lived stories and events, an encyclopedic parade of facts and information.”⁷ In this view, umbrage is taken not with the Chinese habit for making moral judgment but rather with the tendency to uncritically compile and string together sources into a cut-and-paste narrative. These two apparently contradictory observations—that Chinese historians sacrifice historical accuracy to highlight moral and ideological judgment, and that they merely mechanically cut and paste documents together—are not, in the end, irreconcilable. For it is by selective cutting and pasting that such judgments are frequently rendered. In addition it is by careful readings of how a historian employs documentary materials in his or her work and dispenses judgments that the particular nuances of his or her ideology can be discerned. One of the points of this book, then, is to situate our reading on the historian rather than the history. Sometimes one can glean much of an author’s motives by looking at how, rather than what, he or she writes.