| Chapter 1: | Inscribing the Past: A History of Chinese History |
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Ban Gu also disliked Sima’s apparent disdain for the poor. Qian’s literary skills may be praiseworthy, but his writing lacks proper moral views and judgments. One sees that what, rather than how, one writes is most important; Ban Gu and his father held that a text should be appropriately laden with meaning. It must be biased, as long as its bias is the correct bias.
In addition to Ban Biao’s essay and Ban Gu’s closing comments on Sima Qian, Fan Ye’s concluding remarks to his biography of Ban Gu provide a retrospective summary of Gu’s historiographical ideals. Fan Ye repeated Biao’s and Gu’s view that Sima Qian’s notions of right and wrong did not accord with those of sagely men.51 In his summary of Biao and Gu’s opinion of Sima Qian, Fan wrote,
Fan Ye noted that the historiographical view of the two Bans is based on Confucian morals and suggested that the role of the historian is to explain events and render judgments according to the traditional teachings of Confucius. The application of this view is seen in several of Ban Gu’s end-of-chapter comments, or Eulogies (zan 
), in the History of the Han, where Gu borrowed the voice of Confucius, often from lines in the Lunyu 
(Analects of Confucius), as a means to evaluate the persons he wrote about.
Two examples demonstrate this point. In his biography of Su Wu 
(?–60 BC), Ban Gu drew from the Analects of Confucius to praise Su’s loyalty to Emperor Gao 
(r. 206–195 BC), who Su served as a minister.53 Su exhibited the honored Confucian quality of “loyalty to one’s lord,” 
for he is said to have responded to the news of the emperor’s death by looking south while weeping and spitting up blood day and night. Ban Gu wrote,