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

Ban Gu’s intellectual contributions to early China invoked new perspectives on textual production and intellectual orthodoxy that have had lasting effects on how China has perceived its past. Unfortunately, however, Ban Gu’s biographical details have been little studied.

The first Chinese work to discuss Ban Gu at length was the Hou Hanshu (History of the Later Han), where Ban Gu is discussed within the biography of his father, Ban Biao (AD 3–54).¹⁹ Fan Ye (AD 398–445), the author of this work, briefly outlined how Gu arrived at writing the History of the Han, putatively a completion of his father’s work. Current Chinese works mostly include only cursory biographical information on Ban Gu, generally because they have focused their research on textual studies of the History of the Han or Ban’s other literary works, rather than on him and his life. One contemporary Chinese scholar, Li Weixiong , wrote a study of the text entitled the Hanshu daodu (Guide to Reading the History of the Han), which includes a short biographical section on Ban Gu in a discussion of how the work was completed.²⁰ Wang Mingtong , another modern scholar, also has provided a short biography in his study, the Hanshu daolun (Considerations of the History of the Han).²¹ The few English sources that contain biographical information about Ban Gu include Herbert A. Giles’s A Chinese Biographical Dictionary,²² Nancy Lee Swann’s Pan Chao: Foremost Woman Scholar of China,²³ and Michael Loewe’s A Biographical Dictionary of the Qin, Former Han and Xin Empires (221 BC–AD 24)²⁴ And the most complete English biographical discussion of Ban Gu for several decades has been Otto B. van der Sprenkel’s Pan Piao, Pan Ku, and the Han History.²⁵

Several other works contain brief descriptions of Ban Gu’s life, though few have been produced in any language that is devoted exclusively to Ban Gu and his writings. Two works that do center on Ban Gu are Zheng Hesheng’s chronologically organized Han Ban Mengjian xiansheng Gu nianpu (Annals of the Life of Mr. Ban [Gu] Mengjian) and Chen Qitai’s Ban Gu pingzhuan (Critical Biography of Ban Gu).²⁶