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

One of my objectives is to produce something of a history of history by writing a history of the historian. My primary goal, though, is to explain Ban Gu’s apparently sycophantic support of the Han dynastic house and the tools he employed to render his support for the ruling Liu clan. His entire work, I suggest, is inscribed with anxieties naturally connected to his precarious role as an official court historian, and in order to show how he sought to mitigate the danger of his position, I discuss a variety of issues: some historical, some religious, some philosophical, and some literary. This is because the History of the Han contains all of these subjects.

Ban Gu, by becoming a court official and historian, entered an age-old antagonism when he gained close proximity to the person of the emperor. He was, as were most court officials, caught between the duty to be an honest and direct courtier (who would, if called upon, render criticisms of his ruler’s misbehaviors) and the real possibility of arousing the emperor’s ire precisely because of his honesty. While this may appear to be a rather simple reading, such a simple situation, one in which what one writes or says can decide one’s future, is no simple matter if such a situation colors one’s entire literary work—especially if the work is the most important extant history of the Former Han. One only needs to recall Sima Qian’s castration for misspeaking to the emperor to see that penalties for honest talk were serious indeed. Previous history had shown that men and women who approached the emperor frankly were quite often demoted or executed. Ban Gu understood this antagonism well, and as a historian of court life, he was compelled to write his official history to serve two functions: first, to protect his career interests and, second, to facilitate a means whereby his historical writings could be a safe venue for loyal remonstrance. One of his strategies to mitigate this precarious antagonism was the formulation of a new view of the hallowed theory of tianming, Heaven’s Mandate in order to ingratiate himself with the rulers he served.