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

In short I am placing author before text, not because one is more important than the other but because the text, Hanshu (History of the Han), has given scholars a view of China’s early history that cannot be separated from the man who produced it. The Han dynasty depicted in the History of the Han is the Han dynasty envisioned in the mind of its author; simply said, this study is focused primarily upon that mind.

What this book hopes to achieve is a modicum of provocation; that is, I hope to consider one of China’s most influential histories from two directions. First, the standard expository information must be revealed in order to construct a vocabulary, an infrastructure, with which to discuss the History of the Han. I hope to illustrate that Ban Gu’s large historical work was really a larger inscription of self, namely, Ban Gu’s History of the Han was an inscription of the larger framework of Han history while being, at the same time, an inscription of his ideals, aspirations, expectations, and anxieties. The History of the Han is just as easily read as a history of Ban Gu. But Western readers, I suggest, have generally read early Chinese texts not as alternative forms of autobiography but simply as Chinese analogues for Western genres; Chinese history equals Western history in Chinese.

That said, there are two modern views of Chinese historiography that have influenced how scholars have discussed Han historians; both are somewhat problematic. The first reading holds that the early Chinese historian was occupied more with the project of dispensing moral judgment than accurately and objectively recording past events. On-cho Ng and Q. Edward Wang, who stated that Chinese history acquired its authority “because of this historical principle and practice of bestowing praise and blame (baobian ) on personages and events of the past,”⁴ fall into this category. And they asserted that according to Sima Qian and Ban Gu, the “practical purpose” of history was “distinguishing the good and excoriating the wicked.”⁵ Indeed, moralistic judgments have been made in Chinese histories and in the West upon the subjects of history. Western examples of moral judgment dispensed by early authors of historical records include such writers as Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), Mestrius Plutarchus (c. 46–127), and Cornelius Tacitus (c. 56–c. 117).