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

I should, at this point, attempt to place this book into its larger context, which is a growing interest in the study of Chinese historians and historiography in the West, perhaps beginning with Charles S. Gardner’s small book, Chinese Traditional Historiography (1938). Later works include Han Yushan’s Elements of Chinese Historiography (1955), W. G. Beasley and Edwin Pullyblank’s Historian’s of China and Japan (1961), Denis Twitchett’s The Writing of Official History under the Tang (1992) and more recently, Ng and Wang’s Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (2005). On the topic of individual historians of early China there is scant work, and what exists is mostly focused on the great historian Sima Qian. These studies include Édouard Chavannes’ still unsurpassed Les Mémoires Historiques de Se-ma Ts’ien, vol. 1 (1895); Burton Watson’s Ssu-ma Ch’ien: Grand Historian of China (1958); Stephen Durrant’s The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writing of Sima Qian (1995); and Grant Hardy’s World’s of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian’s Conquest of History (1999). This book turns to the historian Ban Gu, highlighting instances wherein Gu’s human concerns and anxieties have become manifest in his writing and, moreover, how his very personal antagonisms have colored the Han dynasty that scholars imagine today.

On sources and methodology there are three editions of the History of the Han that I have most often consulted here: the Zhonghua shuju edition, published in 1962; the Hanshu buzhu (Supplemental Commentary on the History of the Han) commentary, first published during the 26th reign year (1900) of the Qing (1644–1911) Emperor Guangxu (r. 1875–1908);¹¹ and the Jingyou edition, preserved in the Hanshu: Bona ben ershisishi .¹² There are several other works that I have found helpful when writing this book, but studies devoted exclusively to Ban Gu remain lamentably few.¹³ In terms of translation and Romanization, I have utilized the fine translations of others such as Homer Dubs, Watson, and Clyde Sargent but have rendered my own throughout the text.¹⁴ I have also employed the pinyin system of Romanization, not because it is necessarily better than Wade Giles or other systems but because it is now the standard. In addition, I have not included diacritical accents to indicate tones, as I presume that most readers of such a specialized topic as this are already aware of them.