Historians Writing about Historians

Abstract

This article takes three famous historians writing about historians and history-writing as its subject, considering Fan Ye’s work in light of Liu Zhiji’s understanding of history and Fan Ye’s writing on Ban Gu. It seeks to discover in Liu Zhiji’s work the principles for writing a guoshi 國史 (court history), reading Liu Zhiji’s principles in relation to Liu’s assessment of Fan Ye’s Hou Hanshu (History of the Later Han) in general, and, it provides, more particularly as a case study, a study of Fan Ye’s treatment of the earlier historian Ban Gu, author of the Hanshu (History of Han). The article builds the cases that Liu Zhiji and Fan Ye are model historians, insofar as they were responsible for supplying plausible accounts of the past based on the evidence available to them. Liu Zhiji’s metahistorical rules and Fan Ye’s biography of Ban Gu serve in the article as examples in this regard. The article presumes that the historians’ experiences in their own lifetimes inevitably shaped both the style and content of their works, as no “objective” or “scientific” account of history is possible. The good historian instead holds himself accountable for the judgments rendered. So although modern historians of China today may well prefer the rhetorical style of one of the three early historians to that of the others, moderns would do well to ponder, and in some cases emulate features of the early histories under review here.