The Place of Hou Hanshu in Early Chinese Historiography

Abstract

Fan Ye’s Hou Hanshu stands at the center of a period when historical writing in China was proliferating and diversifying in an unprecedented fashion. That period might be framed by two important works of historiography: the Han scholar Ban Biao’s short “General Essay” (“Lüe lun”), which was written around 40 CE and includes a description of the rise of early Chinese historical writing, and a series of fourteen essays found in the history division of the Suishu “Bibliographic Treatise” (“Jingji zhi”). Despite being separated from one another by approximately six centuries, these two works share at least two themes: first, the writing of history is invariably linked in some way to officialdom and has a tradition leading from Chunqiu to Shiji to Hanshu; and second, historical writing is fundamentally an act of compilation in which earlier sources often fall to the wayside. This article examines how Hou Hanshu fits into the pattern of these themes.