So like
I promised last year when I finished Sangokushi, I'm returning to Yokoyama Mitsuteru with his 15-volume adaptation of Shiji (I haven't forgotten about the other promises, they've just been... delayed). In case you haven't noticed from my history-related posts and my 60 volume-translation of Sangokushi, I'm a pretty big fan of Chinese history. And when it comes to Chinese history, there's arguably no other work more important as Sima Qian's Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), which pretty much set how history should be told for not just Chinese, but through China's influence, for Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese as well.
As the New Dictionary of History of Ideas writes:
The most important early figure in Chinese historical thought and writing, however, was the
Han dynasty figure Sima Qian (145–86 B.C.E.). After the unification of various “Warring States”
into a single empire by the violent but short-lived Qin (whose first emperor ordered an infamous
book-burning and mass execution of scholars, virtually eliminating records of the conquered kingdoms),
the succeeding Han emperors (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) created the stable conditions under
which historiography could mature. Sima Qian, often known as the Grand Historian, did far more
than write in his Shiji (Historical Records) a comprehensive account of Chinese history. He also
evinced a clear sense of the historian’s purpose: to record major and minor occurrences accurately
in order to counsel the present and to bestow fame on the good and infamy on evildoers. Perhaps
most important, his model for the compilation of facts about the past with its clearly worked out
format, a combination of year-by-year annals and individual biographical treatments, influenced
the next two millennia of Chinese historical writing. No Western historian, not even Herodotus
or Thucydides, can claim that kind of influence, nor does Western historical writing display the
continuity of a systematic and eventually institutionalized approach to the past that is exemplified
by China. Sima Qian created various categories for the representation of the past that would
be developed and augmented by subsequent writers. By the time he finished the Shiji that his father
had begun, it was nearly four times the size of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. The Shiji
would come to be regarded as the first in a long series of twenty-four “Standard Histories” (zhengshi),
the official history of a dynasty written under its successor dynasty. (The Shiji itself, since it
covered both the Han and their predecessors, is an exception to the rule that Standard Histories
cover only one dynasty and are written after its fall).
I'll probably do a longer Some Thoughts post on Sima Qian and Shiji once I finish this project but the main reason why I'm translating this is because there's a lack of easily accessible "fun" narrative history for early Chinese periods. Yokoyama's Shiji manga is full of interesting stories about famous assassins, ministers, kings, and generals, so I hope this'll get some people interested in Chinese history, just as Sangokushi can help people get into the RotTK fandom.
Release pace will probably be 1 volume every 2-3 months since I plan to juggle it with other projects.
Download:
Shiji v01: Download
Shiji v1 c01: Download
Shiji v1 c02: Download
Shiji v1 c03: Download
Shiji v1 c04: Download
