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China is a country with extremely advanced and mature historical prose. Records of the Great Historian, written by Sima Qian (145 or 135-c.87BC) of the Western Han Dynasty (206BC-8AD), was surely the inaugurating biographical work with historical figures as the center.

Sima Qian, a native of Xiangyang (present-day Hancheng of Shaanxi Province), moved to Chang’an City (present-day Xi’an City) with his father, Sima Tan, at the age of 10, and began to study ancient literatures. After he was 20 years old, he traveled to many places. In the first year (104BC) of the Taichu reign, he started writing Records of the Great Historian.

Records of the Great Historian plays an important role in linking the past and the future in the development of Chinese prose. It covers a history of 3,000 years ranging from the legendary Huang Di, or Yellow Emperor, to Emperor Wudi of the Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD). This book has altogether 103 articles, totaling more than 500,000 Chinese characters.

Records of the Great Historian embodies Sima Qian’s progressive concept of history and judicial criticism of social reality, reflected in four aspects: exposure of the feudal ruling class, especially the supreme ruling clique of the Han Dynasty; expression of people’s resistance to feudal despotism; extolling of people from the lower social strata; and description of a host of patriotic heroes.

Records of the Great Historian is not only a faithful documenting of history but also possesses high literary value. Its artistry is mainly reflected in the skillful characterization of many distinctive characters based on true historical materials. In their portrayals, Sima Qian made great efforts in uniting history, characters and themes, and consequently both history and characters are vividly depicted. Sima Qian is also good at illustrating someone’s character by placing him in a sharp confrontation and letting his words and deeds speak for him. The narration in Records of the Great Historian is concise and vivid. The descriptive dramatic scenes further enhance the work’s appeal.

Instead of following the style of Pianwen with its lavish parallelism and ornate language, Sima Qian formed his own simple, concise, fluent and easy-to-read style. The language used in Records of the Great Historian is informal, humorous  full of variations; therefore it has always been esteemed as the highest achievement of classical Chinese writing. The work by Sima Qian created the writing style of Jizhuanti (history presented in a series of biographies), and has far-reaching influence on the literature development of history.

（Source: chinaculture.org）