The ancient rulers of China even set up the official position of historian, who was responsible for the collection and compilation of history. From Shang dynasty to modern times, thousands of years have left a vast amount of historical materials! This vast history book is rich in content, ranging from national politics, emperors' words and deeds to folk customs and social historical facts!
On the other hand, when we talk about these history books, we always mention such words as "chronological style", "national style" and "biographical style". Do you know what they mean? Next, let's take a closer look.
I. Chronological style
The so-called chronological style refers to a genre of history books written with time as a clue.
The core of chronological history books is time, and historical events are described in units of years, months, days and even hours. Chronology takes time as longitude and events as latitude, which is easier to reflect the relationship between historical events with similar time periods.
The advantage of chronological style is that it is convenient to show the time sequence of historical events and to sort out the relationship between different historical events. Its shortcomings are also obvious. Chronological history books are difficult to record those historical events with unknown time. Therefore, chronological history books are mostly used to record historical and political events with clear time points, while historical materials with vague time concepts such as economic situation and customs are rarely included.
Chronological history books mainly include: Spring and Autumn Annals, Zuo Zhuan, Zi Tongzhi Bamboo Slips, Bamboo Annals, Han Ji, Later Han Shu and Guo Que.
Second, the biography (zhuan) style
The so-called biographical style refers to the genre of historical books (biographies) that take characters as the main body and reflect historical events by describing activities related to characters.
The advantage of biographies is that they can record more historical materials, which is convenient for recording the history that cannot be arranged according to the time axis. In addition, biographical history books can contain more historical figures because biographical narratives focus on characters. Biography also has shortcomings, that is, it is difficult to show the relationship between historical events, and because of people-oriented, it is very easy to exaggerate the role of historical figures.
Biography is people-centered, but it has extremely strict norms on people's status level! The biography of the emperor is called Ji, the biographies of people below the emperor are called Zhun, the biographies of people in unorthodox dynasties are called Zai Ji, and a series of biographies of non-people such as local customs, economy and humanities are called Zhi.
Sima Qian was the founder of biographical history books in Han Dynasty, and his Historical Records was the first. Since then, all the official history books have been written in biographies! Our ancient official history-twenty-four histories-is written in biographical style!
Three. rustic style
The country depends on this national character, as I think you may have guessed!
That's right! Rural style is a genre of historical books that narrates historical events separately by country.
Most national sports history books record the Spring and Autumn Period, Warring States Period and earlier, because there were many countries in that period, so it is possible to keep records of different countries.
The earliest national style book was Guoyu, written by Zuo Qiuming, a historian of Jin State during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. Guoyu recorded Zhou, Lu, Qi, Jin, Zheng, Chu, wuyue and other countries, with a history of more than 400 years.
Besides Mandarin, there is also the famous Warring States Policy, which is also written in a national style. The Warring States Policy records the history of Eastern Zhou, Western Zhou, Qin, Qi, Chu, Yan, Zhao, Wei, North Korea, Song, Wei and Zhongshan 12 countries. The time span began in 490 when Zhi Bo destroyed Fan's family and ended in 490.
The above are some introductions about chronological style, biographical style and rural style. In addition, there are historical styles such as chronicle, general history and dynastic history. In fact, a history book is not limited to one style, and there are often many styles. For example, the Historical Records mentioned in the article are both biographical and general. China's culture is profound and profound, and we can benefit a lot from historical books.