Hanshu initiated the dynastic historical style of "including a generation". "Hanshu" said that biographies are provincial, biographies are provincial and records are written, and the aristocratic families were abolished, so the laws of aristocratic families were compiled into biographies. These changes were inherited by some later history books. ?

The time recorded in Hanshu overlaps with Shiji, and the history of the Western Han Dynasty before the middle period of Emperor Wu of Han Dynasty is recorded in both books.

The extended material Hanshu mainly describes the history of 230 years from the first year of Emperor Gaozu of the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC) to the fourth year of Emperor Wangmang of the New Dynasty (23 AD). Hanshu includes 12 biographies, 8 tables, 10 records, 70 biographies and 100 * *. Later generations divided it into 120 volumes with 800,000 words.

Because Historical Records only wrote the early years of Emperor Wu of Han Dynasty, many people wrote sequels for it at that time. According to the records in the Book of Changes, there are more than ten people who wrote the sequel to Historical Records, such as Liu Xiang, Liu Xin, and so on, whose title is still called Historical Records.

Ban Gu's father, Ban Biao (AD 3 ~ AD 54), was very dissatisfied with these sequels, so he chose Different Stories about Old Events as Historical Records and Postscript of Sixty-five. After Ban Biao's death, Ban Gu, who was only 22 years old, began to sort out his father's manuscripts, determined to follow in his father's footsteps and complete this masterpiece.

Narratively, Hanshu is characterized by paying attention to the systematicness and integrity of historical events, and striving to finish everything and explain it clearly. This provides great convenience for us to understand and study the history of the Western Han Dynasty. Up to now, anyone who studies the history of the Western Han Dynasty takes Hanshu as the basic historical data.

Genre-wise, Hanshu and Shiji are biographical history books. The difference is that Historical Records is a general history from the legend of "Three Emperors and Five Emperors" to the end of the era of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty. However, Hanshu is a dynastic history, which specifically describes the historical events in the Western Han Dynasty. This biographical genre of dynastic history is the creation of Ban Gu. This genre was adopted by the "official history" of later generations. This is Ban Gu's great contribution to China's historiography.

Baidu encyclopedia-hanshu