Historical Records written by Sima Qian is the first biographical general history of China and the first of the twenty-four histories. The book is divided into 12 biographies, 10 tables, 8 books, 30 families and 70 biographies, with a total of 130 articles and more than 520,000 words, which records China's four years from the legendary Yellow Emperor to the early Han Dynasty.
Historical Records is the general name of ancient history books. Since the Three Kingdoms period, Historical Records has gradually evolved from a general name of historical books to a specific name of "Taishi Gongshu". Historical Records, Han Shu (Ban Gu), Later Han Shu (Ye Fan, Sima Biao) and The History of the Three Kingdoms (Chen Shou) are collectively called "the first four histories".
Extended information The book Historical Records includes twelve biographies (recording the political achievements of emperors in past dynasties), thirty aristocratic families (recording the rise and fall of princes in vassal states and Han dynasties), seventy biographies (recording the words and deeds of important people, mainly describing people and ministers, and the last one is preface), ten tables (chronology of major events) and eight books (recording various laws, regulations, rituals, temperament, calendars and books).
Historical records 130, with more than 526,500 words, 395,000 words more than Huainanzi and 288,000 words more than Lv Chunqiu. Historical Records has a huge scale and a complete system, which has a far-reaching impact on the biographical history books of later generations. The official history of past dynasties was written in this genre.
Historical Records is divided into five parts: biography, table, book, family and biography. Among them, biography and biography are the main body. It takes emperors and other political center figures in history as the main line of compiling history books, and the division of labor among various styles is clear. Among them, "Biography", "Biography" and "Biography" account for most of the book's length, and all of them record history with writing characters as the center. As a result, Sima Qian created a new style of history books-"Biography".
The unique narrative art of Historical Records pays great attention to the deeper exploration of the causal relationship of events, synthesizes various historical books of the previous generation, forms a unified statement, and describes all historical times before the middle of the Western Han Dynasty with twelve biographies and ten tables as the representatives vertically, and eight biographies, thirty biographies and seventy biographies as the representatives horizontally, leading all classes, nationalities, fields and industries, forming a comfortable structure criss-crossing.
In addition, Historical Records also has many unique features in terms of composition, sentence patterns and words, which is unique and unconventional, and produces unique effects with its novelty and variety.
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