ACCORDING to the autobiographical postface of the Historical Records the work consisted of 526,500 characters, and one copy was placed by its author in the capital and another apparently in a hiding-place outside the capital in case disaster should befall, as indeed had happened once before when historical documents stored in the imperial library had been obliterated by the conflagration at the end of the Qin. In the History of the Former Han Dynasty we are also told that a grandson of Sima Qian publicized the book, so that it was consulted widely. Unfortunately, however, parts of the work were incomplete and additions were made by another hand. Moreover, parts of the present text are closely similar to the relevant portions of the History of the Former Han Dynasty, so that it is not clear which was copied from which. Some passages may have been maliciously inserted, but the motivation for depicting the First Emperor in an unfavourable light belonged to Sima Qian as much as anyone, especially in view of the indignities he suffered under a later tyrant.
It soon became necessary to elucidate difficulties in the text, so that the powerful Chinese tradition of commentary operated on the Historical Records almost throughout its existence. This tradition has survived under the People’s Republic, and for this translation I have used mainly the most accessible modern edition, which was published by the Zhonghua Shuju in 1959.
There are many possible attitudes to translation, but my own method has been to try to get as close as possible to the original, even at the risk of inelegance. It would of course be possible to make Sima Qian sound as if he were writing in the late twentieth century, but it seems to me that more might be lost than gained. The language may occasionally appear too honorific or humilific for contemporary tastes, but I have preferred to render it as accurately as possible, although the words may sometimes be as empty as the ‘dear sirs’ and ‘yours faithfullys’ of epistolary English. I have, however, made one concession to the non-specialist reader: as in my version of the Analects (Oxford World’s Classics, 1993) I have occasionally adapted the personal names.