Behind Written Records: Rethinking the Features of Xia from the Shiji and the Hanshu

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.210519.084How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Shiji, Hanshu, Xia, Historiography, Readership

Abstract

The Shiji史記(“Records of the Grand Historian”) and Hanshu漢書(“History of the Former Han”) have been used as the main sources of the concept of Xia俠(“knight-errant”) in the pre-Qin and Western Han dynasties. However, these historical records may have certain emphases that may lead readers to have a partial view of Xia, due to the time gap between the authors’ era and when the events that they recorded happened, and their preferences. We can actually see some divergences in the records from the Shiji and Hanshu that somehow implicated a possible different understanding of Xia at that time. By a close reading towards the difference of the Shiji and Hanshu, this article implicated a better way that readers can deal with the information provided by historical records. Readers should be cautious of the delay of the records, the author’s possible tendency, and the limitation of original materials. Therefore, when facing some important historical records such as the Shiji and Hanshu, we should not just focus on several famous pieces but should pay attention to other materials which have been neglected for a long time. Then, through comparison, readers can try to provide a different explanation to a certain historical issue.

Copyright

© 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Hengxuan Wang
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/05/20
TI  - Behind Written Records: Rethinking the Features of Xia from the Shiji and the Hanshu
BT  - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Humanities and Social Science Research (ICHSSR 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 427
EP  - 433
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210519.084
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.210519.084
ID  - Wang2021
ER  -