Is Historical Records the first biography of China?

Historical Records is China's first biographical general history. Historical Records is one of the twenty-four histories. Together with History of Han, History of Later Han and History of the Three Kingdoms, it is called "the first four histories" and is a biographical history book written by Sima Qian, a historian of the Western Han Dynasty. Historical Records is divided into five parts: biography, table, book, family and biography.

Introduction of historical records

There are 130 pieces of Historical Records, which are huge in scale and complete in system, and are divided into five parts: biography, table, book, family and biography. Among them, biographies are the main ones, recording the history of more than 3,000 years from the time of the Yellow Emperor in ancient legends to the fourth year of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty. Historical Records takes emperors and other political center figures in history as the main line of compiling historical books, with clear division of labor in various styles. Among them, biographies, biographies, biographies and biographies account for most of the book, all of which are centered on writing characters to record history. Thus, Sima Qian created a new style of history books.

Ji is the outline of the whole book, which records the words and deeds of emperors according to the time of year and month. Five of them recorded the history of pre-Qin, followed by the five emperors of Xia, Yin, Zhou and Qin. There are seven articles recording the history of Qin and Han Dynasties, followed by Qin Shihuang, Chu Xiangyu, Emperor Gaozu Liu Bang, Gao Zhi, Han Heng, Han Jingdi Liu Qi and Emperor Wudi.

Historical records, from the legendary Yellow Emperor to the first year of Emperor founding ceremony (BC 122), describe the history of China for about 3,000 years. According to Sima Qian, the book has 12 biographies, tables 10, 8 books, 30 famous families, 70 biographies, * * 130, about 526,500 words.