In his early years, Ye Fan joined the army of Liu Yikang, the king of Drum City, and later became an official of Shangshu. In the first year of Yuanjia in Song Wendi (424), Liu Yikang was angered and moved to the left as the prefect of Xuancheng County (now Xuancheng, Anhui Province). Later, he was promoted several times. The officials were General and Prince Zhan. In the 22nd year of Yuanjia (445), he was accused of conspiring to establish Liu Yikang, so he was sentenced to death for treason.
Ye Fan's greatest contribution to the society in his life was writing the Book of the Later Han Dynasty, which was called one of the "first four histories" by later generations. Based on the History of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Ye Fan learned from others' strengths, considered trade-offs, decided his own style, made false textual research, and made up for it by deleting the complicated ones. Because his Book of the Later Han Dynasty is more detailed, it gradually replaced the previous works.
The Book of the Later Han Dynasty inherited the biographical examples of Historical Records and the Book of the Han Dynasty. The narrative is concise and thorough, the notes are focused and there are no omissions. Its narrative feature is to follow the class and not remember the time sequence. Some articles are quite rich in content, such as Biography of Dongyi, which describes in detail the situation of countries on the Korean Peninsula and Japan (then called Japan), and Biography of Nanman is also not available before. Some new biographies, such as Yimin and Lienv, were established in the Book of the Later Han Dynasty. Cen Can