Sima Qian

Sima Qian

Sima Qian ([sɹ̩́mà tɕʰjɛ́n]; c. 145 – c. 86 BC) was a Chinese historian of the early Han dynasty. He is considered the father of Chinese historiography for his Records of the Grand Historian, a general history of China covering more than two thousand years beginning from the rise of the legendary Yellow Emperor and the formation of the first Chinese polity to the reigning sovereign of Sima Qian's time, Emperor Wu of Han. As the first universal history of the world as it was known to the ancient Chinese, the Records of the Grand Historian served as a model for official history-writing for subsequent Chinese dynasties and the Chinese cultural sphere (Korea, Vietnam, Japan) up until the 20th century.Sima Qian's father, Sima Tan, first conceived of the ambitious project of writing a complete history of China, but had completed only some preparatory sketches at the time of his death. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Sima Qian has received more than 931,727 page views. His biography is available in 115 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 111 in 2019). Sima Qian is the 6th most popular historian (up from 7th in 2019), the 11th most popular biography from China (up from 12th in 2019) and the most popular Chinese Historian.

Sima Qian is most famous for the Records of the Grand Historian, which is a history of China and the world from the time of the Yellow Emperor to the time of Emperor Wu of Han.