Ban Gu died in prison, and Sima Qian was castrated (for something he said
rather than wrote), which has led to the observation that historians in China
were in a risky business. Parts of theHan Shuare so similar to theShijias to
indicate wholesale plagiarism, and for a long time it was assumed that Ban
Gu had simply lifted relevant sections from Sima Qian. However, some
modern scholars now believe that parts of one or the other manuscript were
lost and eventually reconstructed using the surviving manuscript many cen-
turies later. The question of which manuscript survived and was copied has
not been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
Both theShijiand theHan Shuinclude discussions of commercial relations
with trading partners. Historical annals, however, whether Chinese or
otherwise, have not proved to be great storehouses of material about trade.
They are more interested in political and military ventures, the great acts of
the high and the mighty, not the common behavior of ordinary people
engaged in such mundane matters as how merchants reached a price, or
where they stored their goods, or how many camels arrived at some parti-
cular time from some oasis or another and what they were laden with.
Using common sense, a healthy dose of twenty-first century skepticism,
and modern historical techniques when necessary, it is usually not difficult to
filter out blatant misinformation from the record. We must always keep in
mind, however, that the narrative evidence we have access to, like that from
archaeology and archival sources, is very selective, focusing most of all on
what happened rather than on how it happened and least of all on why it
happened. Even within these bounds our knowledge depends largely on
what survived and what has been discovered–in other words, on luck. This
changes as new information becomes available and, when it does, so will our
interpretation of what really happened.
12 Some introductory musings