Chinese · -145–-86
Sima Qian inherited the post of Grand Historian from his father, who died begging him to finish the history they had planned. In 99 BC he spoke in defence of a general who had surrendered to the Xiongnu and was sentenced to castration. He could have chosen suicide, as an official of his rank was expected to; he chose the mutilation and the disgrace in order to finish the book, and explained why in a letter to his friend Ren An that is one of the most quoted documents in Chinese literature. The Records of the Grand Historian covers roughly two thousand years in one hundred and thirty chapters, invents the arrangement by annals, tables, treatises, hereditary houses and biographies that every later dynastic history copied, and closes chapter after chapter with a signed personal verdict beginning The Grand Historian says. He wrote about assassins, doctors, merchants and jesters as well as emperors.