Behind Written Records: Rethinking the Features of Xia from the Shiji and the Hanshu
- DOI
- 10.2991/assehr.k.210519.084How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- Shiji, Hanshu, Xia, Historiography, Readership
- Abstract
The Shiji史記(“Records of the Grand Historian”) and Hanshu漢書(“History of the Former Han”) have been used as the main sources of the concept of Xia俠(“knight-errant”) in the pre-Qin and Western Han dynasties. However, these historical records may have certain emphases that may lead readers to have a partial view of Xia, due to the time gap between the authors’ era and when the events that they recorded happened, and their preferences. We can actually see some divergences in the records from the Shiji and Hanshu that somehow implicated a possible different understanding of Xia at that time. By a close reading towards the difference of the Shiji and Hanshu, this article implicated a better way that readers can deal with the information provided by historical records. Readers should be cautious of the delay of the records, the author’s possible tendency, and the limitation of original materials. Therefore, when facing some important historical records such as the Shiji and Hanshu, we should not just focus on several famous pieces but should pay attention to other materials which have been neglected for a long time. Then, through comparison, readers can try to provide a different explanation to a certain historical issue.
- Copyright
- © 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Hengxuan Wang PY - 2021 DA - 2021/05/20 TI - Behind Written Records: Rethinking the Features of Xia from the Shiji and the Hanshu BT - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Humanities and Social Science Research (ICHSSR 2021) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 427 EP - 433 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210519.084 DO - 10.2991/assehr.k.210519.084 ID - Wang2021 ER -