History & Order

The swan song of historians: the first Chinese general history threading past to present in biographical form.

By Sima Qian — "to explore the boundary of heaven and human, to comprehend the change of past and present, and to form one school of one’s own."

The most authoritative gloss on the Spring and Autumn era: spare narrative, sharp judgment.

Attributed to Zuo Qiuming — the summit of pre-Qin narrative prose and the ancestor of historical criticism.

The essential history of statecraft: reading rise and fall, knowing gain and loss.

Chief-edited by Sima Guang as an annalistic universal history, warning posterity with the successes and failures of the past.

China’s first institutional history: officialdom, livelihood, rites and law presented whole.

Two hundred chapters by Du You of the Tang, opening with food and goods — the ancestor of books on governance.

The dynastic histories from the Records of the Grand Historian onward: the full arc of Huaxia’s dynastic rise and fall.

Biographical history written without pause across four thousand years — the only unbroken historiographical enterprise in the world.

From pre-Qin to Ming and Qing: four thousand years of dynasties, letters and customs in one continuous genealogy of Huaxia.

From ancient states to the Ming-Qing synthesis: the whole thread of Chinese history joined end to end.

Choosing the worthy and governing the marches: the institutional wisdom that sustained a civilization of continental scale.

Rotating officials for the frontier and examinations for talent — two institutional pillars used for a thousand years.