Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (review)

On-cho Ng and Q. Edward Wang in this work attempt an impossible task. They seek to provide a "panoramic work" of the theory and practice of writing history in pre-twentieth-century China. Only in Chinese civilization, with its remarkable cultural continuities, could one reasonably expect to find common perspectives that extend over several millennia. Bookstore shelves, for example, still await a tome entitled European Historians: From Herodotus to Hobsbawm. Surely, a monograph-sized work on this immense subject would suffer from major gaps and distortions. Great histories would go unmentioned, and key developments would never receive their due consideration. Yet the authors have produced a succinct, well-balanced survey of how learned Chinese thought about and wrote history from the time of Confucius until the eve of the Opium War.

Ng and Wang write for a general academic audience. They structure their work chronologically, devoting a chapter apiece to each major dynastic period. As necessary in such a work, they cite key secondary scholarship, such as that of Denis Twitchett on the Tang, Hok-lam Chan on fourteenth-century historiography, and so forth. The authors intend their book to be solely an introduction; no footnotes or endnotes clarifying finer points appear here. Most chapters outline the historical trends of the given period and summarize its noteworthy historians and histories. The authors adopt a catholic view of the genre; their survey includes not only dynastic histories and chronicles, but also administrative compendia, encyclopedias (leishu 類書), collections of random notes (biji 筆記), and historical criticism. For those needing a single book that will provide a quick idea about the compilation of the Yuan shi 元史 or the influence of Ban Gu 班固 (d. 92 C.E.) on later historiography, Mirroring the Past will do the job nicely.

The prologue makes three central points. First, in the authors' words, "writing history has been the quintessential Chinese way of defining and shaping culture" (p. vii, emphasis mine). By "culture," Ng and Wang refer to the learned culture of men familiar with the Confucian classics and who sought, at least in orderly times, to serve the imperial state. Buddhist historiography receives but a brief nod, while the Daoists' efforts go untold. Second, the authors emphasize that Chinese historians saw history as the working of moral forces, to be understood with a pragmatic attitude to better contemporary circumstances. In other words, within the endless l'histoire événtmentielle of wise officials, feckless monarchs, administrative appointments, and coup d'etats lay the working of the transhistorical Way. Consequently, the writing (and reading) of history in China must be understood in terms of their intimate relationship with canonical scholarship and philosophy. Third, modern historians unfairly cast their traditional counterparts as the handmaidens of despots. As a result, they slight the dedication of Chinese historians to historical veracity and miss the cultural context of Chinese historiography. The authors reprise these themes throughout the work; for them, traditional historiography should be viewed as a coherent whole.

Ng and Wang view their subject through distinctly Confucian lenses. They begin, for example, with a tale of valiant self-sacrifice, relating the Zuozhuan 左傳 story of historians from the kingdom of Qi 齊 who paid with their lives for reporting honestly how Cui Zhu 崔杼 gained the throne through regicide. Their chapter divisions and organization of early historiography reveal more. The first chapter, "The Age of Confucius," summarizes the office of the shi 史 and sketches the sage's historiographical view, mostly through an introduction to the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu 春秋). Some may wonder, of course, why the authors appear to wish to attribute authorship of this work to the historical Confucius and believe that their reference to skeptics of this claim emerges too late in the discussion (p. 23).¹ Despite this puzzling decision, teachers of Chinese history and literature will welcome their valuable presentation of the work's "law...