Ban Gu

Ban Gu (born ad 32?, Chang’an [now Xi’an], China—died 92) was a Chinese scholar-official of the Dong (Eastern), or Hou (Later), Han dynasty and one of China’s most noteworthy historians. His Han shu (translated as The History of the Former Han Dynasty) became the model most frequently used by later Chinese historians.

Ban Gu was the son of Ban Biao (ad 3–54), an intellectual and antiquarian who was given a court appointment by the emperor Guangwudi during the early years of the restoration of the Han dynasty. Disliking court life, Ban Biao pleaded poor health and retired, thereafter devoting himself to the independent study of history. He collected material for the continuation of Sima Qian’s great history of China, the Shiji, which had begun with the earliest dynasties and stopped midway through the Xi (Western), or Qian (Former), Han dynasty.

After his father’s death, Ban Gu continued this historiographical undertaking. In the course of it, however, he was imprisoned for tampering with dynastic records. His twin brother, Ban Chao, an outstanding general who extended China’s western frontier to the Pamir ranges, interceded so successfully that Ban Gu was not only acquitted but was also appointed by the emperor to the office of official historian.

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With all obstacles now removed, he spent the next 16 years compiling and editing the vast Han shu, which became the prototype for the official histories of successive ruling houses in China, recording the administrations of their predecessors. Although modeled on the Shiji, the Han shu was not merely a supplement to that long-range work but was a new and comprehensive record of the Han empire, from its beginning down to the regime of the reformer Wang Mang, who had proclaimed his own short-lived dynasty in ad 9 (and had thus caused the division of the Han into two halves).

Ban Gu went back to the beginning of the Han, duplicating almost verbatim most of the documents Sima Qian had used for that part of the Han period he had treated, excising redundancies or simplifying the prose that seemed to him awkward or obscure. And, since Ban Gu’s own age enjoyed widening education, bureaucratic proliferation, improved writing materials and techniques, and standardized orthography, he had an even larger body of recent records from which to select. Dealing with a period of roughly 200 years, the Han shu is much longer than the Shiji, which purports to cover 3,000 years.

Both Sima Qian and Ban Gu were court officials, and they inevitably used the official record of the lives of the emperors and their close relatives (and of the often more decisive activities of their civil and military administrators) to form their main chronological narrative. This constitutes Ban’s part 1, the basic annals. He adopted Sima Qian’s methods for other parts: part 2, charts and diagrams of events, genealogies, persons, etc.; part 3, treatises on a wide range of topics, such as court ceremony, music, money and taxes, and navigation; and part 4, single or grouped biographies of memorable persons other than emperors. To these subjects he added new ones on natural phenomena, on geography, and on bibliography, a descriptive account of the books preserved in the imperial library—invaluable to later scholars trying to judge textual authenticity and family lineages after many works had vanished. Ban eliminated Sima’s fifth category of “hereditary houses,” since China was no longer a collection of competing states.

When the historian felt his task to be essentially completed, he apparently decided to participate more actively in the politics of his day. He had been at least on the periphery of intellectual controversy regarding the interpretation of the Confucian Classics—by no means a mere antiquarian pursuit but one fraught with political implications, as he remarked in one of his few personal observations in the Han shu. Editorship of the Baihu tong, or “Symposium in the White Tiger Hall,” which deals with this subject, is ascribed to him.

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In his middle 40s, however, Ban Gu chose to undertake something more adventurous. Leaving the finishing touches on the Han shu to his sister Ban Zhao, also an extraordinary scholar (not to be confused with his brother Ban Chao), he joined the staff of the general Dou Xian and accompanied him in successful campaigns against the northern Xiongnu tribes. The following victory inscription composed by Ban Gu was carved in stone some 1,000 miles (1,600 km) beyond the frontier:

Our trained soldiery came hither on a campaign against barbarian hordes. We chastised Turkic insolence and restored our supremacy in this distant land. Across these vast plains they went back to their northern home, while our splendid troops set up this trophy that the achievements of our glorious Emperor should be heard of ten thousand generations hence.

The emperor, however, who was 14 years old and Dou Xian’s nephew, became alarmed at the general’s self-importance and, suspecting him of excessive ambitions, exiled him to his own lands. Ban Gu’s fate was one common throughout Chinese history; his superior’s fall implicated him, and he was incarcerated for interrogation. Falling ill in prison, he died there at the age of 60. His sister duly rounded out the vast Han shu manuscript and was officially sanctioned to instruct other scholars on its contents.

For centuries the Chinese have debated the relative merits of the history of the single self-contained dynasty such as Ban Gu’s and the comparatively rare histories that span the rise and fall of successive hegemonies and systems, which are claimed to reflect more effectively the lessons of history. Obviously, the general historian must build on the work of those dealing with shorter periods, and the two kinds of enterprise cannot be compared qualitatively on the basis of scope. As a historian, Ban Gu must be evaluated on other grounds in relation to his predecessor and to the next great long-range narrator, Sima Guang, who wrote more than 1,000 years later. Since both were more inclined to offer interpretations and personal comments, their commentaries appear to be more colourful and sometimes more interesting. Ban Gu, on the other hand, is admired for his thoroughness and his virtually complete objectivity.

Indeed, one might call Ban Gu a historiographer rather than a historian. He undertook simply to represent the Han dynasty and empire as factually as possible through an organized compendium of existing documents; hence the title Han shu—literally, “Han Documents.”

Ban Gu’s prose style, to which he more or less adjusted the documents he incorporated, was simple, lucid, uneccentric, and not especially vivid. It was terse but not lapidary; somewhat more carefully regulated than Sima Qian’s, it was still, probably, not altogether remote from the spoken Chinese of his own day and class. It was a model of what came to be known as the Han style, revived many centuries later in reaction to excessively elaborate prose.

When practicing the dominant literary form of his time, the fu, or rhymed prose, however, Ban Gu could be as extravagant, bizarre, and exhibitionistic as others displaying their talents in this fashionable genre. His two rhymed prose compositions on the merits of the successive Han capitals (the new one, of his present masters, of course, winning out) spawned many imitations, especially for their exhibition of unusual words. In a simpler vein he wrote some rather inconsequential verses modeled on the popular folk songs of his day. His name has been attached, spuriously, to a collection of anecdotes and hearsay about the reign of the Han emperor Wudi.