Person
Sima Guang
A Song-dynasty historian who compiled the chronicle Zizhi tongjian, presented to the throne in 1084. Across several episodes on the period of Chinese rule, he appears as a man who rewrote earlier histories selectively — at times deliberately leaving out a detail he had read, at times changing a single word.
At a glance
- Dates
- The eleventh century; presented the Zizhi tongjian to the throne in 10841
- Role
- Compiled the Zizhi tongjian; in the episodes compared here, at one point he deliberately leaves out a detail he had read (Mai Thuc Loan's Black Emperor), at another he changes a word of an older source (the Chen shu's exaction becomes brutality, of Tieu Tu), and at another his wording runs close to the Chen shu while his dates match the Liang shu234
Life
How later ages remembered
On the events of 248, Sima Guang records no woman. He sums up the sentence from the Tam quoc chi: the barbarian rebels of Giao Chi and Cuu Chan attacked and seized the walled towns; the Wu ruler sent Luc Dan; Dan entered the region and appealed to them with kindness and good faith, more than fifty thousand households surrendered, and the province was at peace again. Under that same Song dynasty, by the eleventh century, the reference books and the geographies had Trieu Au, but his year-by-year history did not yet.5
On Tieu Tu's governorship of Giao Chau, the Chen shu records that he lost the people's hearts through exaction and harshness. Some five hundred years after the events, Sima Guang wrote that sentence again in the Tongjian: the regional inspector of Giao Chau, Tu, Marquis of Vu Lam, lost the people's hearts through harshness and brutality. Exaction has become brutality — one word about property, the other about how people were treated. From here on the Vietnamese histories follow the Tongjian: the Complete Annals copy the sentence almost word for word under the year 541, and the Cuong muc quotes that same sentence.6378
He also records that Tieu Tu bribed Ly Bi to save himself, but changes where Tieu Tu fled to: the Liang shu says Viet Chau, the Tongjian says Quang Chau, and the sources are not enough to choose between them. When Tieu Tu reported that the two generals Ton Quynh and Lu Tu Hung were in league with the rebels and had dawdled without advancing, the Tongjian says only that he reported it; the word falsely — which turns the charge into a slander — was added by the Complete Annals when they copied the sentence, the judgment of the Le-dynasty court historians, not in Sima Guang's sentence.91011
The clearest case is Mai Thuc Loan in 722. In the Kaoyi, the notes he wrote alongside the history to explain which version he chose, he records what the biography of Duong Tu Huc says: the chieftain Mai Huyen Thanh styled himself the Black Emperor, plotted with Lam Ap and Chan Lap, and took the An Nam protectorate — and then writes: now we follow the Basic Annals. In other words, he had read all of it and deliberately left it out of his main text, though he does not make clear which Basic Annals he followed. His main text uses a third name, Mai Thuc Yen, and has no Black Emperor, no Lam Ap, no count of troops on his side. In the same note he rejects the old annals' date of the eighth month, day Binh Tuat, since that month had no Binh Tuat day.21
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