Moral Judgment in the Shiji and Tongjian

Every historian makes moral judgments, but the way those judgments are delivered shapes how we read them. Sima Qian hides his inside the narrative, letting irony and structure do the work. Sima Guang dispatches his in explicit essays labeled with his own name. The difference between these two methods is not a matter of literary fashion. It reflects fundamentally different beliefs about what history is for and how people learn from it.

This article is part of the comparison series. See the Tongjian pillar and the Shiji pillar. Sibling articles cover the two authors and their literary styles.

Sima Qian’s Method: Judgment Through Narrative

The Shiji almost never tells you that a person was good or evil. Instead, Sima Qian arranges the narrative so that the judgment emerges from the evidence. He might begin a biography by describing a ruler’s generosity and then slowly reveal, through a series of incidents, that the generosity was always self-serving. He might omit the conventional praise that a ruler expected, and that omission alone would signal disapproval to a reader familiar with the conventions of Chinese historical writing.

One of Sima Qian’s most powerful techniques is placement. In the Shiji, the Basic Annals (benji) are reserved for legitimate sovereigns. When Sima Qian placed Xiang Yu, who never held the title of emperor, in the Basic Annals rather than in the more common Biographies section, he was making a moral statement: Xiang Yu deserved the status of a ruler, even though he never achieved it. Similarly, when he placed Empress Lu in the Basic Annals rather than relegating her to a subordinate category, he was acknowledging her de facto power while simultaneously using the surrounding narrative to expose the damage she did.

This method demands more of the reader. You have to notice what is included, what is omitted, where a person is placed, and how the narrative is shaped. Sima Qian trusts his reader to put these signals together and arrive at the judgment he had in mind without being told what to think.

Sima Qian never tells you The First Emperor was a tyrant. He simply shows you the bodies, the forced laborers, the burning books, and the terrified officials. The conclusion assembles itself in the mind of the reader without needing to be stated.

Sima Guang’s Method: Judgment Through Commentary

Sima Guang takes the opposite approach. At key moments in the Tongjian, the chronological narrative pauses and a passage introduced by the formula “your servant Guang says” (chen Guang yan) delivers an explicit moral analysis. These passages tell you directly what was right, what was wrong, and what the lesson is. There is no irony. There is no ambiguity. There is no trust-the-reader approach.

For Sima Guang, the purpose of history was instruction, and instruction required clarity. A ruler reading the Tongjian was supposed to learn lessons, and lessons only work when they are stated plainly. If Sima Guang thought a minister’s advice was bad, he told the reader it was bad and explained why. If he thought a ruler’s decision was wise, he said so and explained the principle behind it. The commentary essays are the core of the Tongjian‘s pedagogical function.

These commentary passages vary in length from a few sentences to several paragraphs. They address everything from the ethics of usurpation to the proper treatment of ministers to the dangers of overvaluing military success. Sima Guang’s moral framework is consistently Confucian, with a particular emphasis on loyalty, restraint, and the importance of virtuous ministers correcting wayward rulers. His judgments are predictable, which was part of their value: the reader could learn the principles and apply them to situations not covered in the text.

A Case Study: The First Emperor of Qin

The First Emperor of Qin (Qin Shi Huang, r. 221-210 BCE) appears in both texts, and the differences in treatment reveal how each author handles moral judgment. In the Shiji, Sima Qian presents the First Emperor as a figure of enormous ambition and terrible cruelty. He describes the book burnings, the burial of scholars, the massive forced labor projects, and the paranoia of the emperor’s final years. But he also describes the administrative brilliance of the unified empire, the standardization of weights, measures, script, and law. The portrait is morally devastating but also intellectually honest about the emperor’s achievements. Sima Qian does not tell you what to think. He shows you both sides and lets the horror and the admiration exist side by side.

In the Tongjian, Sima Guang’s treatment of the First Emperor is filtered through a consistent moral framework. The emperor’s achievements are mentioned but the emphasis falls on the cruelty, the hubris, and the inevitable consequences of ruling through fear. When the Qin dynasty collapses, Sima Guang’s commentary makes the lesson explicit: a government that depends on terror cannot survive the death of the man who inspired the terror. This is a clear, portable lesson that a ruler could apply. It is also a simpler verdict than Sima Qian’s more layered portrait.

Judging Women in Both Texts

The treatment of women in the two texts illustrates another difference. Sima Qian includes biographies of women who exercised political power, like Empress Lu, and describes their actions with the same narrative complexity he gives to men. He does not moralize about whether women should hold power. He shows the consequences of their decisions and lets the reader evaluate them on the same terms as male rulers.

Sima Guang is more conventional in this regard. He treats women who exercise power as a disruption of proper order, and his commentary often frames their influence as a warning. The Tongjian includes women as political actors when they matter to the governance narrative, but the moral lens is stricter and the judgments are more gendered.

Which Method Produces Better moral Instruction?

This depends on what you mean by “better.” For rulers facing immediate decisions, Sima Guang’s explicit judgments are more useful. You can extract his lessons, write them down, and consult them. The commentary essays function as case studies in applied Confucian ethics, and their clarity is a virtue when the stakes are high and time is short.

For readers who want to develop their own capacity for moral reasoning, Sima Qian’s method is more valuable. By forcing you to notice patterns, draw connections, and arrive at conclusions yourself, it trains the muscle of moral judgment rather than simply giving you the results of someone else’s judgment. This is the difference between being told the answer and being given a problem to solve. For more on how to approach both texts as a reader, see which to read first and how their structures shape judgment.

The Problem of Historical Figures Who Defy Easy Judgment

One of the points where the two methods diverge most sharply is in the treatment of figures who cannot be reduced to a simple moral category. Consider Cao Cao (155-220 CE), the warlord and statesman who dominated the end of the Han dynasty. Cao Cao was a brilliant military strategist, an effective administrator, a patron of literature, and a ruthless political operator who willing to slaughter civilians when it served his strategic purposes. No single label captures him. He was neither hero nor villain but a deeply complex person in a deeply complex situation.

The Tongjian covers Cao Cao’s era in detail, but Sima Guang’s treatment is constrained by his need for clear judgment. His commentary on Cao Cao tends to emphasize the harshness and the ambition, and to downplay the administrative competence. The moral lesson Sima Guang draws is that a ruler who gains power through force cannot establish legitimate authority, and Cao Cao becomes a case study in the inherently unstable nature of power acquired through coercion.

The Shiji does not cover Cao Cao directly because it ends before his time, but Sima Qian’s treatment of comparable figures, like the First Emperor or the founding emperor of the Han, is more open to contradiction. He can show a person as simultaneously brilliant and monstrous without forcing the reader to choose one interpretation. This tolerance for moral complexity is one of the things that makes the Shiji feel more modern than the Tongjian, even though both are products of premodern China.

I find this difference deeply meaningful for how we judge historical figures today. When we look at a leader who accomplished great things through terrible means, we face the same tension that Sima Qian and Sima Guang faced. Do we acknowledge the complexity and let the contradictions stand? Or do we choose a side and state a clear verdict? Both choices have costs. Sima Qian’s approach leaves the reader uncertain but trains them to think. Sima Guang’s approach gives the reader clarity but risks oversimplifying. The best we can do is be aware of which method we are using and why.

For anyone studying how moral judgment in Chinese historiography influenced political culture, the comparison between these two methods is invaluable. The Shiji trains the reader to be a moral thinker. The Tongjian trains the reader to be a moral applier. Both roles matter, and a well-educated official in imperial China was expected to play both: to think independently when confronting new situations, and to apply established principles when the situations were familiar. This is why both texts were required reading, and why neither replaced the other over the centuries despite their fundamentally different approaches to the same fundamental question of how the past should teach the present.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Sima Guang ever criticize Sima Qian’s moral approach?

Not directly in the Tongjian, but by choosing explicit commentary he was implicitly rejecting Sima Qian’s indirect method. He believed indirect judgment was too easy to miss and therefore less useful for instruction.

How many commentary essays did Sima Guang write?

There are approximately 200 “your servant Guang says” passages in the Tongjian. They range from a few sentences to several paragraphs and cover a wide range of political and moral topics.

Which method is more biased?

Both are biased, but in different ways. Sima Qian’s bias is harder to detect because it is built into the structure rather than stated. Sima Guang’s bias is easier to identify because it is stated explicitly, which paradoxically makes it easier for the reader to evaluate and agree or disagree with.

Did later historians prefer one method over the other?

The official dynastic histories generally followed Sima Qian’s method of embedding judgment in narrative. But political education texts, especially those based on the Tongjian or the Gangmu, followed Sima Guang’s explicit commentary style. Both traditions continued side by side.