Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji)
A 130-chapter history of China from the legendary Yellow Emperor down to the author's own lifetime under Emperor Wu of Han, organized into annals, treatises, chronological tables, and biographies. It set the template for every official Chinese dynastic history that followed. Page count is the standard reader's edition: Burton Watson's three-volume Columbia University Press revised set (Qin Dynasty 224 pp + Han Dynasty I 496 pp + Han Dynasty II 505 pp, CUP-verified).
Three paperbacks, 1,225 pages, not one map among them, and "a staggering number of difficult (for Westerners) names of people and places to keep track of," hundreds of similar-sounding people with no character list to sort them. The opening annals are year-by-year calendar entries, the stories everyone promises live in the biographies, and by the later Han volume those shrink to strings of minor officials, "repetitive with little context." Trust it as history and you inherit another problem: he wrote a century after the Qin fell, for the dynasty that replaced it, and "the ancient Chinese historical style was in any case to preserve traditions rather than to get at the truth." One reader, lost in the flood of names, gave up: "I just couldn't finish this."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
