简体中文 ｜ English
Overview
Key data
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Completed | c. 91 BCE |
| Author | Sima Qian |
| Form | Two of the eight “books” |
| Modern chapters | “Calendar,” ch. 26; “Celestial Offices,” ch. 27 |
The form it began
The Shiji’s eight books are those on rites, music, pitch pipes, the calendar, the celestial offices, the feng and shan sacrifices, the rivers and canals, and the equalization of prices. The calendar and the celestial offices take one chapter each — the first calendrical, the second astronomical. This division was inherited by the later histories.
The Treatise on the Calendar
It goes back to the Yellow Emperor’s “fixing the star calendar and establishing the five agents,” runs through the changes of the three dynasties, the Qin use of the Zhuanxu calendar, the early Han retention of it, and ends with the Taichu reform.
It preserves the sentence “The Xia began with the first month, the Yin with the twelfth, the Zhou with the eleventh” — the most often cited text for the doctrine of the three zheng.
The Treatise on the Celestial Offices
It divides the sky into the central palace and the four palaces of east, south, west and north, describing each in turn with the portents attached. It is one of the earliest systematic accounts of the Chinese star-officials.
The colors, brightnesses and portents it records were the basis of later star catalogues and astrological works.
Value
Though briefer than the later treatises, these two chapters are the beginning of astronomical and calendrical chapters in the standard histories. From them on, each dynasty’s history carried its dynasty’s calendar.
Full text
Simplified Chinese (TXT) ｜ Traditional Chinese (TXT)
The reader shows the text section by section, with the original tables preserved; the first few lines give source and licence. If scripts are disabled, use the TXT links above.
The title, date, summary and index structure compiled here are offered under CC BY 4.0 (attribution: Chujia Kuang · kuangchujia.com).
The full electronic text (about 40,067 characters: only the 2 juan listed on this page, not the complete history) is taken from the Chinese Wikisource text of Shiji — “Treatise on the Calendar”; “Treatise on the Celestial Offices”; that part is offered under CC BY-SA 4.0 (attribution — share alike); source: zh.wikisource.org.
The electronic text has not been collated by us; please check the original before citing.
Compiled and arranged by Chujia Kuang.