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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the new books network.
- [00:08]
B
Welcome to the Books on Asia podcast. I'm John Ross and today we have a Repeat guest, Tim McGurk, former foreign correspondent and author of the novel the Wondrous Elixir of the Two Chinese Lovers. It's a fun thriller weaving stories of modern Mexico and ancient China together. Welcome back, Tim.
- [00:33]
A
Happy to be here, John, once again.
- [00:35]
B
Well, it's your third appearance, Right. You get to wear a jacket or something. I'm not sure.
- [00:42]
A
I think a funny tin hat. Yeah.
- [00:44]
B
Okay. Last time we chatted about Simon Winchester's wonderful biography of Sinologist Joseph Needham. Yes.
- [00:53]
A
And we talked about Needham's science and civilization in China. It's one of the greatest works ever of scholarship, and not just for China, but in the whole world.
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B
Yes. And today we're exploring one of the most influential figures in Chinese and world history, Sima Qian, the Grand historian of the Han dynasty. That was 2,000 years ago.
- [01:16]
A
Yes. It's a story of incredible intellectual ambition, and it's set against a backdrop of political terror. Within the Chinese tradition, Sima Qian holds a status that is almost impossible to overstate.
- [01:30]
B
He's often compared to Herodotus or Thucydides in the west, but that doesn't quite match his importance.
- [01:37]
A
We'd better explain the title, Grand Historian. This was the name of an official position and the duties of a grand historian, they weren't just about archiving old scrolls. It was a role that mixed history with astronomy and the regulation of the calendar.
- [01:54]
B
Right. It was a position that combined the roles of historian, court scribe, and you mentioned astronomer, but perhaps a bit closer to what we would call astrology. So he's concerned with auspicious signs and dates.
- [02:10]
A
Yes, but Sima Qian was primarily interested in history, and it's no exaggeration to call him the father of Chinese history.
- [02:19]
B
Yes, he lived during the early Han dynasty, roughly from 145 BC to 86 BC and in the capital, Chang', an, modern day Xi', an, which is in western China. And this was in the court of Emperor Wu, one of the greatest and longest serving emperors, though a bit despotic.
- [02:43]
A
And when he ascended the throne, China as a unified entity was quite new. Just 80 years before 221 B.C.
- [02:53]
B
right. So China unified 221 B.C. yes. Emperor Wu is on the throne 80 years later, and yeah, relatively new country in some ways, but still plenty of history, maybe 2,000 years worth of it to write up. And Sima Qian's work, the Shiji, or records of the Grand Historian. It set the template for how history was written across the Sinosphere, China, Japan, Korea for the next 2,000 years.
- [03:25]
A
That's a long time. And that's exactly true. He did more than just write history. He basically invented the way history was recorded in all of Eastern Asia.
- [03:34]
B
Yes, and the way that the book came about is quite remarkable. Now, we talked about the position of grand historian at the court. Sima Qian's father, Sima Tan, had that position, was actually the first to hold it. And a side note about names. Sima is the family name. Yeah, two characters, very unusual today, but not so back then.
- [04:02]
A
And the father, Sima Tan, was the one who first dreamed of writing a complete universal history of China.
- [04:10]
B
And the sources tell us that in 110 BC, Simmartan fell terminally ill. And
- [04:18]
A
on his deathbed, he summoned his son and made a dying request that his son take up the mantle and complete the historical work they had begun together.
- [04:27]
B
Gee, thanks, Dad. I mean, what can you say?
- [04:31]
A
Suma Qian viewed fulfilling this wish as a profound act of Confucian filial piety. He took over his father's post and spent seven years laboring in the archives, piecing together the story of a civilization that already spanned two millennia.
- [04:47]
B
And, you know, he'd already been helping his dad out with this project, but, yeah, now he's got the burden of finishing it. And, you know, he wasn't just reading archives. He drew on travels he'd made as a young man, because around the age of 20, in 126bc, he traveled all over the Han Empire. He visited the river where the poet Qu Yuan was said to have drowned, for example.
- [05:14]
A
That's right. Dragon Boat Festival. The boat races, the dumplings.
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B
That's the one, yes. And he searched for the burial places of legendary rulers. And he went to Chufu, the hometown of Confucius. And. Yeah, amazing travels.
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A
No, it sounds like it. And he kept on going. And afterwards, he continued to look beyond the capitol archives. He's not stuck in some library and archive just copying old scrolls. He was interviewing witnesses and examining sites. He questioned elderly people about the early days of the dynasty and found that their stories were often very different from the official versions that he'd heard.
- [05:55]
B
Hmm, interesting. Yeah. And when the emperor went on inspection tours, he would have tagged along as the court scribe. But tragedy strikes in about 99 BC. Now, China was constantly dealing with raids from the Xiongnu nomadic tribes from the northern northwestern deserts. And Emperor Wu sent a young commander named Li on a daring raid deep into enemy territory.
- [06:27]
A
You know, it was a suicide mission. Essentially, Li led only a few thousand men against the hordes. He fought desperately for 10 days, but with his arrows gone and no relief forces in sight, he was eventually forced to surrender. And when word reached the capital, Emperor Wu was absolutely livid. He expected his generals to die in battle rather than be captured. And the entire court, sensing the Emperor's great rage, turned on Li Ling, condemning him as a coward. And only one man stood up to defend him, Simao Qian.
- [07:01]
B
An act of incredible courage. Sima Qian didn't even know Li that well, but he admired the man's record of loyalty and felt it was wrong to condemn him for a single impossible defeat. He argued that Commander Li had fought bravely against overwhelming odds.
- [07:21]
A
But the Emperor Wu wasn't really interested in nuance. He took the Grand Historian's defense as a personal insult, specifically suspecting that Sima Qian was trying to disparage another commander, which the Emperor favored, who happened to be a brother in law, I think, who was also involved in the campaign without much success.
- [07:43]
B
Dangerous to get the Emperor angry.
- [07:45]
A
No kidding. Horse Ima Qian was thrown into prison, subjected to interrogation and torture, and eventually sentenced to castration.
- [07:56]
B
Yeah, it was initially a death sentence execution, but our historian asked something like, I have this unfinished project. Any alternatives to the execution?
- [08:10]
A
Well, I've read that in the Han legal system, you could actually commute a death sentence by paying a massive fine. But the wages of a historian weren't that great, and poor Sima didn't have the money.
- [08:23]
B
Yeah, but there was another option, and that was castration.
- [08:28]
A
Oh. Which was really considered the lowest of all punishments. Customarily, a man of his status was expected to commit suicide before submitting to such a disgrace.
- [08:39]
B
Death before dishonor.
- [08:41]
A
Okay, well, castration. John, I think we better clarify this for people. Go ahead.
- [08:45]
B
Oh, thank you.
- [08:47]
A
I'll leave the dirty work to you.
- [08:49]
B
Yeah. Okay. This is complete castration. This is not like taking your dog to the vet. We're talking about all three treasures. So not just humiliating, but dangerous, especially when you're older.
- [09:07]
A
Well, humiliating, especially for a scholar gentleman. Castration, it's really considered the worst of all punishments. A source of ignominity that can never be wiped away for generations. Really? Apparently, most men in his position would have committed suicide to preserve what was left of their tattered shreds of their honor.
- [09:26]
B
Sima Qian didn't take the honorable route. He chose to live as a palace eunuch so as he could finish his Shi Ji, his history. He wrote about this choice in his famous letter to his friend Ren an, where he said that even the lowest slave can commit suicide. But he endured his disgrace because he grieved that the things in his heart had not yet been fully expressed to posterity.
- [09:55]
A
It's a beautiful letter. What comes across is his personality more than anything. He is a very humble man, but he's just got this kind of clear diamond hard fixation on finishing the task that his father had assigned to him. And there's a really beautiful lines in this letter. He says that men have always had but one death. For some, it's as weighty as Mount Tai. For others, it's as insignificant as a goose down. Sima Qian decided that finishing his history was what would make his life and his death weighty.
- [10:31]
B
It's a wonderful letter and story, but I find the praise for the sacrifice of choosing to live a little overdone. Okay, castration, not fun, admittedly, but is it worse than death? You know, let's consider his life circumstances. He's already about 45 years old, so he's not some young party animal. And his parents were already dead, so he doesn't have the shame of them seeing him as a unit.
- [11:03]
A
No, that's true, John, but I think especially in the letter, you get a sense of the shame, the great shame he feels walking down the corridors where before he once went striding around as a member of the court, and now everyone is shunning him, all of his former friends. But you're absolutely right, you know, he's already produced children, so he's fulfilled his filial duty to keep the family line going. And he had a daughter.
- [11:27]
B
Yeah, he had a daughter. I've read that he had two boys. I think they changed their surname so they wouldn't be associated with their disgraced dad.
- [11:37]
A
After he was released from prison around 96 BC, Sima Qian served as a court archivist. It's really a high status position reserved for eunuchs, which is really quite surprising. A prisoner and a death row inmate being allowed an important position.
- [11:53]
B
Yeah, that's a surprise. Now, we don't have a clear record of when he died, though many people believe it was around the same time as Emperor Wu. 87, 86 B.C. sima Qian's grandson eventually decided that this dangerous hidden work could be released.
- [12:14]
A
Yes, this was during the reign of Emperor Xuan, a man with a remarkable background. As an infant, Xuan survived a brutal court purge in about 91 BCE under Emperor Wu. Most of his family were killed and he was imprisoned he survived only through the protection of a sympathetic jailer and grew up as a commoner after a general amnesty. Wow.
- [12:38]
B
From, yeah. Rags to riches, becoming an emperor. And, you know, there's no surviving evidence that Emperor Xuan expressed any view on Sima Qian or his work. The history likely circulated quietly among scholars during his reign, gaining influence over time rather than having immediate recognition.
- [13:02]
A
Let's have a look at the Shiji. It's monumental. It's over 500,000 characters long, organized into 130 chapters.
- [13:12]
B
Yeah. So, yeah, let's give some context for that. Half a million characters. Really long. In comparison, the Analects, the famous work associated with Confucius, just 16,000 words. Well, characters. 16,000 characters, so a mere fraction of the length.
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A
I guess he didn't believe in brevity, but it was a long history that he had to plow through.
- [13:37]
B
A lot of history. Yeah.
- [13:39]
A
So Half a million characters is something similar to that novel War and Peace, except it wasn't written on paper.
- [13:46]
B
Right. Paper didn't become common for a few centuries, yet it was written on bamboo strips tied together. So the book would have consisted of lots of bundles of these bamboo strips, and it would have taken up quite a bit of space.
- [14:03]
A
And what a work it turned out to be. We're talking about 130 chapters. As I said, it covers the entire known history of the Chinese people, from the legendary Five Emperors all the way down to Simat's own time. He even included chapters on Central Asia, Korea, and Vietnam, effectively writing a history of the entire known world.
- [14:24]
B
The book is not just a list of dates this happened that happened. There are these chronological records, but there are also what we might call treatises, writings on specific cultural subjects like music, astronomy, water control, economics. And the largest section of the book is biographies, numerous chapters on famous individuals.
- [14:50]
A
And the most famous individual in the work is, of course, the first emperor of China.
- [14:54]
B
Sima Qian was doing more than showing that the emperor and the Qin dynasty as cruel. He was indirectly attacking his own government,
- [15:04]
A
but he had to do it in very subtle ways. Simet spent his life serving Emperor Wu. Hunger, in many ways, was very similar to the first emperor. Both were obsessed with expanding borders, building massive construction projects, and also finding immortality. So when Summa described the first emperor's madness, or as megalomania, he's often taking a sideways swipe, you might say, at his own emperor. And when he writes about the harsh laws and merciless beatings in the Qin prisons, where men are beaten until they confess to crimes they never committed, he was no doubt drawing from his own experiences in prison.
- [15:43]
B
Sima Qian had a visceral loathing for the legalist philosophy which underpinned the Qin dynasty system. Legalism, the idea that you could manipulate people like puppets through the simple levers of punishment and reward. He wanted to warn people, future generations, to keep away from this.
- [16:06]
A
I guess he was a humanist at heart, our grand historian. He wanted a kinder, more humane government. And so he still reads and feels actually very modern and appealing to readers today.
- [16:19]
B
Yeah, I mean, he's essentially using history as a moral guide. And he explicitly said he was following the tradition of Confucius so as to clarify right and wrong.
- [16:33]
A
But you can imagine, especially after castration, that the world seems unfair. He struggled with the way of heaven. He observed that good men often starved to death, while villains live to a ripe old age. His conclusion was that the historian's job is to ensure that in the end, the good are remembered and the wicked suffer an evil reputation.
- [16:55]
B
Yeah. One of the most striking villains in his portrait is Zhao Gao, a eunuch official. Sima Qian portrays him as perhaps the most evil figure in his history, but doesn't write a biography of him. Yeah, he's sort of ignored. He just pops up in other people's biographies.
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A
It's interesting that he really portrayed this guy as an unalloyed villain, when you might have thought that as a fellow eunuch, you would have had a little more compassion for him. But that's clearly not the case.
- [17:31]
B
For me, one of the things I love about Sima Qian is that he produces this very humanistic foundational work, and he kind of vaccinates Chinese civilization against tyrants. Of course, you could argue that didn't work out completely, but you have this history which doesn't glorify the first emperor or other emperors, you know, because he suffered himself. And he and his fellow scholars respect Confucius, and Confucius was persecuted by the first emperor. So you have this 2000 year tradition of Confucian resistance to tyranny.
- [18:18]
A
That's right, John. And I think what galls him especially is the fact that the first emperor, in order to make everything start from zero, adopted such of this legalist thinking of punishment, carrots and sticks, and engaged in the burning of books in which thousands of tomes about the history, about the philosophy, about alchemy, all of these were set to flames. And I think that as a historian, as a man who just to really sacrifice his reputation to keep going and to record the history, I think he found this just especially Hard to bear the great loss of this really, this treasure of information.
- [19:01]
B
Yes. So he had a shortage of written material to draw on. So sometimes he was using dubious sources, sources that contained a lot of fiction.
- [19:15]
A
You know, you say that as if it's an entirely negative thing, but at the same time, I think today in a modern sense, it really draws the reader in. You get this feeling that you're hearing kind of a lot of the palace gossip that happens in the corridors, people whispering, telling tales that they shouldn't. I think gives the writing a real immediacy.
- [19:37]
B
Yeah. He also has a unique way of ending his chapters. He provides a section titled the Grand Historian Remarks where he steps out from behind the curtain and offers his own judgment on the people he's writing about.
- [19:55]
A
That's right. It's as if he was Shakespeare who had, at the end of the play, decided to step onto the stage to explain to the people what was really going on and what his own thoughts were. Writing this.
- [20:07]
B
Right? Yeah. There's one case where he is criticizing a duke of the Qin Dynasty, otherwise a great ruler. But Sima Qian criticizes him because he had his best ministers killed to accompany him in death.
- [20:26]
A
Yeah, it seems a bit excessive, doesn't it?
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B
Yeah, yeah.
- [20:30]
A
He even used irony and invented dialogue to make points he couldn't say directly. There is a scene where a Chinese eunuch who had defected to the Chony debates a Han envoy. This eunuch defends Xiongn's customs as being morally equally or even superior to the Chinese ones. And scholars think that Simat used his character to attack the corruption and sycophancy of his own hand court.
- [20:56]
B
That's really amazing, isn't it? You know, more than 2,000 years ago. And he's giving a sympathetic portrayal of these so called barbarians.
- [21:06]
A
But it's clever how he's sniping at his own. At his own ruler who had him castrated. So he does get his revenge.
- [21:15]
B
We're talking about Sima Qian more than we are the emperor who he lived under. And this Emperor Wu was the longest reigning emperor until the Kangxi Emperor in the Qing dynasty in the 1600s.
- [21:33]
A
And that's very different from the first emperor that we'd spoken about who really thought that he deserved to live for at least 10,000 years. His own dynasty ended what, his son, second son, and took over the throne. But he lasted less than a dozen years.
- [21:54]
B
Yes, very short lived dynasty. The first emperor's reign was quite short, but he packed a lot into it and he put an enormous number of People to work building the Great Wall, or at least a section of it. And he built a huge mausoleum, the famous terracotta army, which was part of his absolute obsession with immortality, of living forever. And that's where your novel comes in. You tell the story of him sending out one particular monk, sometimes called a magician. So once again we have astrology mixed up with things. Shufu.
- [22:36]
A
That's right. I think what fascinated me about the character of the first emperor was this, as you described, this almost pathetic obsession with immortality, that here is a man who is so shrewd and such a, I think a fierce judge of other characters, but when it comes to his own shortcomings, and no shortcoming is greater than his grandiosity, his feeling that he could live forever, that he decides to send alchemists and sages on expeditions into the high mountains and in the case of Shufu, across the seas into the Pacific Ocean to try to find the abode of the immortals, to somehow either cajole or bribe or charm them into getting the elixir of immortality. So you can bring it back.
- [23:26]
B
Yes, we talked about that in your first appearance on the Books on Asia podcast. So people can listen to that. But Sima Qian writes about Shufu and well, the interesting thing for me just re looking at that before we started recording was he's mentioning other expeditions as well. Shufu was not the only one.
- [23:50]
A
No, that's right, John. And it's interesting that last summer it was pronounced by the Chinese archaeologists had found, written on an outcrop of rock way up on the Tibetan plateau, an inscription that has been verified as authentic, that pretty much says this was written by a member of the party of alchemists who had been sent by the emperor to go to Mount Kunlun to bring back the elixir of immortality. And these people were never heard of again. Clearly they failed or vanished. High tailed it over the mountains because the emperor died not long after.
- [24:30]
B
Yes. So he sent expeditions to the west, to the mountains. And Shufu was just one of five expeditions, I think, sent out into the seas. And Sima Qian talks about the Emperor being annoyed with Shufu, also a guy called Han Zhong. And this guy looking at Wikipedia says, yeah, sounds like a drug addict. He was always consuming this psychoactive drug. Something odd. Sima Qian has a funny dig at the Emperor. He has him as a madman. Shufu is complaining about these large fish that interrupted his expedition to search for to reach these immortal islands and the elixir. And then the Emperor is walking up and down the coast, the cliffs, looking for these giant fish. Tell me about that.
- [25:28]
A
I think it shows his desperation. It shows how ill he was becoming, really. Taking too much mercury, ironically, to enhance and prolong his own life. So there he was, the most powerful man in all of Asia, striding along the. Well, by that point, he wasn't striding, he was more like staggering along the coast. And I think it came to him in a dream that he had to kill a large fish that was stopping Shufu from sailing back, bringing him the elixir of immortality that would save him right at the very moments when his life was ebbing away.
- [26:08]
B
And there's a fish aspect to his death. He was away from the capital when he suddenly died, and his underlings wanted to cover up his death, so they put his body in a cart and covered him with fish so that his rotting corpse would be covered by the smell of the fish. That's an ignoble end for a man who wanted to live for 10,000 years, isn't it?
- [26:35]
A
It certainly is. You think they would have at least put flowers or lavender or something to cover the stench, but to load up the imperial carriage with dying fish, that seems a bit rude, to say the least.
- [26:49]
B
Yeah. So the records of the Grand Historian is available in English, and it mercifully does not include everything from the original. It's the best bits. It's pretty readable considering how old it
- [27:04]
A
is, I think it is. And I think maybe a lot has to do with the translation by Burton Watson.
- [27:11]
B
Anyway, Tim, so let's finish with a plug for your wonderful novel. The Wondrous Elixir of the Two Chinese Lovers.
- [27:21]
A
The Wondrous Elixir of the Two Chinese Lovers actually opens in modern day Mexico. An archaeologist finds the memoir of the Taoist sage Shufu. And in my telling, he lands on the shores of Mexico in his mad search for the elixir that he should be taking back to the emperor, but he decides to stay in Mexico instead.
- [27:45]
B
Excellent. Sima Qian's writing was one of your inspirations for the novel.
- [27:49]
A
Very much so. In the beginning, I actually thought of putting the novel in the voice of Sima Qian, and I experimented with writing it because I thought that his character is so compelling as it comes out, as we discussed in the letter to his friend, who also faces shame and execution. And there's something just very. I loved his kind of doggedness, his stubbornness, that in the face of humiliation and ridicule, that he wants to get the job done. He feels that he owes it to something greater than himself.
- [28:23]
B
Yes, yes.
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A
So, yes, he's a very compelling character. And I can see why, even though it's half a million characters long, that his record is really just one of the great, great works of mankind.
- [28:36]
B
Absolutely, yes. Though you've gone one better than his story about Shufu. You have our monk getting on with the Emperor's mother.
- [28:48]
A
Well, a lot of the scandalous things that I heard about the Emperor's mother, I read in the basic annals of the Qin dynasty by our great historian.
- [28:58]
B
Okay, listeners can check out your novel. Anyway, Tim, it's been wonderful for speaking to you again.
- [29:04]
A
Likewise, John, always a pleasure.
- [29:07]
B
Okay, signing off.
- [29:09]
A
Bye bye. Thank you.