You Wei, Annals, and the Dumb Way to Read History

The Dumb Way to Read History

While reading a biography of Su Shi, I wanted a better feel for how his life actually unfolded. So I used AI to reorganize his timeline, mapping every major event against a fixed grid of his age and year. It came out looking something like this:

Year (CE)	Age	Location	Office	Events
1036	1	Meishan County, Meizhou	None	Born on the 19th day of the 12th lunar month at the family residence on Shahang, Meishan County, Meizhou.
1037	2	Meishan County, Meizhou	None
1038	3	Meishan County, Meizhou	None
1039	4	Meishan County, Meizhou	None	Younger brother Su Zhe is born, childhood nickname Maojun.
1040	5	Meishan County, Meizhou	None
1041	6	Meishan County, Meizhou	None
1042	7	Meishan County, Meizhou	None	Starts learning to read and study around age seven or eight.
1043	8	Meishan County, Meizhou	None	Enters primary school under the Daoist priest Zhang Yijian. Sees Shi Shoudao’s Poem on the Sacred Virtue of Qingli at school and begins to admire contemporary worthies.
1044	9	Meishan County, Meizhou	None
1045	10	Meishan County, Meizhou	None	Father Su Xun travels widely seeking office; mother Lady Cheng teaches him the classics and histories personally. Reading the “Biography of Fan Pang” in the Book of Later Han, she sighs deeply. Su Shi, standing by her side, asks: “If I were to become Fan Pang, would you allow it, Mother?” Lady Cheng replies: “If you can be Fan Pang, could I not be Fan Pang’s mother?” Su Shi is inspired and sets his ambitions on serving the world.
1046	11	Meishan County, Meizhou	None
1047	12	Meishan County, Meizhou	None	Grandfather Su Xu passes away; father returns from Jiangnan for mourning.
1048	13	Meishan County, Meizhou	None
1049	14	Meishan County, Meizhou	None
1050	15	Meishan County, Meizhou	None
1051	16	Meishan County, Meizhou	None
1052	17	Meishan County, Meizhou	None	Befriends Liu Zhongda; they travel back and forth visiting each other in Meishan.
1053	18	Meishan County, Meizhou	None
1054	19	Meishan County, Meizhou	None	Marries Wang Fu, daughter of Wang Fang from Qingshen County, Meizhou.
1055	20	Chengdu	None	Visits Chengdu. Zhang Fangping, Prefect of Yizhou, meets him and treats him as a scholar of state distinction.
1056	21	Capital	Jinshi	Accompanies his father and brother traveling overland to the capital; passes the imperial examination as a jinshi.

Chronological Timeline of Su Shi’s Life

At 21, he travels to the capital for the imperial examinations and passes as a jinshi. The very next year, his mother passes away—three years of ritual mourning. Then a four-year post in Fengxiang. The year after returning to the capital, his father dies—another three years of mourning. Then two years back in the capital, falling out with the reformist faction, and getting sidelined to Hangzhou.

By then, he was 36. In our world, that’s the age you get aged out of the workforce. But we all know how the story goes: his fame only spread further, and his life of wandering had only just begun.

So how do I read history? I’ve always relied on this kind of dumb method: trace the cause and effect of what happened, and when needed, lay everything out in chronological order with fixed time steps.

The advantage of a strict year-by-year chronicle over a regular “major events” timeline is that the ruler of time becomes much clearer. In traditional grand narratives, centuries of history can get squished into a couple hundred words, flashing by in the blink of an eye. But for an individual’s brief life, time unfolds in chunks of single years and decades.

What does a century actually look like? In ancient China, average life expectancy was around 30 to 40 years. The Southern Song’s retreat south lasted 152 years. The Kangxi Emperor reigned for 61 years; Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong reigned for 134 years combined. The Qing dynasty collapsed in 1912, 113 years ago today.

Reading You Wei

You Wei (《有为》) is written entirely in this chronological annals format. It spans 54 years of history, beginning in 140 BCE when 17-year-old Liu Che took the throne and ending in 87 BCE when he died at 70.

To be completely honest, one side effect of the annals format is that thematic threads get scattered. It’s terrible for studying for a history exam (I’ve forgotten a lot of it). But its magic is that it makes you feel the true dimension of people and time.

Take Zhang Qian’s appearances throughout the book:

Year	Liu Che’s Age	Chapter
-140,-139	17,18	/
-138	19	Zhang Qian’s first mission to the Western Regions
-137,-126	20,30	/
-126	31	Zhang Qian returns
-125,-122	32,35	/
-121	36	Eastern campaign against the Wise King of the Left
-120,-115	37,41	/
-115	42	Zhang Qian returns again
-114	43	Zhang Qian passes away
-113,-88	44,70	Liu Che passes away

He reads almost like an interlude: he shows up, then vanishes for 10 years. He reappears, makes another brief appearance, and disappears for several more years. A year after his final appearance, he dies. And after his death, Liu Che would continue ruling for another 28 years—barely halfway through his reign.

In this book’s structure, every single year is its own chapter, covering three to five events. Each chapter runs roughly 6,000 words. So reading Zhang Qian’s storyline feels like this: he gets a passing mention in 138 BCE, and then you read through 10 chapters and 60,000 words before suddenly running into the chapter title “Zhang Qian Returns.” The sheer shock of it! An old friend, long forgotten, returning with staggering achievements! I imagine that was pretty much what the crowd back in Chang’an actually felt at the time.

And here is Huo Qubing:

Year	Liu Che’s Age	Chapter
-140,-124	17,33	/
-123	34	Huo Qubing debuts on the battlefield, enfeoffed as Marquis Champion
-122	35	/
-121	36	Huo Qubing’s two Hexi campaigns; King Hunxie surrenders; Wuwei and Jiuquan commanderies established
-120	37	/
-119	38	Decisive Battle of Mobei; sacred rites at Mount Langjuxu; Da Sima posts created for Wei and Huo
-118	39	/
-117	40	Huo Qubing passes away
-116,-88	41,70	Liu Che passes away

Looking at a timeline and narrative structure like that, don’t you feel that tragic sense of destiny—a born military prodigy streaking across the sky like a meteor? Meanwhile, our Martial Emperor would continue ruling the empire for another 30 years.

By now, I think you can feel the appeal of measuring time on a real scale. But it goes beyond that. Once you nail down the chronological sequence of events—what happened first, what happened next, and who influenced whom—events that once seemed fuzzy and completely unrelated suddenly reveal how they were coupled together.

After all, we’re reading the history of the Han era, not just a disparate list of bullet points like the “Decree of Extending Grace,” the “Battle of Mobei,” or the “state monopoly on salt and iron.”

Appendix: Preface: Why I Wanted to Write Emperor Wu of Han in Chronological Annals

The British Sinologist Michael Loewe wrote in “The Campaigns of Han Wu-ti”:

The reign of Han Wu-ti is worth studying because it is sufficiently long to show the initial implementation and success of China’s new expansionist policies, as well as their subsequent failure and abandonment. We can also observe the reactions of officials from diverse positions and points of view.

Although Loewe’s assessment focused solely on military affairs, it applies just as well to every aspect of Emperor Wu’s era. Emperor Wu ruled for 54 years—a full quarter of the Western Han dynasty, and equivalent to an entire human lifetime back then. Over that stretch of time, you really do see a representative cross-section of shifting fortunes and personnel.

When Sima Qian wrote the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) and Ban Gu wrote the Book of Han (Hanshu), imperial records were designated either as benji (“Basic Annals,” like the “Basic Annals of the First Emperor of Qin” in the Shiji) or simply ji (“Annals,” like the “Annals of Emperor Wu” in the Hanshu). The character ji (纪) carries the silk radical; its original meaning is a thread that binds things together. Sima Qian and Ban Gu used the emperor’s lifetime as a chronological thread, tying together hereditary houses, biographies, treatises, and tables into a sweeping history of the era.

In theory, then, a book explaining how the times shifted over Emperor Wu’s 54-year reign, and what kind of fate befell the people living through it, should be ideally suited to a chronological annals format. Only then can readers gradually feel why the wheels of history were so unstoppable, and how figures large and small were swept along by them. Unfortunately, aside from a tiny handful of works throughout history—such as Sima Guang’s Zizhi Tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance) and Wang Yizhi’s Xihan Nianji (Chronicle of the Western Han)—chronological works on Emperor Wu’s reign are almost nonexistent.

Among modern works, there isn’t a single one. Without exception, modern histories organize chapters by topic: one chapter on foreign military campaigns, one on opening up the Western Regions, one on the Witchcraft Disaster, one on fiscal reforms… The advantage of this topical approach is clear themes and tidy narratives; you get a systematic overview of a specific subject. But its downside is that by chopping up and rearranging events across a 54-year span, it ends up severing the reader’s intuitive grasp of temporal logic.

Take suanmin and gaomin, for instance. These were major fiscal policies under Emperor Wu (property taxes on merchant wealth and edicts rewarding whistleblowers for reporting tax evasion). But their rollout was directly tied to the escalating costs of the wars against the Xiongnu. If you split them into two separate thematic chapters, readers lose their temporal sensitivity to the policy; it becomes harder to sense the chronological sequence and causal connections between events. Or take Emperor Wu’s Taichu calendar reform: that was a crucial milestone, and without anchoring it precisely on the chronological timeline to see what happened before and after, it’s hard to understand why historian Tian Yuqing, in On the Luntai Edict, lamented that Emperor Wu missed his best window to change course during the Taichu era. In short, an annals format lets readers trace the actual pulse of historical change far more clearly.

That’s why I wanted to try writing Emperor Wu of Han in a chronological annals format.

Yet after trying my hand at it, I quickly realized why nobody writes this way—it really is a thankless, grueling slog.

First, why it’s thankless. Inevitably, some readers will aggressively demand: “Zizhi Tongjian is already chronological—what’s the point of writing another one? How is your book any different from the Tongjian? Do you seriously think you can write better than Sima Guang?” Anyone asking that almost certainly hasn’t read the Tongjian. If they had, they’d know that Sima Guang selected only major events that served as practical lessons for governance. His editorial filter was heavy, his coverage was far from comprehensive, and certain details slightly lack objectivity. For example, in the fourth year of the Yuanshuo era (125 BCE), Sima Guang wrote only two lines:

In winter, His Majesty visited Ganquan. In summer, the Xiongnu invaded the commanderies of Dai, Dingxiang, and Shang, each with 30,000 horsemen, killing and plundering several thousand people.

Beyond that, not a single detail.

And that brings me to why it’s so grueling. Since this book organizes chapters by year, while I can’t make every single year equal in length, I also can’t just dash off twenty or thirty words for a year and call it done. I had to comb through the original sources from scratch, hunting down other historical events from that year that Sima Guang deemed irrelevant to statecraft and left out, but that are genuinely worth knowing for modern readers.

The second reason it’s a slog quickly followed: the dating of major events in Emperor Wu’s era is notoriously messy. The Shiji is our most crucial primary source, but Emperor Wu’s reign happened to be the very period when reign names were first instituted. Multiple calendar systems ran in parallel, so the Shiji often doesn’t specify which year an event occurred. The Hanshu attempted some chronological verification, but made plenty of mistakes. For instance, Emperor Wu once captured a white lin (an auspicious mythical beast) and changed the reign title to mark the omen; later, an ancient bronze vessel (baoding) was unearthed, prompting another change in reign title. Both events are vital anchors on the timeline, and unfortunately, the Hanshu misdated both of them. Once the Hanshu got them wrong, subsequent histories like the Zizhi Tongjian followed suit. Just to produce an annals-style history as rigorous as my abilities allow, the sheer volume of work spent on dating and historical verification multiplied dramatically.

Of course, the difficulties went far beyond that, but I won’t ramble on here whining to win the reader’s sympathy. In any case, the book is finally finished. As a new experiment, I hope it offers readers a fresh reading experience. Although this book centers on Emperor Wu, his 54 years on the throne are really just used as a fuse of time—a way to illuminate the lives of the people around him, a turbulent era in rapid upheaval, and the grief, hardship, and helplessness of everyone caught up in it.

As you read, I also hope you can get comfortable with one perspective: while historiography always strives for historical truth, the distance of time and the lack of sources mean many issues may not easily yield definitive conclusions. Emperor Wu’s era left behind countless unresolved mysteries, largely because our primary sources—the Shiji and the Hanshu—are sketchy in their records and often contradict each other. All we can do is draw on scholarship and debate, incorporate newly excavated texts, and inch closer to the truth step by step. Until we get there, we can only say as much as the evidence supports, offering at most reasonable inferences and conjectures within plausible bounds. History never presumes to provide final answers, but it always strives to provoke thought.