Shiji, the original name as The Records of the Historian, was the publication Si Ma Qian undertook this official responsibility handed down by his father and written on behalf of a historiographer. Si Ma Qian, inspired by Chun Qiu, further interpreted the purpose of ‘Studying the relationship between the universe and humanity, looking through the changes taken place from before to now, and the one forms a philosophy of his own.’. Under the prevalent background of interactions between the universe and mankind, the overall historical structure of Shiji, which mainly focused on human beings and incidents themselves as a series of biographies style, represented the inclination of Si Ma Qian’s choices. During the time of combining political affairs writing style and practical statecraft ideology in academia, Si Ma Qian also followed suit. This style reflected on his writing structure, which he emphasized more on the profound truth contained in subtle words and critical spirit as like Confucius had written Chun Qiu. While integrating the idea of determined resolution of writing from Qu Yuan, Si Ma Qian also absorbed the power from folktales and association. From the applications of recording proportion, overall layout, topic presentation, subtle speech, and connotation, Shiji specifically showed the history awareness of historiography, which its awareness paid more attention on contemporary history.
Considering the above background, the researcher started from the century when Si Ma Qian was, his clan school, giant misfortune, and the contradiction of times to establish different aspects of his writing background, purpose, idea, style, structure, narration, and calligraphy. According to the processes of historical construction and interpretation, from Han Wu Dynasty (witness history) to whole Western Han Dynasty (contemporary history), the researcher further connected history of early Qin Dynasty with Qin Dynasty, and comprehensively demonstrated ‘contemporary history awareness’ within the general historical style of Shiji.
On the arrangement of each chapter, the researcher especially revealed the style of chronology, which was quite neglected before, and stressed on its function in the meaning of five styles. Through the textual analysis of Shiji, the researcher also dug out Si Ma Qian’s writing calligraphy as one of the methods to interpret the text; the rest methodology such as “Hujian”, the skills of “Narrative and Argumentative Complement”, and “Judgement in Sequence”. Then, the researcher combined literature review to be tailor-made for deeper discussion issue. Finally, from the acceptance of Twenty-Five Dynastic Histories, the researcher connected the previous collections with comparison, enquiry, question, reflection, and the dialogues among literature, research, and guidance books to form the statements of this thesis.