Few early civilizations can match imperial China in the precociousness of its historical writings. For nearly three thousand years, the Chinese have produced works astonishingly advanced in method and monumental in volume, thereby making it difficult to speak of a single epochal Golden Age for the historical genre. Conceivably, though, the Eastern Zhou (ca. 770–256 B.C.E.) was such a time: in this classical period, history first asserted its independence from literary and cosmological writings to assume an autonomy of its own. Every major epoch contributed distinctively to the philosophy and technique of historical scholarship, yet the Song dynasty (C. E. 960–1279) can rival the very best. Historical innovators of the time drew inspiration from classical traditions, yet they adjusted traditional forms to meet the current needs of politics and the expectations of scholarship. The Historical Records of the Five Dynasties, or Wudai Shiji, so uniquely succeeded in combining tradition with innovation, empirical rigor with didactic message, that the government promptly sanctioned it as official history. It was the last of the dynastic histories by an individual author and the last written in a wholly private capacity.
The Five Dynasties era (C.E. 907–979), with its pandemic tumult and personal tragedy, differed from the times of author Ouyang Xiu (Ou-yang Hsiu, 1007–1072) like night and day. In the earlier period, a mighty military machine commonly subverted civilian controls, lackluster favorites wreaked havoc on a succession of royal palaces, and emperors typically acted on whim and their officials on greed while northern China succumbed to a string of alien occupiers. Ouyang Xiu writes in indignation and disbelief, his . . .