The Shiji as a Source for Chinese Religion

The Shiji is not a religious text, and that is exactly its value: it is the observant record of a court insider describing what the religion of early imperial China actually was. Its treatise on the feng and shan sacrifices is the fullest early account of the supreme rites of the Chinese state, the emperor's offerings to Heaven and Earth on Mount Tai, which Emperor Wu revived in Sima Qian's own lifetime with the historian's father in attendance until, painfully, he was excluded from the climactic ceremony. Around that treatise the book documents the whole religious apparatus of the age: the official cults and their altars, the diviners and dream interpreters, and the fangshi, the masters of esoteric techniques who promised Emperor Wu contact with immortals and drugs of deathlessness, described by Sima Qian with an irony that still reads clearly.

The book's hereditary house chapter on Confucius is the earliest connected biography of the sage, the account from which two millennia of images of Confucius descend, and its biographies preserve much of what is known of early Daoist figures, including the famous notice of Laozi that already presents him as half legend. Later dynasties canonized the Shiji as the first of the standard histories. For the atlas it stands as the great early witness to Chinese religion as practiced, recorded by a historian who watched much of it from inside the court.