Ancient Chinese historiography developed a tradition of official history-writing that has no real equivalent in the ancient West. The Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) by Sima Qian (c. 145-86 BC) is the founding work of a tradition that continued producing dynastic histories for two thousand years.

Sima Qian's innovation was organizational as much as literary. He developed a format — annals for chronological political history, tables for genealogies and chronologies, treatises for specialized topics (economics, ritual, astronomy), biographies of major figures — that was adopted by every subsequent official historian and remained the standard structure of Chinese historical writing through the 20th century.

The personal dimension of the Shiji is also remarkable. Sima Qian was castrated on the orders of the Han emperor Wu Di as punishment for defending a defeated general. He chose castration over death because he had not yet finished the Shiji. His preface to the work, which survives, is one of the most moving pieces of historical self-reflection in ancient literature.

The Official History tradition had significant epistemological implications. History was written by state officials, using state archives, for state purposes. The result was comprehensive documentation of official political history and systematic exclusion of almost everything else. Economic history, social history, the history of women, religious history — all present only in fragments in official history, except where they intersected with dynastic politics.