"mirror" (three Parts), The History Of The Source

Zizhi Tongjian is a outstanding historical work written by Sima Guang,spent 19 years, during Song dynasty. This paper is concentrated on theoriginal material of Three Kingdom part of this famous work. The mainlyoriginal materials of Zizhi Tongjian are official historical documents andrecords, but there is still a small quantity of materials that sourced from otherhistorical works.Generally speaking, Sima Guang showed his respects about originalmaterial during his composing of this great work by totally quoting, sometimeseven without changing a word. But he usually made some necessary lingualmodification according to the different linguistic customs of different times.Sima Guang chose a lot of materials from those official historicaldocuments, while admitting others. On overall, these omitting are necessaryand needed. By these omitting, it avoided the lengthiness and needlessrepetition of original material, endowed the entire works with a clear and fluentlook. As Zizhi Tongjian was a work arranged by the way of counting the years,and the material Sima Guang collected were mainly arranged by personae, alot of supplements were needed during the writing. These supplements werealso added mostly according to the official history documents of that time,while few by other nongovernmental history documents. By thesesupplements, Zizhi Tongjian behaved more sufficient in reciting history affairsand more distinct in depictions. Since Sima Guang had made so manyaccepting, rejecting, adapting and embellishment, the Zizhi Tongjianrepresents a different appearance from the original official history documents.Some of the difference was caused while Zizhi Tongjian corrected those errorsin original documents according to textual research. Together with the merit ofZizhi Tongjian, some defect are still existed. As it is a rather complicated itemconcerning Zizhi Tongjian using the official historical documents, we should becareful in citing the materials from Zizhi Tongjian. Only by such way, we cando our research work in a correct and efficient way.