Welcome!

This site is dedicated to the translation of Zizhitongjian （资治通鉴）by Sima Guang for English readers.  The original Chinese text is available at zh.wikisource.org.

I am a retired software engineer and an aspiring amateur writer, dedicated to promoting cultural and intellectual exchange between the Chinese linguistic environment and the English-speaking world.

Most Chinese official history is written in the form of biographies. Sima Guang and his colleagues compiled historical records spanning 1,400 years and organized them into a book of annals. While the original dates are given in the sexagenary cycle of the lunar calendar, I choose to use Gregorian calendar terms, such as “January 5, 1450 A.D.”, in my translation.  This does not mean the event occurred on January 5, 1450, in the Gregorian calendar but is a simplified form of “the 5th day of the first month of the year 1450 on the lunar calendar.” Please note these dates are approximations, with a margin of error of a few days.

The Chinese calendar has changed every few hundred years. Some dynasties selected different months to mark the start of their calendar year. As a result, readers may observe some years beginning in October, others in December or January, and so on.

The links (URLs) in the text are primarily for disambiguating the numerous homophones in Chinese characters representing names of persons or places. Where possible, I have included references from Wikipedia or other online resources in English. Some references are in Chinese when no English resources were available. Although the contents of these references may not be easily understood by readers, they serve to show that characters with identical pronunciation (and often the same spelling) can refer to entirely different things. I do not endorse the accuracy of the reference contents, as I have not reviewed all of them myself.

The spelling of Chinese names (of persons or places) is based on Mandarin using the Pinyin system. Mandarin is a tonal language, but I have not included tone marks in the spelling to simplify typing.