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Garden of Eloquence / Shuoyuan說苑

By Liu Xiang. Translated and Introduced by Eric Henry

In 17 BCE the Han dynasty archivist Liu Xiang presented to the throne a collection of some seven hundred items of varying length, mostly quasi-historical anecdotes and narratives, that he deemed essential reading for wise...

The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian’s Legacy

By Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, Michael Nylan, and Hans van Ess

Sima Qian (first century BCE), the author of Record of the Historian (Shiji), is China’s earliest and best-known historian, and his “Letter to Ren An” is the most famous letter in Chinese history. In the...

Chang'an 26 BCE

An Augustan Age in China

By Michael Nylan, Griet Vankeerberghen

During the last two centuries BCE, the Western Han capital of Chang'an, near today's Xi'an in northwest China, outshone Augustan Rome in several ways while administering comparable numbers of imperial subjects and equally vast territories....

Exemplary Figures / Fayan

By Yang Xiong. Translated by Michael Nylan. Introduction by Michael Nylan

Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature

Exemplary Figures (sometimes translated as Model Sayings) is an unabridged, annotated translation of Fayan, one of three major works...