Alex Amies, Gu Ban
Volume 95 of the Hanshu was previously translated to English by Wylie (1880). Given that a prior translation exists, this translation should be considered as a re-translation. Why re-translate this book? The age of the Wylie translation , lack of correlation with source Chinese text, and the archaic transliteration system used make it somewhat inaccessible to present-day readers and due for revisiting. To assist future authors to translate related texts and to help readers relate the translation and commentary here, bilingual text with aligned Chinese and English is given. Although the first standard history, 史記 Shiji ‘Records of the Grand Historian, has been translated to English (Sima Qian and Watson tr. 1993; Ssu-ma Ch'ien, et al, 2020), the Hanshu is only partially translated and only a very small proportion of the remaining twenty-two standard histories for the succeeding dynasties up to the Ming dynasty have been translated (there is no standard history of the Qing). The Han dynasty is foundational in Chinese imperial history and this particular volume is critical to scholars studying fields related to Chinese history, such as historic literature, anthropology, Buddhism, art history, archeology, and also historians of the neighboring countries of Vietnam and Korea. For these scholars to jump into the middle of an ocean of mostly untranslated Chinese primary sources is very difficult and relying on secondary sources is not fully satisfactory. The author hopes that this work fills a part of the foundation needed. Some of the Chinese source text in Volume 95 of the Hanshu was copied verbatim by Bangu from volumes of the Shiji. However, there are also major differences. The ground-breaking translations from Wylie and Watson have made the work of the present author much easier. However, there are some interpolations in both Wylie’s and Watson’s translations, which the present author prefers to separate out to the commentary in order to keep the translated English t
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