In reaction to the traditional tight political control over the drafting of history, controlled, censored and redacted by those in power, Liu’s book marks the start of a long tradition of reflection on the problem of writing history. Liu’s interest in the accurate recording of words, his critical attitude to the classics and his insistence that history should not deal in myths, but only take in human factors, economics, climate and geography, were part of a core concern for objectivity, which would be a recurring issue in Chinese historiography until the present day.
