Song Dynasty History (published by Hwang Shanfu)

A 12th-Century Chinese History Book, Reborn in a Japanese Museum

Open one of its ninety stitched volumes and the page is dense with characters: a single column of large type carrying the main text, flanked by smaller characters printed two lines deep inside ruled borders. Those smaller lines are commentary, three layers of it, accumulated over seven centuries before this book was even printed. This is the Shiki in its Chinese form, the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), and the copy held at the National Museum of Japanese History in Sakura is the oldest complete printing of its kind anywhere in the world.

The text itself is one of the foundational works of East Asian civilization. Sima Qian (Shiba Sen in Japanese), an official at the court of the Former Han, finished it around the start of the first century BCE. He set out to record the whole of the known past, from the legendary Yellow Emperor down to his own age, and organized it into 130 chapters across five formats: basic annals of rulers, chronological tables, treatises on institutions, accounts of the great houses, and ranked biographies. The structure he invented became the template for nearly every official Chinese history that followed. In Japan, the Shiji was read as a core text by educated people for more than a thousand years.

Why the Huang Shanfu Edition Matters

For centuries the Shiji circulated with three separate scholarly commentaries, each produced in a different era. The earliest, the Jijie (Collected Explanations), was assembled by Pei Yin in the fifth century. To it were added the Suoyin (Seeking the Hidden Meaning) by Sima Zhen and the Zhengyi (Correct Significance) by Zhang Shoujie, both Tang-dynasty scholars of the eighth century. Readers who wanted all three had to consult them separately.

That changed in Southern Song China. A commercial publisher named Huang Shanfu, working in Jian'an in what is now Fujian Province, printed an edition that merged all three commentaries around the main text on a single page. A colophon at the end of the Jijie preface in the second volume records his workshop by name: "Printed by Huang Shanfu of Jian'an, at the Jingshi studio of the family school." By comparing it with another of his productions, scholars have dated the printing to the Qingyuan era, roughly 1195 to 1201, the close of the twelfth century.

Many copies of the three-commentary edition once existed. This one is the only complete survivor. All 130 chapters are present, the printing is crisp, and the cut of the characters is unusually clean. For anyone studying the textual history of the Shiji, it is a primary reference point.

A National Treasure With a Long Japanese Life

Japan designated the book a National Treasure on 11 June 1966, in the category of calligraphy and classical texts. By then it had been in the country for a long time, and its margins show it. Zen monks of the medieval Gozan, the elite "Five Mountains" monasteries, added fine handwritten notes throughout, a running record of how the Shiji was read and taught in Japan.

Its chain of ownership reads like a tour through learned Japan. Sources differ on the earliest holders, naming figures connected to Zen monastic and shrine circles, but they agree on the later course. The book entered the library of Naoe Kanetsugu, the formidable chief retainer of the Uesugi house, a warrior renowned in equal measure for his swordsmanship and his scholarship. From the Uesugi it passed to the Kōjōkan, the domain academy at Yonezawa, where generations of students would have known it. At some point in the sixteenth century the volumes were rebound for preservation, which is why a Song printing survives today in such sound condition.

What to Look For When It Is on View

The first thing most visitors notice is the page layout. The main narrative runs in a single column of bold characters; the three commentaries are squeezed into paired half-size lines within the ruled frame, a visual hierarchy you can read even without knowing Classical Chinese. It tells you instantly which words are Sima Qian's and which belong to his later interpreters.

Look also for the collectors' seals stamped in red and other inks, including one reading "Kōgakutei in," and for the small marginal annotations in Japanese hands. These are the fingerprints of the book's readers. The binding is the pouch-fold style standard for East Asian printed books, where each leaf is folded outward so the printed surfaces face one another.

One practical point: this is paper, and paper is fragile. The museum rotates its three great Chinese histories, the Shiji, the Hanshu, and the Hou Hanshu, through its displays rather than showing them continuously. Check the current exhibition schedule before a special trip, since on any given day a different volume or a different one of the three may be open.

Around the Museum

The National Museum of Japanese History, known to almost everyone as Rekihaku, sits on the grounds of the former Sakura Castle, north of the modern town. It is one of the largest history museums in the country, with roughly 270,000 items and six permanent galleries tracing the islands from prehistory to the modern era; the modern-history gallery reopened in spring 2026 after a major renovation. Plan on at least an hour and a half.

The wooded castle park around the museum is pleasant in its own right, and the old castle town of Sakura repays a wander. Nearby stands the former Hotta residence, the late-nineteenth-century home of the last lord of the Sakura domain, whose main buildings are an Important Cultural Property and whose garden is a nationally designated Place of Scenic Beauty. A short row of preserved samurai houses survives in the same district.