Book of Sui

The Sui Shu is one of the more carefully compiled of the Twenty-Four Histories, produced by a team of deeply learned historians led by Wei Zheng; beyond the annals and biographies, the ten treatises carry the greatest weight. They systematically preserve institutional material from the Northern and Southern Dynasties onward—rites, music, calendar and harmonics, astronomy, the five phases, food and money, criminal law, officialdom, geography, and bibliography—making the work indispensable for research on the institutional history of the Sui and preceding dynasties. The "Bibliography Treatise" in particular traces the survival and loss of books and the evolution of scholarship over six hundred years from the Han to the Sui, and establishes the four-part classification of classics, histories, masters, and belles-lettres that shaped Chinese bibliography for more than a millennium. It can be read both as an account of the Sui's rise and fall and consulted as a repository of medieval institutions and scholarly culture. For general readers, the annals and biographies are clearly narrated and make a good starting point; the ten treatises are more specialized and suited to consultation as needed. The style is concise throughout, but the density of institutional terms and official titles calls for some patience on a first reading.