About the author
Yuan Hong was a historian in ancient China. Concrete details of his life, official career, and birth and death years are currently limited in publicly available sources and are difficult to describe in full. Works attributed to Yuan Hong that survive today include the _Hou Han Ji_ (Annals of the Later Han) and the _Liang Han Ji_ (Annals of the Two Han Dynasties, 2 volumes), which collects his historical writings. In terms of subject matter, he concentrated on organizing and narrating the history of the Eastern Han dynasty, following the annalistic approach in traditional historiography; his works are commonly classed as historical reading. His text arranges events year by year and traces the rise and fall of an era, offering later generations a fairly systematic reader for understanding the politics and society of the Eastern Han. Because sources are limited, his teachers, official posts, and scholarly lineage cannot be given here; readers may begin with the narrative structure and selection of materials in the _Hou Han Ji_ to appreciate the rigor and restraint of his historical writing, and thereby to understand the common methods by which ancient historians organized the history of earlier ages.