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Shiji Chaoxian Liezhuan (The Account of Joseon in the Records of the Grand Historian)史記 朝鮮列傳

Sima Qian · About 90 BC · China · 4 entries · 1,257 Chinese characters

The only contemporary record of the rise and fall of Wiman's Joseon. It begins with Man, a man of Yan, binding up his hair in a topknot and crossing the Paesu to become king, and ends with his grandson Ugeo killed by his own ministers and the land turned into four commanderies. The two Han generals who attacked Joseon fell out with each other, and one was put to death in the marketplace while the other was made a commoner; even the envoy sent to set matters right was killed. Sima Qian closes with the words: "Both armies were disgraced, and among the generals not one was made a marquis."

The whole of the Joseon account in volume 115 has been translated (10 paragraphs, 1,257 graphs). The paragraphs were matched against the source text one by one and confirmed to differ by not a single graph. The source text runs as one stream from beginning to end, with no place of division. It is broken into four for reading, but as was done with the Goryeo account in the History of Song and the Joseon account in the History of Ming, the Chinese-graph titles carry only the ordinal number and the titles that hold a meaning are kept on the Korean side alone. The source text has three collation marks from the Zhonghua Book Company punctuated edition (（及）［乃］, （征）［正］, （戰）), where the round brackets hold the error of the source text and the square brackets the corrected graph. They are left as they are in the original and the sense was construed with the correction only in the translation.

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