Zuo Zhuan
春秋左氏傳 (Chunqiu Zuo Zhuan)
The Spring and Autumn Annals' bare entries only make sense once expanded into full narrative, complete with speeches, motives, and consequences, because moral judgment in history requires seeing not just what happened but why people acted as they did.
- narrative expansion of the bare Spring and Autumn entries
- detailed diplomatic and military history of the Eastern Zhou states
- authorship traditionally but doubtfully attributed to Zuo Qiuming
- model for later Chinese narrative historiography
The longest and most historically substantial of the three surviving commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals, expanding its terse yearly entries into a vivid connected narrative of diplomacy, court intrigue, and warfare among the rival states of the Eastern Zhou, full of speeches, anecdotes, and battlefield detail largely absent from the bare chronicle it comments on. Long attributed to a shadowy contemporary of Confucius named Zuo Qiuming, it is now generally dated on internal and linguistic grounds to the 4th century BC, compiled from earlier court records rather than composed by a single hand. It is prized independently of its commentarial function as the finest narrative prose history to survive from pre-imperial China.
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