Historical Events in Their Entirety (jishi benmo lei 紀事本末類)

The historiographical style of "historical events in their entirety" (jishi benmo lei 紀事本末類) is a subcategory to the literary category of historiography (shibu 史部). In this type of history particular historical events are reported in an annalistic style, but in such a coherent way that integral themes can be understood from their beginnings to the very end. The genre is based on Yuan Shu's 袁樞 (1131-1205) book Tongjian jishi benmo 通鑑紀事本末 from the Song period 宋 (960-1279) which was in fact a rearrangement of Sima Guang's 司馬光 (1019–1086) chronicle Zizhi tongjian 資政通鑑. Yuan so created a very new historiographic style that enriched the two traditional ones, namely annals (biannanti 編年體) and the combination of biographies, imperial annals and treatises on statecraft (jizhuanti 紀傳體), as seen in the official dynastic histories (zhengshi 正史).

The compilers of the descriptive book catalogue Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao 四庫全書總目提要 praised this new style as merging the advantages of the annalistic style with that of the biographical histories to a very new, third style.

Later on other authors adopted this style successfully and wrote "entirety" histories for whole dynasties, as can be seen in Chen Bangzhan's 陳邦瞻 (d. 1626) Songshi jishi benmo 宋史紀事本末, Mingshi jishi benmo 明史紀事本末 by Gu Yingtai 谷應泰 (1620–1690), or Li Youtang's 李有棠 (1837–1905) Liaoshi jishi benmo 遼史紀事本末 and Jinshi jishi benmo 金史紀事本末.

The compilers of the imperial series Siku quanshu 四庫全書 added to this section all histories narrating the development of one historical theme, for instance, the historiographical type of the military annals (fanglüe 方略) that was invented by the conquest dynasty of the Qing 清 (1644-1911) - although this genre had some precursors in the Ming 明 (1368-1644). Already in older texts, the prevalence of military affairs over civilian matters is significant. This preponderance of war themes in the jishi benmo seemed to have been the critical argument for a classification of these texts. Some of them, like Shujian 蜀鑑, a history of Sichuan, or Yanjiao jiwen 炎徼紀聞, a history of the southwest, would have been classified as local or regional histories (zaiji 載記), were they not focusing on belligerent matters.

Before the creation of the subcategory of jishi benmo type history books they were found in the subcategory of chronicles (biannian) or the "miscellaneous" histories (zashi 雜史).

In total, there are 22 jishi benmo-type histories included in the Siku quanshu, and a further 4 in the appended descriptive cunmu 存目 catalogue.

For the sake of making orientation in the large corpus of jishi benmo texts easier, the ChinaKnowledge.de encyclopaedia separated them into the three sections of dynastic histories, books on regional history, and such on military history. This arrangement does not correspond to that in the Siku quanshu, which is strictly chronological.