Book of Han

The Book of Han is a Chinese history of the Western, or Former, Han dynasty from the first emperor in 206 BCE to the fall of Wang Mang in 23 CE, and one of the Twenty-Four Histories. Begun by Ban Biao as a continuation of Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian and recast by his son Ban Gu, it was finished in 111 CE by Ban Gu's sister Ban Zhao, 19 years after he died in prison. In 100 fascicles of annals, tables, treatises and biographies, it was the first history in the annals-biography form to cover a single dynasty and set the model for the official histories until modern times. Its treatise on geography holds the first unambiguous mention of the people of Japan.