24 Histories provides complete English translations of the Twenty-Four Dynastic Histories (二十四史), the canonical collection of Chinese historical records spanning from ancient times through the Ming Dynasty. The site also includes full translations of the Draft History of Qing (清史稿) and the Zizhi Tongjian (資治通鑑).
The 24 Histories are a series of historical texts compiled over centuries, documenting Chinese civilization from its legendary origins to 1644 CE. They include the famous Records of the Grand Historian (史記) by Sima Qian, along with official histories of successive dynasties. Together they comprise over 40 million characters and represent one of the world's most comprehensive historical archives.
All chapters now have complete English translations. These are AI-generated translations produced under Garrett M. Petersen's direction, using a workflow that asks models to produce both literal and idiomatic renderings and publishes the idiomatic version for readability.
The current corpus is a complete first-pass translation. It is intended to make the texts readable and citable now, while leaving room for ongoing polish, consistency work, and semantic review.
Each chapter records its translation metadata and provides citation tools.
Original Chinese text is sourced from Chinese Notes, CText, and Wikisource.
The goal of this project is to make these foundational historical texts accessible to English readers. With the first-pass translation of all 4,099 chapters complete, the next work is improving polish, consistency, names, places, glossary data, and long-term reading formats.
Questions or feedback? Contact Garrett M. Petersen at @GarrettPetersen on X.