The father of Chinese history — the Han court astrologer who chose the disgrace of castration over death so that he could finish his father's great work, and in the Shiji built the model for how China would write its own past for the next two thousand years.
Condemned after defending a defeated general, Sima Qian faced a choice most men of his rank would have found unbearable. He could die with honor, or endure castration and live on in disgrace. His words in the general’s defense had enraged Emperor Wu of Han. A gentleman was expected to die rather than be cut. Sima Qian chose the knife. He chose it for one reason: he was not yet finished. His father had begged him on his deathbed to complete a history of the whole Chinese world, and the work was only half done. So he endured a shame he called worse than death, and lived to write the Shiji, the book that taught China how to record itself. In a letter he confessed why. Some deaths weigh more than a mountain, he wrote, and some weigh less than a feather. His own life was worth nothing now. The book was worth everything.