The largest part of any Standard History is taken up by lieh-chuan – literally, “connected traditions” or “connected accounts” – a section that is largely made up of biographical entries on notables of the period, but that also includes accounts of foreign peoples and their relations with the dynasty. Unlike the monographs (chih) and tables (piao), which might or might not be included, the lieh-chuan were, together with with the basic annals, a fundamental section of any history in the “composite” annal-biography (chi-chuan) form.

There is already a good deal of literature, including two previous studies of my own, dealing with the problems and special features of Chinese biography, in particular with those relating to the biographies included in the histories. This is not the appropriate place to go into further detail on these important general issues in Chinese historiography, but a number of points need to be repeated as background before discussing the way in which the biographies that formed such an important component of T'ang official historical writing came into being.

First, the lieh-chuan chapters in a Chinese history in the composite form were not designed simply as a succession of separate biographies of individuals, each focusing on the personality and life of the individual per se, even though the modern reader often uses these sections of the histories as a convenient substitute for a biographical dictionary of the period.