Sima Biao

Also known as Zi Shaotong

Sima Biao, courtesy name Shaotong, was a member of the Western Jin imperial clan, the eldest son of Sima Mu, Prince of Gaoyang, and was nominally adopted into the line of Sima Yi's younger brother Sima Min. Studious but dissolute as a young man, he was rebuked by his father and passed over as heir, after which he withdrew from society and devoted himself to scholarship. He served as a cavalry commandant and then in the imperial library, wrote a commentary on the Zhuangzi and compiled the Jiuzhou chunqiu. Finding the records of the Eastern Han scattered and confused, he wrote the Continued History of the Han (Xu Hanshu) in eighty sections of annals, treatises and biographies, from Emperor Guangwu to Emperor Xian. He died at the end of Emperor Hui's reign, aged over sixty. Since Fan Ye's Book of the Later Han lacked treatises, Liu Zhao of the Liang annotated Sima Biao's eight and added them, and later editions print them together.