The historian of Han who traded his pen for a sword-stroke at the Yanran Mountain; author of the stele's inscription, dead in the Luoyang gaol the year after it was raised.
In his array of the wandering knights he set the withdrawn aside and advanced the slippery; in his account of wealth he honoured power and profit and was ashamed of the poor. His reading was wide, and it was not disciplined.Ban Gu's judgment on Sima Qian, his own predecessor as historian; Hanshu, juan 62, Biography of Sima Qian
Appears in
Relations
- Ban Chao brother — Younger brother of the two: he kept the pen at the capital while Chao carried the staff west, and their sister Ban Zhao finished what he left.
- Dou Xian client — He sat on Dou Xian's staff, wrote the victory in stone, and died in the Luoyang gaol the same year as his patron's fall.
- Ban Yong uncle — His brother Chao's son; the western record the family made passed to the nephew who went out and held it.
Myth vs record
Ban Gu is the sober author of the Han Annals, a scholar who stayed out of politics and died of old age at his desk.
He traded the pen for a campaign: he went north on Dou Xian's staff and cut the Yanran Mountain inscription in 89 CE, the one thing of his that the frontier made famous. When the emperor moved against Xian in 92, Ban Gu was examined on a charge of concealment and died in the imperial jail. The history he left was unfinished — the tables and treatises were completed by Ban Zhao and by Ma Xu — and the parts he did write were copied into the Wenxuan and read for fifteen hundred years.