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Concept
Samguk Sagi
Summary
Samguk Sagi (, History of the Three Kingdoms) is a historical record of the Three Kingdoms of Korea: Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla. The Samguk Sagi is written in Classical Chinese, the written language of the literati of ancient Korea, and its compilation was ordered by King Injong of Goryeo (r. 1122-1146) and undertaken by the government official and historian Kim Busik () and a team of junior scholars. Completed in 1145, it is well known in Korea as the oldest surviving chronicle of Korean history. The document has been digitized by the National Institute of Korean History and is available online with Modern Korean translation in Hangul and original text in Classical Chinese.
In taking on the task of compiling the Samguk Sagi ("compiling" is more accurate than "writing" because much of the history is taken from earlier historical records), Kim Busik was consciously modeling his actions on Chinese Imperial traditions, just as he modeled the history’s format after its Chinese forebears.
Specifically, he was harking back to the work of Sima Qian, an official of the former Han Dynasty (206 BCE-24 CE). Nowadays known as the Records of the Grand Historian, this work was released circa 100 BCE under the more modest title of Shǐjì 史記, i.e. Scribe's Records. By allusion, Kim Busik called his own work 三國史記, i.e. Samguk Sagi, where Sagi (nowadays 사기) was the Korean reading of the Chinese Shǐjì.
Adopted as well from Chinese historiographical tradition was the classic four-part division of the standard dynastic history into Annals (bongi, 本紀), Tables (pyo, 表), Monographs (ji, 志), and Biographies (yeoljeon, 列傳).
There were various motivating factors behind the compilation of the Samguk Sagi in the 12th century. These may roughly be categorized as ideological and political. The ideological factors are made manifest in the work's preface, written by Kim Busik, where the historian states,
Of today’s scholars and high-ranking officials, there are those who are well-versed and can discuss in detail the Five Classics and the other philosophical treatises.
Official source
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