史記 (Records of the Grand Historian)

The story of the Zhao orphan, the massacre of the Zhao clan and the retainers who give their lives to save its last child, is told in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, in the account of the house of Zhao. Ji Junxiang's Yuan drama is built on it.

Sima Qian invented the form Chinese historical fiction has used ever since: history told as a series of lives, each a self-contained biography with speeches, private scenes and a judgement at the end, rather than as a single chronicle. The Three Kingdoms is built that way. It moves between figures, gives each an arc and a characteristic virtue or vice, and treats invented dialogue and reported thought as legitimate parts of a historical account, which is exactly what the Records had licensed. Its immediate source is Chen Shou's Records of the Three Kingdoms; the reason a novel could be made out of a history at all is Sima Qian's method.