This dissertation proposes that writings about the past in the classical era (323 BCE- 316 CE) are best viewed as rhetorical constructs, rather than history. Classical-era writers were interested in the past mainly because history provided useful examples, good and bad, for addressing sociopolitical problems in the present. In writing the histories of the kingdoms of Wu and Yue (sixth-fourth centuries BCE), classical-era writers, centuries removed in time, space, and customs from the southeast, took individual anecdotes and speeches associated with famous historical figures such as Wu Zixu and Fan Li, which were in oral and written forms, for didactic and even entertainment purposes. These anecdotes and speeches they inserted into a chronological order in order to “reconstruct” history” and repurpose it. By examining nine complete versions of the Wu-Yue legends from the received texts, “side-by-side.” this thesis attempts to show that the early empires' rhetorical needs shaped the structures and logics of the narratives that did develop. For that reason, characters and events central to one story version were sometimes omitted from other versions of the same story, and frequently rhetorical devices such as dramatic irony were employed to make the narrative arcs of the versions more memorable. For modern scholars writing histories of early China, this hypothesis has important implications for how we understand the unseen processes by which our sources were compiled and transmitted, which, in turn, suggests that scholars need to modify their current methodological approaches to the early histories, legends, and myths, given that the stuff of history was not usually intended primarily to convey reliable accounts of the remote past.
As was the case with the “histories” of Wu and Yue, stories – even stories about the most famous historical figures from those regions – tell little about the inhabitants of those kingdoms over time, even the rulers of those kingdoms. Attention to the epigraphical evidence shows us that many rulers besides Goujian were unknown to the authors and compilers of Qin and Han. Even by Western Han, their strange-sounding names were only half-remembered in jumbled and confused king lists, and key events during their reigns tended to be forgotten or unremarked. Perhaps forgetting some part of the past allowed Goujian and other semi-legendary figures from the remote past to be “remembered” in a new way.