On LU Si-mian’s Analysis of Reasons of the Loss of Historical Truth

LU Si-mian is the contemporary master of history in China, who attached importance to the pursuit for the historical truth. He believed that the causes why the history lost its truth were as follows: difficulty in seeing through the historical facts and inference by only observers and recorders, distortion in transmission caused by different norms in different times and historians’ knowledge and moral, failure to record those which were considered universally known, erosion of time, focus on literary style of recording history facts, and difficulty in being objective in recording history.