The Grand Scribe's Records, Volume V.1: The Hereditary Houses of Pre-Han China, Part I

I have not read all of this yet - it is quite complex reading, and refers in some detail to the dynastic history of the dozen or so states that were eventually merged into the Chin Empire - which with many reverses of fortune evolved into modern China. Ssu-ma Ch'en is the first of China's historians - his methodology appears to be a combination of annalistic and genealogical. he lived in the reign of Wudi, one of china's mightiest emperors, who was later deified as the Chinese god of war. He is therefore a contemporary witness of events between c150 and 100 BC - and would have had access to both people and written sources dealing with the rise of the Han Dynasty. Part of his remit was in his view to attempt to reconstruct the earlier history of china from sources badly damaged by the Chin persecution of scholarship. It strikes me however that the claim that these sources were almost completely destroyed is over stated both by the Han historians, ( who were attempting to legitimise the displacement of the Chin and the Han), and by modern historians. This is one of what seems to be fifteen or so volumes of Ssa-ma's compendious history of which I have three - but for anyone attempting to get more than a popular knowledge of early Chinese history this is the primary source.