Book of Song

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The Book of Song (traditional Chinese: 宋書; simplified Chinese: 宋书; pinyin: Sòng Shū), also called "The History of the Song," is a historical text of the Liu Song Dynasty of the Southern Dynasties of China. It covers history from 420 to 479, and is one of the Twenty-Four Histories, a traditional collection of historical records. It was authored by Shen Yue from the Liang Dynasty (502-557) and contained 100 volumes at the time that it was written. By the Song Dynasty, some volumes were already missing. Later editors reconstructed those volumes by taking material from the History of the Southern Dynasties, plus a few works such as the Historiette of Gao by Gao Jun, though many of those volumes were no longer in its original condition. Modern historians believe that it had glaring problems; one of them being that the book maintained a very foggy attitude and was biased against the surrounding ethnic groups, including the ruling elites of Northern Wei.