This chapter explores the attitudinal resources in ancient Chinese history, based on focus texts extracted from Records of the Grand Historian. This book of history assumes historical significance in that it set the model for all subsequent official dynastic histories in China down to the seventeenth century. The study adopts a top-down perspective, approaching the focus texts from their genre and register features. Most chapters of the Records are biographical profiles of historical figures, and most of the biographies have a generic structure Orientation ^ Record ^ Evaluation. A particularly prominent feature of ancient Chinese histories represented by the Records is that they contain an explicit culminative stage of Evaluation, expressing the history writer’s attitude. The discourse analysis in relation to attitudes in this chapter is informed by the APPRAISAL systems of Martin and White (2005) . Through analysing the types and values of attitudes and their lexicogrammatical realisations in classical written Chinese, the study aims to facilitate an understanding of the genre of historical records of the Chinese imperial dynasties that prevailed for about two millennia, and an understanding of the social and cultural values in China that have been passed down from history to the present.

The Art of War and Sunzi’s modern image outside China must be placed within their original Chinese context. The mythical author and “his” text served a specific function in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian that, given the seminal nature of the Records of the Grand Historian in creating many of the categories and interpretations of pre-imperial and very early imperial history, have persisted until the present. Samuel Griffith connected Sunzi to Mao Zedong, the great Chinese military genius of the twentieth century, in order to make Sunzi relevant to Western readers. He also connected Sunzi back to ancient Chinese history to establish that, if Mao was the most recent manifestation of strategic acumen, the foundation of that thought was basic to Chinese culture. Sunzi was an ancient classic that was not only an enduring piece of strategic truth, but also a description of warfare in premodern China.