I need 6 primary sources for this essay I have due in a couple of weeks. I’ve only managed to find one so far which are the records kept by Sima Qian called “Accounts of the First Emperor.” I have plenty of secondary sources but these primary sources seem hard to come by. Thank You.
You're right to suggest that Sima Qian is, by a distance, our most important, most highly regarded, and most useful, source for the reign of the First Emperor, and I think I would recommend breaking this down to allow room for more than one extract among your six sources. Nonetheless, others are available – how easily rather depends on the online resources that are actually accessible to you.
A second major classical source is the Han Shu, or "Han history", compiled primarily by Pan Ku in the first century CE. This describes the collapse of the Qin Dynasty as well as the rise of the Han. Not all of this material is based on Sima Qian's study, and among the most import sections are chapter 23, on law (the Qin state, was, infamously, one rooted in legalist philosophy) and 24, on state economics. These are available in English translation in AFP Hulsewé, Remnants of Han Law (1955) and Nancy Lee Swann, Food and Money in Ancient China (1950).
Qin law itself is the subject of Hulwesé's Remnants of Ch'in Law (1985), which quotes fairly extensively from the primary sources. The same writer is also responsible for the section "Qin and Han legal manuscripts", which reprints primary sources in translation, in E. Giele's paper "Early Chinese manuscripts: including addenda and corrigenda..." in Early China 23 (1998) pp.247-33.
Legalist sources for the period would be important to fleshing out a balanced study. WK Liao's The Complete Works of Han Fei Tzu (1959) and HG Creel's Shen Pu-hai: A Chinese Political Philosopher of the Fourth Century BC (1974) both contain primary material covering the legalist beliefs that underpinned the First Emperor's rule.
Finally, and in terms of recent discoveries, by far the most exciting has been the recovery of a cache of 36,000 contemporary bamboo writing strips from a well in Hunan province (2002). Collectively these cover the period 259-210 BCE, and they offer insights "from below" into the reign of the First Emperor. While most remain to be transcribed, you can get a feel for their importance from a 2017 article describing them in Smithsonian Magazine.
And I was wondering if I could split the records kept by Sima Qian into multiple primary sources
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