The credited editor was chief minister Liu Xu, but the bulk (if not all) of the editing work was actually completed by his predecessor Zhao Ying.
[3] Volumes 21–50 contain treatises, including rites, music, calendar, astronomy, five elements, geography, officials, carriages and clothes, literature, food and commodities, and law.
Volumes 51–200 contain biographical related content, including empresses and consorts (51–52), imperial families, and the peoples populating the areas bordering the Tang empire (194–200).
[7] These sources were often directly copied from records and earlier histories, and the result would be severely criticised during the Northern Song; Emperor Renzong of Song, for example, called the book "poorly organised, burdened with unimportant details, wanting in style and poorly researched".
It was during the Ming dynasty when the remaining copies were gathered and the book was once again published, eventually becoming canonised as one of the Twenty-Four Histories.