In 1065, Emperor Yingzong of Song commissioned his official, Sima Guang (1019–1086), to lead a project to compile a universal history of China, and granted him funding and the authority to appoint his own staff.

It remains an extraordinarily useful first reference for a quick and reliable coverage of events at a particular time",[2] while Achilles Fang wrote "[Zizhi Tongjian], and its numerous re-arrangements, abridgments, and continuations, were practically the only general histories with which most of the reading public of pre-Republican China were familiar.

Sima Guang departed from the format used in traditional Chinese dynastic histories, consisting primarily of 'annals' (紀; jì) of rulers and 'biographies' (傳; zhuàn) of officials.

[5][1] Because the Zizhi Tongjian is a distillation from 322[4] disparate sources, the selection, drafting, and editing processes used in creating the work as well as potential political biases of Sima Guang, in particular, have been the subject of academic debate.

[8] The condensed Zizhi Tongjian Gangmu was also the main source for Textes historiques, a political history of China from antiquity to 906, published in 1929 by the French Jesuit missionary Léon Wieger.