Lǐ Tāo 李燾
The greatest historian of the Southern Sòng after Sīmǎ Guāng. Zì Rénfǔ 仁甫 / Zǐzhēn 子真; hào Xùnyán 巽巖. Native of Méishān 眉山 (the Sū Shì hometown), in modern Sìchuān. Lifedates 1115–1184 (CBDB id 1094 confirmed). The catalog meta gives 1114–1183, off by one year on each side from the standard CBDB and Wikidata figure of 1115–1184; the externally verified figure is followed here per protocol.
Jìnshì of Shàoxīng 8 / 1138. Career under Gāozōng and Xiàozōng: a long sequence of provincial appointments — magistrate of Jǔxiàn 莒縣, prefect of Róngzhōu 榮州, prefect of Lúzhōu 瀘州, prefect of Suìníngfǔ 遂寧府 — interspersed with central-government posts — Lǐbù láng 禮部郎, Bìshū shǎojiān 祕書少監, Tóngxiū 同修 of the Guó shǐ (National History) bureau, and finally Lǐbù shàngshū 禮部尚書 in his last year. Consistently a partisan of the zhǔzhàn anti-Jin faction, in close intellectual alignment with Hú Quán 胡銓 and Zhāng Shì 張栻; a vocal opponent of the yìhé peace party.
His magnum opus is the Xù Zī zhì tōng jiàn cháng biān 續資治通鑑長編 (KR2b0019) — the Long Draft of the Continuation of the Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance — a chronicle of the Northern Sòng nine reigns (Tàizǔ to Qīnzōng, 960–1126) that explicitly modelled itself on the cháng biān (long-draft) stage of Sīmǎ Guāng’s three-stage compositional method, with the deliberate plan that some later master (he hoped Sīmǎ Guāng’s collateral heir) would compress it into the final Xù Tōng jiàn proper. The work was composed over forty years and presented to Xiàozōng in four major instalments (Lóngxīng 1 / 1163, Qiándào 4 / 1168, Chúnxī 1 / 1174, and again Chúnxī 1) — see Lǐ Tāo’s biographical apparatus below. The closing inventory was 1,063 juǎn in 687 books — the largest historical work ever submitted to a Chinese throne up to that time.
Other works include the Liùcháo zhìjí lǐzhèng tōngjiàn 六朝制敵禮政通鑑 (lost), the Liúshì shū lù 劉氏書錄 (a biographical treatment of Liú Bīn and Liú Bāng), the Shuō wén jiě zì wǔ yīn yùn pǔ 說文解字五音韻譜 (KR1d0034), and many others. Biography in Sòng shǐ 388. CBDB id 1094.