Hanshu (History of the [Former] Han Dynasty), a biographic dynastic history of the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-8AD), has 100 chapters. The author, Ban Gu, started to write Hanshu based on his father Ban Biao's Houzhuan, but died in his sickbed and left the unfinished book in 92AD. Ban Gu's sister Ban Zhao continued with the work, and at last Ma Xu, who studied Hanshu following Ban Zhao, accomplished the book.

Hanshu is of the same style with that of Shiji (The Records of the Great Historian): both of them are biographic history. However, Shiji is a general history whereas Hanshu is a dynastic history, so it is Hanshu that created the style of dynastic history.

Hanshu is a rare ancient book on the history of the Western Han Dynasty: it offers abundant information, and biographies of many individual figures help supplement a lot of historical facts. Hanshu was the first to establish The Table of Ancient and Modern People and The Table of All Kinds of Officials, by which he introduced and commented them one by one.

Upon the compilation, Hanshu was well received among people, but the book is not easy to understand because it used many ancient characters. Thus scholars began to annotate it at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220), and later even more kinds of annotation editions emerged.