This room holds the oldest layer of Chinese historical writing, read outward from its root: the royal documents and speeches gathered in the Book of Documents; the court chronicle of Lu with the Zuo Commentary that grew up around it, year by year through twelve dukes; the Discourses of the States; the miscellany of Zhou documents called the Lost Book of Zhou; the received Bamboo Annals; the damaged travel-record of King Mu; the persuasions of the Strategies of the Warring States; and, chapter by chapter, Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, the first work in the tradition with a historian's name on it.

Every text here is a Good Works Translation made directly from the classical Chinese, which is printed complete beneath the English. Where a text carries an early commentary in its received form — Wei Zhao on the Discourses, Bao Biao and Yao Hong on the Strategies, the Sanjia commentators on the Records — that commentary is kept in the source layer and is not translated; each file says so. Prior English translations, where they exist, are named in each colophon as controls that were not consulted; no file claims to be the first unless the check behind the claim is described.

Chapters of the Records and the Book of Han that concern the steppe and the Western Regions are shelved with the Chinese Frontier Sources on the Scythian shelf.