Chinese historian who wrote the Wenxian tongkao (“General Study of the Literary Remains”), a huge encyclopaedia of general knowledge. This work, with the works of two other historians of the Song dynasty (960–1279), Zheng Qiao (1104–62) and Sima Guang (1019–86), is considered one of the greatest institutional histories ever written on China and, as such, was a model for many later historians. Ma insisted that a knowledge of institutional history was just as necessary to the Confucian official as knowledge of the Confucian Classics.