65-volume Sanguozhi (Records of the Three Kingdoms), which records the history of the late Eastern Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period. The text was divided into three sections – Book of Wei (魏书), Book of Shu (蜀书) and Book of Wu (吴书) – and was composed of mainly biographies of notable persons in those eras. Chen Shou received acclaim from his contemporaries for his work and was praised as an excellent historian. Around the time, another historian, Xiahou Zhan (夏侯湛), was writing the Book of Wei (魏書; Wei Shu), which recorded the history of Wei in the Three Kingdoms era. He destroyed his work after reading Chen Shou's Sanguozhi. Zhang Hua was so deeply impressed with the Sanguozhi that he told Chen Shou, "We should entrust the responsibility of writing the Book of Jin to you." Chen Shou was highly regarded as such after he wrote the Sanguozhi. Controversies Despite his achievements, Chen Shou faced false accusations and other controversies. The Jin Shu mentioned two controversies surrounding Chen Shou and his writing of the Sanguozhi. His critics used them to disparage him. Extorting grain The first one was about Chen Shou attempting to extort 1,000 hu of grain from the sons of Ding Yi (丁儀) and his younger brother Ding Yi (丁廙) – two officials in Wei during the Three Kingdoms period. He promised them that he would write biographies for their fathers in the Sanguozhi if they gave him the grain, but they refused, so he did not write the biographies. However, the Jin Shu prefaced the anecdote with the term huoyun(或云), which meant "rumours". The Qing dynasty writer Pan Mei (潘眉) rebutted the Jin Shu'''s account about Chen Shou attempting to extort from the Dings and called it "uninformed". He disproved the claim that the Ding brothers were very famous officials in Wei by pointing out that they had neither held important appointments nor made any significant achievements. Pan also felt that a historian was clearly justified if he decided to not write biographies for the Ding brothers, because, in his opinion, the Dings had committed grievous sins – instigating sibling rivalry and causing instability in the Wei imperial clan – which made them unworthy of having biographies in historical records. Pan further noted that there were also other notable persons in Wei (e.g. Chen Lin, Wu Zhi and Yang Xiu) who did not have biographies in