It is, of course, common knowledge among scholars that the Standard Histories were only the end product of a long and complex process of compilation, recompilation, and editing. The outline of this process is well known. The record began with the Court Diaries (Ch'i-chü chu) and the Administrative Record (Shih-cheng chi), the material which was successively compiled into a Daily Calendar (Jih-li) for each year, then into a Veritable Record (Shih-lu) for each reign, into a full-scale National History (Kuo shih) of the reigning dynasty, and finally after the dynasty had fallen and had been replaced by its successor into the Standard History (Cheng shih) of its period.

The Standard History comprised two essential components: the basic annals (pen-chi) and the biographies (lieh-chuan), the latter including entries on various foreign peoples. In most cases, they also included monographs (chih) on specific historical topics, mainly ritual and administrative, and in exceptional cases might also include table (piao) of various sorts. Each of these sections underwent a rather different process of compilation. The political narrative that eventually became the basic annals of the Standard History had normally been through each of the successive stages of compilation mentioned and, as the definitive record of each reign's achievements, was subjected to the most careful scrutiny. The biographies of individuals were normally inserted for the first time at a rather late stage of the process when they were incorporated into the chronological framework of the Veritable Record, after the notice of their subject's death.