The Book of Jin had the longest gestation period of any official history, not seeing the light of day until 229 years after the end of the dynasty it describes. As some chapters were written by Emperor Taizong of Tang, the work is sometimes given the honorific "imperially authored". The book was hastily compiled between 646 CE and 648, by a committee of 21 people led by editor-in-chief Fang Xuanling. As part of this ambition its treatises cover not only the Jin but also the preceding Three Kingdoms, making up for the lack of such a section in the Records of the Three Kingdoms.
Yet Emperor Taizong deemed them all to be deficient and ordered the compilation of a new standard history for the period, as part of a wider six-history project to fill in the gaps between the Records of the Three Kingdoms, the Book of Song, the Book of Qi, the Book of Wei and the Emperor's own time. Over 20 histories of the Jin had been written during the Northern and Southern dynasties, of which 18 were still extant at the beginning of the Tang dynasty.
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