Chronicle Chronology Drift / 编年错位

Chronicle chronology drift / 编年错位 is the source-reading problem 《资治通鉴·周纪》10丨 以家族单位 有蚂蚁吃大象的精神（2） identifies when it says several early 《资治通鉴》 events may be placed in the wrong year. The clearest case is 齐威王: the text records him coming to the Zhou court under 周烈王’s sixth year, but the host argues the surrounding Qi chronology makes that unlikely.

This concept is adjacent to Chronicle Source Gaps / 编年史料空缺, but not identical. A source gap is silence; chronology drift is preserved material whose position in time may be wrong because the underlying Warring States records were thin, disordered, or transmitted through already-problematic sources such as 《史记》.

The concept also protects the wiki from overcorrecting. When a source itself flags a dating problem, the page should record the event, the proposed doubt, and the evidence boundary rather than silently moving the event into a new canonical timeline.

Key Claims

• A chronicle can preserve a real story while placing it in a doubtful year.
• Later compilers can inherit errors when their available base sources are already unstable.
• Chronology doubt should be explicit because moving an event without evidence can create a new false certainty.
• Early Warring States material needs special caution because source survival is uneven and later political destruction may have biased the archive.

Connections

• 《资治通鉴》, 司马光, and 《史记》 - chronicle, compiler, and inherited-source frame.
• 齐威王 and 周烈王 - source case.
• Chronicle Source Gaps / 编年史料空缺 and Historical Detective Reasoning - adjacent source-reading guardrails.
• 战国时期 - period whose record instability motivates the concept.