Émmanuel-Édouard Chavannes (5 October 1865 – 29 January 1918) was a French sinologist and expert on Chinese history and religion, and is best known for his translations of major segments of Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, the work's first ever translation into a Western language.Chavannes was a prolific and influential scholar who was one of the most accomplished sinologists of the modern era, notwithstanding his relatively early death in 1918 at only fifty-two years old.