Guifang

Chinese annals contain a number of references to the Guifang, the earliest are the records in the Bamboo Annals which states that, in 1119 BCE, the thirty-fifth year of the Shang King Wu Yi, Zhou leader Jili attacked the Gǔiróng (Chinese: 鬼戎) in Xiluo (西落) and captured twenty Dí kings.[8][1] Historians believe that the Guirong were identical to the Guifang.[9] The name Guifang appeared during the reign of the King Kang of Zhou (r. 1005/03–978 BCE). They were probably a people located northeast of the initial Zhou domain. According to the Xiao Yu Ding (小盂鼎) bronze vessel inscriptions, cast in the twenty-fifth year of King Kang (979 BC), after two successful battles against the Guifang, captured enemies were brought to the Zhou temple and offered to the king. The prisoners numbered over 13,000 with four chiefs who were subsequently executed. Zhou also captured a large amount of booty.[9] The Yijing or "Book of Changes" mentions a Shang King, probably Wu Ding (r. 1250-1192 BCE),[10] fighting against the Guifang, "attacked the Demon region, but was three years in subduing it."[11][12]

However, possibly the Shang and Guifang relations did not always consist of mutual hostilities but also occasional political alliances: Taiping Yulan preserved a traditional account that King Zhou of Shang married a daughter of a Marquis of Gui (鬼侯), who ranked among his Three Ducal Ministers - along with Western Count Ji Chang (西伯昌) and Marquis of Xing (邢侯)); yet Marquis of Gui's daughter disapproved of Zhou's debaucheries so Zhou killed her and her father, and then also Marquis of Xing for criticizing Zhou's cruelties.[13][lower-alpha 1]

The Shang state had a system of writing attested to by bronze inscriptions and oracle bones, which record Shang troops fighting frequent wars with neighboring nomadic herdsmen from the inner Asian steppes. In his oracular divinations, a Shang king repeatedly showed concern about the fang (方) groups of barbarians outside his inner tu (土) regions in the center of Shang territory. A particularly hostile tribe, Tufang (zh:土方) from the Yan Mountains region, is regularly mentioned in divinatory records.[15] Another Chinese ethnonym for the animal husbandry nomads was ma (马) or "equine" barbarians mentioned at the Shang western military frontier in the Taihang Mountains, where they fought and may have used chariots.[16]

As a result of phonetical studies and comparisons based on the inscriptions on bronze and the structure of the characters, Wang Guowei came to the conclusion that the tribal names in the annalistic sources Guifang, Xunyu, Xianyu, Xianyun, Rong, Di, and Hu designated one and the same people, who later entered history under the name Xiongnu.[17][18][19] Likewise, using Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian and other sources, Vsevolod Taskin proposes that in the earlier pre-historic period (i.e. the time of the legendary Yellow Emperor) the Xiongnu were called Hunyu; and in the late pre-historic period (i.e. the time of the legendary Emperor Yao and Emperor Shun) they were called Rong; in the literate period starting with the Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BC) they were called Guifang, in the Zhou period (1045–256 BC) they were called Xianyun, and starting from the Qin period (221–206 BC) the Chinese annalists called them Xiongnu.[20][21][22]

Even so, Paul R. Goldin (2011) reconstructs the Old Chinese pronunciations of 葷粥 ~ 獯鬻 ~ 獯鬻 ~ 薰育 as *xur-luk, 獫狁 as hram′-lun′, and 匈奴 as *xoŋ-NA; and comments all three names are "manifestly unrelated". He further states that sound changes made the names more superficially similar than they really had been, and prompted later commentators to conclude that those names must have referred to one same people in different epochs, even though people during the Warring States period would never have been thus misled.[23]

Ulrich Theobald PhD, lecturer for Chinese History and Classical Chinese at the University of Tübingen, noticed that leaders of the Red Di (赤狄, Chidi), during the Spring and Autumn period, bore the surname 隗 Kuí, hinting that they might be identical to the Guifang during the Shang period.[24]

• Ethnic groups in Chinese history