Minyue

Minyue was an ancient Yue kingdom in what is now Fujian province in south-eastern China. Its rulers traced their descent from the royal house of the old state of Yue, and it flourished alongside the early Han dynasty until the Han destroyed it in 110 BCE. Its starting date is uncertain: some references give 334 BCE, when the Yue royal family fled south, while others date the kingdom from about 306 BCE.

The Yue state of the lower Yangtze region was defeated by Chu and Qi in 334 BCE, and members of its royal family fled south. Their descendants, of the Zou clan, came to rule two kingdoms on the south-east coast: Minyue in Fujian and Dong'ou, or Eastern Ou. The Minyue capital is recorded as Yecheng. Tradition makes a stone city in Fujian's inland mountains the royal seat, and nearby tombs follow the same burial customs as Yue tombs in Zhejiang.

When the Qin dynasty collapsed in 206 BCE, the warlord Xiang Yu refused to recognise the Yue leaders Zou Wuzhu and Zou Yao as kings, so they joined his rival Liu Bang. After Liu Bang won the civil war and founded the Han, he made Zou Wuzhu king of Minyue in 202 BCE, and in 192 BCE Zou Yao became king of Dong'ou. A statue of Wuzhu now stands in Fuzhou.

In 154 BCE Liu Pi, the king of Wu, rose against the Han and urged both Yue kingdoms to join him. Minyue refused. Dong'ou joined but then killed Liu Pi when he fled there, and his son Liu Ziju escaped to Minyue, where he worked to provoke war between the two Yue states.

In 138 BCE Minyue attacked Dong'ou and besieged its capital. After debate at court, the Han sent an army by sea from Kuaiji Commandery, but Minyue had withdrawn before it arrived. The king of Dong'ou then asked to move his whole people into Han territory, and they were resettled between the Yangtze and Huai rivers.

In 137 BCE Minyue invaded the neighbouring kingdom of Nanyue. When the Han sent an army, the Minyue king's brother Zou Yushan murdered him and made peace. The Han placed Zou Chou, a grandson of Wuzhu, on the throne, but Yushan also declared himself king, and Emperor Wu, unwilling to fight again, recognised him as king of Dongyue. For a time the country had two kings.

When Nanyue rose against the Han in 112 BCE, Yushan promised help but kept his troops back at Jieyang while staying in touch with Nanyue. The next year, learning that a Han general wanted to punish him, he proclaimed himself emperor and struck first, capturing three Han places and killing three commanders. That winter the Han invaded from several directions. When their forces reached the capital, a local Yue leader killed Yushan and was rewarded with a Han title. Judging the mountainous country too hard to hold, Emperor Wu had its people moved north to the land between the Yangtze and the Huai. According to tradition, this left Fujian almost empty for a time.

Accounts of the Minyue describe customs such as snake emblems, short hair, tattooing, the removal of teeth, houses raised on piles, burial in cliffs, and husbands moving to live with their wives' families. Some of these resemble customs of Taiwan's indigenous peoples, and the linguists Li Jen-kuei and Robert Blust have suggested that some Taiwanese peoples may descend from Minyue-related populations of the south-east coast. Whether the Minyue spoke an early Austronesian language remains a hypothesis.

Our maps label the kingdom Min-Yue and draw it in 200 and 100 BCE, on the south-east coast beside Nanyue. Our 300 BCE map shows the region among the Zhou states, and by our 1 BCE map it lies within Han China, in today's China.