Chǔ

The Chǔ culture is the people of Hubei, the lake and river country of the middle Yangtze around Jiangling and Wuchang. In the Zhou era this was the kingdom of Chu, also called Jingchu, whose capital Ying stood near present-day Jingzhou and whose poets, headed by Qu Yuan, created the Songs of Chu tradition before Qin annexed it in 223 BCE.

After the Mongol conquest it formed the heart of Huguang, a name the Ming kept after driving out the Yuan in 1368. Its river towns grew on the Yangtze and Han waterways, their speech Southwestern Mandarin, spread by the Ming and Qing migrations that repopulated the upper Yangtze.

The late Ming brought devastation as the armies of Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong ravaged Hubei in the 1630s and 1640s; the Qing took control in 1644 and 1645, and in the 1660s split Huguang into Hubei and Hunan. Wuchang and the Han-confluence towns then grew into busy inland trading cities.