Ōuhǎi

The Ōuhǎi culture occupies the Ou River estuary and rugged southern Zhejiang coast around Wenzhou, taking in Yongjia and Rui'an beneath the Zhejiang-Fujian hills. The native Ou, a Yue branch, had formed the Dong'ou polity by the fourth century BC; their kingdom submitted to the Han in 138 BC; the Jin set up Yongjia Commandery in 323, its walled city laid out by scholar Guo Pu.

Tang renamed the prefecture Wenzhou in 675; under the Southern Song and Yuan its harbor opened to maritime trade, while the Yongjia School made the city a center of commerce-friendly Confucian thought. In 1348 Wenzhou fell into the sphere of Fang Guozhen's coastal fleet, until he surrendered to the Ming in 1367.

The local Oujiang speech is Wu's most divergent branch, so hard that some treat it as a separate language called Ou; the thirteenth-century scholar Dai Tong wrote his character study Liushugu in the Yongjia variety, printed in 1320.