Talk:Yilou

On the [who] thing about historians disagreeing with Yilou/Sushen connection

I was just randomly reading this article and don't have the time to figure out how to edit this properly myself right now, but in case someone wants to, the historian Mark E. Byington asserts that in his book "The Ancient State of Puyo in Northeast Asia":

"From the end of the Eastern Han period (25–220), however, we see the first appearance in Chinese records of a people called the Yilou 挹 婁, a subject people of Puyŏ who are described in various works as being the descendents of the ancient Sushen people.24 In some works the names Sushen and Yilou are used interchangeably. Historical geography from Han times and later show the Yilou to have been located in the valley of the Mudan River 牡丹江 in southeastern Heilongjiang near the Qing-period city of Ningguta 寧古塔.

Although many Chinese scholars simply assume, based on this information, that the Sushen of the early Zhou were located in eastern Manchuria and use this to demonstrate that Zhou’s influence had reached to such extremes, it is much more likely that two different groups are indicated. It is almost inconceivable that news of King Cheng’s defeat of the Eastern Yi of Shandong could reach the ears of people in the Mudan valley and prompt a congratulatory mission sent to such a distant realm. Some scholars, insisting that the early Zhou Sushen and the late Han Yilou must have been the same group, theorize that a large-scale migration was responsible for the apparent disjunction in the history of this ancient people. Yet the archaeology of the Mudan River region not only indicates that the people occupying that region in the Han period were indigenous to eastern Manchuria but also reveals a lack of similarity between the cultures of North China and this region. It is rather more likely, as with the case of the Eastern Yi, that the name of the ancient Sushen was applied during the Han or Wei periods to a different border people, the Han and Wei borders reaching much farther east than did those of Zhou. It is possible that when the Yilou presented a tribute of arrows to the Han or Wei courts, the historians of those courts were reminded of the ancient Sushen and assumed a connection. Alternatively, the association with the Sushen may have been deliberately emphasized to reinforce Han’s (and especially Wei’s) own association with the ancient Zhou kings, whose authority was such that remote border tribes willingly offered their allegiance in the form of tribute missions.27"

From page 36. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Torneberge (talk • contribs) 01:50, 9 January 2019 (UTC)