Yu Huan's Weilue: Peoples of the West

Yu Huan wrote the Weilue in the third century CE, a survey of the countries and peoples along the routes west of China, reaching as far as the Roman world. The work survives in long excerpts quoted in a later commentary rather than as a whole book. The card lists John E. Hill's web translation of the surviving text. The atlas does not hold the text of this edition: no copy was harvested into the corpus, so nothing from it was read for this guide.

How they knew

Compiled from others

Who “Tartar” means here

Not recorded, and the word is not expected here. The work belongs to the third century CE, long before the name Tartar was used for the Mongols.

Why read it

It is an early Chinese picture of the Silk Road world, showing how far and how specifically the peoples of the west were described.

Watch out

The card asks readers to separate the original record, its later preservation by quotation, and the modern translator's annotation.