Brief History of Wei
| Wei lüe | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chinese | 魏略 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Wèi lüè |
| IPA | [wêi lɥê] |
| Hakka | |
| Romanization | Ngui liok |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Yale Romanization | Ngaih leuhk |
| Jyutping | Ngai6 loek6 |
| Southern Min | |
| Hokkien POJ | Guī lio̍h |
The Weilüe (Chinese: 魏略; literally: "A Brief History of Wei") was a Chinese historical text written by Yu Huan between 239 and 265. Yu Huan was an official in the state of Cao Wei (220–265) during the Three Kingdoms period (220–280). Although not a formal historian, Yu Huan has been held in high regard amongst Chinese scholars.
The original text of the Weilüe, or “Brief Account of Wei”, by Yu Huan has been lost, but the chapter on the Xirong people was quoted by Pei Songzhi as an extensive footnote to volume 30 of the Records of the Three Kingdoms, which was first published in 429. Other than this chapter, only a few isolated quotes remain in other texts.
Yu Huan does not mention his sources in the text that has survived. Some of this new data presumably came to China via traders from the Roman Empire (Da Qin). Land communications with the West apparently continued relatively uninterrupted to Cao Wei after the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty.
Yu Huan apparently never left China, but he collected a large amount of information on the countries to the west of China including Parthia, India, and the Roman Empire, and the various routes to them. Some of this information had reached China well before Yu Huan’s time, and can also be found in the sections dealing with the 'Western Regions' of the Records of the Grand Historian, the Book of Han, and the Book of the Later Han. In spite of this repetition of earlier (and sometimes fanciful) information, the Weilüe contains new, unique, and generally trustworthy material, mostly from the late second and early third centuries. It is this new information that makes the Weilüe a valuable historical source. Most of the new information appears to have come from the Eastern Han dynasty, before China was largely cut off from the West by civil wars and unrest along its borders during the late second century.
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