Dai (Spring and Autumn)
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Constituent States of the Zhou Kingdom. Dai lies in the central north area.
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| Literal meaning | State of Dai | ||||||||
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Dai was a state which existed in northern Hebei during the Spring and Autumn Period of Chinese history. Its eponymous capital was located north of the Zhou Kingdom in what is now Yu County, northeast of present-day Yuzhou. It was apparently established by the people known to the ancient Chinese as the Baidi or "White Barbarians". They traded livestock and other goods between Central Asia and the Zhou states prior to their conquest by the Zhao clan of Jin.
Dài (pinyin) and Tai (Wade-Giles) are romanizations of the modern Mandarin way of reading the character , which is usually a preposition meaning "for", a verb meaning "to stand for" or "represent", or a noun meaning "era". Its original sense in Old Chinese was "to replace", but the kingdom's name was a transcription of the capital's native name; linguistic reconstruction suggests its Old Chinese pronunciation would have been something like /*lˤək-s/.
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