Professor Andrew Meyer

When the Zhou get forced to move east, the Chu take advantage of that.

to migrate south, and they establish their capital in one of the tributaries of the Yangtze.

So the whole Yangtze River Valley region, it's really alien terrain to most of the elites of the Zhou.

Much of it is swampland at this time.

There's a lot of mosquito-borne illness, a lot of malaria.

A lot of the terrain of this region is sort of cut off.

Different parts of the area are cut off from one another by these very steep limestone ridges.

It's a very fragmented terrain.

But the Chu clan, they establish themselves in the Han River Valley, a tributary of the Yangtze, and they slowly expand outward until they basically control virtually the entire Yangtze River Valley.

It's a huge domain in terms of square area, but because population density in the south is so low, they don't really have that many more people than some of the territorially smaller states in the north.

That's the sixth of these great warring states.

The seventh state is a state known as Yan.

Yan is situated around the area of the capital today of Beijing.

They occupy the area that's centered on Beijing.

In fact, Beijing means northern capital.

One of the alternate names is Yanjing, which means capital of Yan.

That was sort of alluding to this early history.

Like the state of Chu in the south, they have a very broad territory.

It extends throughout much of what we think of as Manchuria, even goes as far as the border, even over the border of what we think of as Korea.

But at that time, it's much more arid.