The preface of the Qieyun describes how the plan of the book originated from a discussion with eight of his friends 20 years earlier at his home in Chang'an, the capital of Sui China.

[2][3] According to Lu, Yan Zhitui (顏之推) and Xiao Gai (蕭該), both men originally from the south, were the most influential in setting up the norms on which the Qieyun was based.

[4] When classical Chinese poetry flowered during the Tang dynasty, the Qieyun became the authoritative source for literary pronunciations and it repeatedly underwent revisions and enlargements.

It was annotated in 677 by Zhǎngsūn Nèyán (長孫訥言), revised and published in 706 by Wáng Renxu (王仁煦) as the Kanmiu Buque Qieyun (刊謬補缺切韻; "Corrected and supplemented Qieyun"), collated and republished in 751 by Sun Mian (孫愐) as the Tángyùn (唐韻; "Tang rimes"), and eventually incorporated into the still-extant Guangyun and Jiyun rime dictionaries from the Song dynasty.

[5][6] The Qieyun reflected the enhanced phonological awareness that developed in China after the advent of Buddhism, which introduced the sophisticated Indian linguistics.

Particularly prized were copies of Wáng Rénxū's edition made in the early 9th century by Wú Cǎiluán (吳彩鸞), a woman famed for her calligraphy.

The word is glossed as 木方 mù fāng, i.e. the direction of wood (one of the Five Elements), while the numeral 二 "two" indicates that this is the first of two entries in a homophone group.

"At the present time, most people in the field accept the views of the Chinese scholar Zhou Zumo" (周祖謨; 1914–1995) that Qieyun spellings were a north–south regional compromise between literary pronunciations from the Northern and Southern dynasties.