Also known as Jing (荊) and Jingchu (荊楚), Chu included most of the present-day provinces of Hubei and Hunan, along with parts of Chongqing, Guizhou, Henan, Anhui, Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai.

For more than 400 years, the Chu capital Danyang was located at the junction of the Dan and Xi Rivers[4][5] near present-day Xichuan County, Henan, but later moved to Ying.

[6][7] According to legends recounted in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, the ruling family of Chu descended from the Yellow Emperor and his grandson and successor Zhuanxu.

After the Zhou overthrew the Shang dynasty, King Cheng (r. 1042–1021 BC) enfeoffed Yuxiong's great-grandson Xiong Yi with the fiefdom of Chu in the Nanyang Basin and the hereditary title of 子 (zǐ, "viscount").

After this death, Zhou ceased to expand to the south, allowing the southern tribes and Chu to cement their own autonomy much earlier than the states to the north.

[14] At the beginning of the sixth century BC, Jin strengthened the state of Wu near the Yangtze delta to act as a counterweight against Chu.

Following the Battle of Boju, it occupied Chu's capital at Ying, forcing King Zhao to flee to his allies in Yun and "Sui".

King Zhao eventually returned to Ying but, after another attack from Wu in 504 BC, he temporarily moved the capital into the territory of the former state of Ruo.

By the end of the 5th century BC, the Chu government had become very corrupt and inefficient, with much of the state's treasury used primarily to pay for the royal entourage.

Despite Wu Qi's unpopularity among Chu's ruling class, his reforms strengthened the king and left the state very powerful until the late 4th century BC, when Zhao and Qin were ascendant.

Zhang Yi argued in favor of conquering Han and seizing the Mandate of Heaven from the powerless Zhou king would be wise.

The importance of Shu in the Sichuan Basin was its great agricultural output and its control over the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, leading directly into the Chu heartland.

Wang Jian's army passed through southern Chen (陳; present-day Huaiyang in Henan) and made camp at Pingyu.

After failing to lure the Qin army into an attack, Xiang Yan ordered a retreat; Wang Jian seized this opportunity to launch a swift assault.

[16] The following year, Wang Jian and Meng Wu led the Qin army against Wuyue around the mouth of the Yangtze, capturing the descendants of the royal family of Yue.

The excavated personal letters of two regular Qin soldiers, Hei Fu (黑夫) and Jing (惊), tell of a protracted campaign in Huaiyang under Wang Jian.

[19] After Ying Zheng declared himself the First Emperor (Shi Huangdi) and reigned briefly, the people of Chu and its former ruling house organized the first violent insurrections against the new Qin administration.

They were especially resentful of the Qin corvée; folk poems record the mournful sadness of Chu families whose men worked in the frigid north to construct the Great Wall of China.

Xiang Yu then engaged with Liu Bang, another prominent anti-Qin rebel, in a long struggle for supremacy over the lands of the former Qin Empire, which became known as the Chu–Han Contention.

The conflict ended in victory for Liu Bang: he proclaimed the Han dynasty and was later honored with the temple name Gaozu, while Xiang Yu committed suicide in defeat.

Liu Bang immediately enacted a more traditional and less intrusive administration than the Qin before him, made peace with the Xiongnu through heqin intermarriages, rewarded his allies with large fiefdoms, and allowed the population to rest from centuries of warfare.

However, subsequently, Chu absorbed indigenous elements from the Baiyue lands that it conquered to the south and east, developing a blended culture compared to the northern plains.

For example, the bronze Jin (altar table) unearthed from the Chu tomb in Xichuan, Henan Province are complex in shape.

Dated to the mid sixth century BC, it was one of the early confirmed lost-wax cast artifacts discovered in China proper.

A common Chu motif was the vivid depiction of wildlife, mystical animals, and natural imagery, such as snakes, dragons, phoenixes, tigers, and free-flowing clouds and serpent-like beings.

The Chu culture and government supported Taoism[24] and native shamanism supplemented with some Confucian glosses on Zhou ritual.

[27][28] Recent excavated texts, corroborated by dialect words recorded in the Fangyan, further demonstrated substrate influences, but there are competing hypotheses on their genealogical affiliation.

[29][30] Noticing that both 荆 Jīng and 楚 Chǔ refer to the thorny chaste tree (genus Vitex), Schuessler (2007) proposes two Austroasiatic comparanda:[33] The Mo'ao (莫敖) and the Lingyin (令尹) were the top government officials of Chu.

[36] Shenyin (沈尹) was the minister of religious duties or the high priest of Chu, multiple entries in Zuo Zhuan indicated their role as oracles.

[14] In traditional Chinese astronomy, Chu is represented by a star in the "Twelve States" asterism, part of the "Girl" lunar mansion in the "Black Turtle" symbol.