Weilüe

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 Annotated Records of the Three Kingdoms,[1] which was first published in 429.

Land communications with the West apparently continued relatively uninterrupted to Cao Wei after the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty.

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.

One such record which may have been available to Yu Huan is detailed in the Book of Liang of a merchant from the Roman Empire who in 226 arrived in Jiaozhi, near modern Hanoi, and was sent to the court of the Eastern Wu emperor Sun Quan, who asked him for a report on his native country and its people.

In 1905, Édouard Chavannes translated the remainder of the Weilüe into French under the title of "Les pays d'occident d'après le Wei lio".

Chavannes' translation is accompanied by copious notes in which he clarified numerous obscurities, and convincingly identified many of the countries and towns mentioned in the Weilüe, especially along the eastern sections of the overland trade routes.