Guifang (Creel, Herrlee G. (1970). The Origins of Statecraft in China. The University of Chicago Press. p. 232.) was an ancient ethnonym for a northern people that fought against the Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BCE). Chinese historical tradition used various names in different periods for northern tribes such as the Guifang, Rong, Di,Old Text Bamboo Annals. "Wu Yi" quote: "三十五年，周王季伐西落鬼戎，俘二十翟王。" Xunyu, Xianyun, or Xiongnu peoples.Book of Jin "Vol. 97, section Northern Di" quote: "匈奴之類，總謂之北狄。…… 夏曰：薰鬻，殷曰鬼方，周曰獫狁，漢曰匈奴。"Taskin V.S., "Materials on history of nomadic tribes in China 3rd-5th cc", Issue 3 "Mujuns", "Science", Moscow, 1992, p.10, This Chinese exonym combines gui (鬼 "ghost, spirit, devil") and fang (方 "side, border, country, region"), a suffix referring to "non-Shang or enemy countries that existed in and beyond the borders of the Shang polity."Loewe M. and Shaughnessy E.L., eds., The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C., New York, Cambridge, 1999, , p. 269.
Overview Chinese annals contain a number of references to the Guifang. The earliest sources mentioning the Guifang are the Oracle Bones.Yu Taishan. (2000). "A Hypothesis about the Source of the Sai Tribes" in Sino-Platonic Papers 106. Ed. Victor Mair. p. 106-109Khayutina, Maria. (2016). "The Tombs of the Rulers of Peng and Relationships between Zhou and Northern Non-Zhou Lineages (Until the Early Ninth Century B.C.)" in Shaughnessy, Edward L. (ed.) Imprints of Kinship: Studies of Recently Discovered Bronze Inscriptions from Ancient China Publisher: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. pp. 71-132. p. 26 of pdfAnderson, Matthew Mccutchen. (2015). "Change and Standardization in Anyang: Writing and Culture in Bronze Age China". Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1589. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1589 p. 106 Extant oracle bones record no military action between Shang and Guifang; the Guifang have been interpreted as hostile toward the ShangShima Kunio 島邦男, Yinxu buci yanjiu 殷墟卜辞研究, tr. Pu Maozuo 濮茅左 and Gu Weiliang 顧偉良 (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji chubanshe, 2006), pp. 802-04; Wang Yuzhe, “Guifang kao buzheng” 鬼方考補正, in Wang Yuzhe, Gu shi jilin, pp. 309-17. cited in Khayutina (2016) p. 26 as well not hostile.
The Bamboo Annals, interred with King Xiang of Wei (died 296 BC) and re-discovered nearly six centuries later in 281 AD (Western Jin dynasty) in the Jizhong discovery, state that:
In the thirty-second year of Shang King Wu Ding (fl. 1200s BCE), he attacked the Guifang, and stationed at Jing (荊); and in the thirty-fourth year, after a campaign of three years, the King's armies subdued the Guifang, and the Di and Qiang came as guests.Current Text Bamboo Annals "Wu Ding" quote: "三十二年，伐鬼方。次于荊。三十四年，王師克鬼方。氐、羗來賓。" Wu Ding's conquests against the Guifang are also mentioned in the Yi Jing "Book of Changes".Creel (1970), p. 232.Yijing "䷾既濟 - Ji Ji" quote: "高宗伐鬼方，三年克之" James Legge's translation: "[Gao Zong], who attacked the Demon region, but was three years in subduing it."Theobald, U. (2011) "Wu Ding 武丁" ChinaKnowledge.de - An Encyclopaedia on Chinese History, Literature and Art quote: "Wu Ding was a great warrior and was able to defeat the Guifang 鬼方 (or Gongfang [𢀛]方) in the north [...] Wu Ding's dynastic temple name is Gaozong 高宗."
The oracle bones indicate that, following Wu Ding's conquest, the Guifang became Shang's subjects and even assisted the Shang against other polities, e.g. the Qiang. Gui officials even managed to achieve high statuses in the Shang court; for examples, a Gui official, Geng, was ordered to perform the gang sacrifice 剛 in the xiang 亯 sacrificial temple.
In the thirty-fifth year of the Shang King Wu Yi (i.e. 1119 BCE), Zhou leader Jili attacked the Gǔiróng () in Xiluo (西落) and captured twenty Dí kings.Current Text Bamboo Annals "Wu Yi" quote: "三十五年，周公季歷伐西落鬼戎。" Historians believe that the Guirong were identical to the Guifang.Nicola Di Cosmo, The Northern Frontier in Pre-Imperial China//The Cambridge History of Ancient China, p. 919
Up to the time of Shang king Di Xin, Gui chiefs had been long-enfeoffed vassals of Shang and even participated in the Shang royal government. In Stratagem of the Warring States, Lu Zhonglian (魯仲連) related that the Marquis of Gui (鬼侯) ranked among Di Xin's Three Ducal Ministers (along with the Marquis of E (鄂侯) and the Western Count [Ji] Chang (西伯昌)) and married his beloved daughter to Di Xin. However, Di Xin considered her detestably ugly (惡), so he killed her and boiled alive the Marquis of Gui; the Marquis of E sharply criticized Di Xin and was butchered.Zhanguo Ce "Stratagems of Zhao 3 - Qin besieged Zhao's Handan" quote: "昔者，鬼侯之鄂侯、文王，紂之三公也。鬼侯有子而好，故入之於紂，紂以為惡，醢鬼侯。鄂侯爭之急，辯之疾，故脯鄂侯。" A parallel account in Shiji features the Marquis of Jiu (九侯), his daughter (九侯女), and the Marquis of E (鄂侯);Shiji, "Annals of Yin" quote: "以西伯昌、九侯、鄂侯為三公。九侯有好女，入之紂。九侯女不喜淫，紂怒，殺之，而醢九侯。鄂侯爭之彊，辨之疾，并脯鄂侯。" the Marquis of Jiu was identified with the Marquis of Gui. Another parallel account in Taiping Yulan states the Marquis of Gui's daughter disapproved of Di Xin's debaucheries, so Di Xin killed her and her father, and Di Xin had the Marquis of Xing butchered rather than the Marquis of E.Taiping Yulan, Sovereigns and Kings - Part 8" quote: "以西伯昌、鬼侯、邢侯為三公。鬼侯有好女，入之紂。鬼侯女不僖淫，紂殺之，而醢鬼侯。刑侯爭之，并脯之。"
Among the succeeding Zhou dynasty's bronze inscriptions, the Xiao Yu Ding (小盂鼎) –cast in the twenty-fifth year (976 BCE) of King Kang of Zhou (r. 1005/03–978 BCE)– mentioned the Guifang, probably located northeast of the initial Zhou domain. After two successful battles against the Guifang, the Zhou victors brought their captured enemies to the Zhou temple and offered them to the king. The prisoners numbered over 13,000, with four chiefs who were subsequently executed. In this campaign, Zhou also seized a large amount of valuable goods.
No events involving the Guifang are reported after 650 BCE, which is also the last mention of the Northern Rong (北戎). They were replaced by a new group of Northern foreigners, the Di (狄).
Interpretations As a result of phonetic studies and comparisons based on the inscriptions on bronze and the structure of the characters, Wang Guowei came to the conclusion that the tribal names in the annalistic sources Guifang, Xunyu, Xianyu, Xianyun, Rong, Di, and Hu designated one and the same people, who later entered history under the name Xiongnu.Taskin V.S., "Materials on history of nomadic tribes in China 3rd-5th cc", Issue 3 "Mujuns", p. 10Wang Guowei, "Guantang Jilin" (觀堂集林, Wang Guowei collection of works), Ch.2, Ch. 13Taskin V.S., 1968, "Materials on history of Sünnu", "Science", Moscow, p.10
Likewise, using Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian and other sources, Vsevolod Taskin proposes that in the earlier pre-historic period (i.e. the time of the legendary Yellow Emperor) the Xiongnu were called Hunyu; and in the late pre-historic period (i.e. the time of the legendary Emperor Yao and Emperor Shun) they were called Rong; in the literate period starting with the Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BC) they were called Guifang, in the Zhou period (1045–256 BC) they were called Xianyun, and starting from the Qin period (221–206 BC) the Chinese annalists called them Xiongnu.Sima Qian, Shiji, Ch. 1, l. 4b; Ch. 110, l. 1a, notesin Taskin V.S., "Materials on history of Sünnu", p.10Classic of Poetry "Major Hymns - Decade of Dang - Dang" quote: "文王曰咨、咨女殷商。……內奰于中國、覃及鬼方。" Legge's translation: "King Wen said, 'Alas! Alas! you [sovereign of] Yin-shang, [...] Indignation is rife against you here in the Middle kingdom, and extends to the demon regions."
Even so, Paul R. Goldin (2011) reconstructs the Old Chinese pronunciations of 葷粥 ~ 獯鬻 ~ 獯粥 ~ 薰育 as *xur-luk, 獫狁 as hram′-lun′, and 匈奴 as *xoŋ-NA; and comments all three names are "manifestly unrelated". He further states that sound changes made the names more superficially similar than they really had been, and prompted later commentators to conclude that those names must have referred to the same people in different epochs, even though people during the Warring States period would never have been thus misled.Goldin, Paul R. "Steppe Nomads as a Philosophical Problem in Classical China" in Mapping Mongolia: Situating Mongolia in the World from Geologic Time to the Present. Penn Museum International Research Conferences, vol. 2. Ed. Paula L.W. Sabloff. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. 2011. p. 225-226; p. 237, n.22
Other fang-countries
The Shang state had a system of writing attested to by bronze inscriptions and oracle bones, which record Shang troops fighting frequent wars with neighboring nomadic herdsmen from the inner Asian steppes. In his oracular divinations, a Shang king repeatedly showed concern about the fang (方, likely meaning "border-region"; the modern term for them is 方国 fāngguó "fang-countries"),Anderson, Matthew Mccutchen. (2015). "Change and Standardization in Anyang: Writing and Culture in Bronze Age China". Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1589. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1589 pp. 94-95 groups of barbarians outside his inner tu (土) regions in the center of Shang territory. A particularly hostile tribe, Tufang (:zh:土方) from the Yan Mountains region, is regularly mentioned in divinatory records. Another Chinese ethnonym for the animal husbandry nomads was ma (馬) or "horse" barbarians mentioned at the Shang western military frontier in the Taihang Mountains, where they fought and may have used chariots.
Seima-Turbino culture as "Guifang"
Several of the Shang dynasty artifacts of the Yin Ruins and from the tomb of Fu Hao (died ), excavated in Shang capital of Anyang, are similar to Seima-Turbino culture artifacts, such as socketed spearheads with a single side hook, jade figurines and knives with deer-headed pommel. These Late Shang artifacts, visibly derived from the Seima-Turbino culture to the north, were made precisely at the same time the Shang reported intense protracted conflicts with the northern tribes of the "Guifang". Their century-long conflict with the Shang led to the transfer of various object and manufacturing techniques.
Particularly, the introduction of the socketed spearheads with a single side hook seems to date back to the period of the Taosi culture, when the earliest and most faithful Seima-Turbino types start to appear in China, circa 2100-2000 BCE. These early artifacts suggest that Chinese bronze metallurgy initially derived from the cultures of the Eurasian steppes. Soon however, China was able to appropriate this technology and refine it, particularly through its mastery of bronze casting, to create a highly sophisticated and massive bronze industry.
Johannes Krause, professor and director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has stated the following:
"For example, the Afanasievo culture, an eastward extension of the Yamnaya steppe pastoralist culture, impacted Mongolia around the turn of the third millennium BCE, although in contrast to Europe, where Yamnaya ancestry became permanently established after it first arrived, a near-complete displacement of the ancestry brought by these migrants occurred in Mongolia following the decline of the Afanasievo culture. Strikingly, ancestry from the initial Yamnaya expansion (had only) survived in northwest China at least into the Iron Age. " (Modern Xinjiang, China).
https://phys.org/news/2021-02-genomic-insights-pre-historic-populations-east.html
The earlier Afanosievo Indo-European culture (3000 BC) which migrated to modern Xinjiang was confined from moving further eastwards by the westwards migration of northern Asian tribes within Mongolia. These tribes have retained Ancient Northeast Asian ancestry (ANA) a.k.a. Amur Basin genetic ancestry, which is also the ancestral DNA of modern Mongolic, Tungusic, and Turkic peoples. In modern Mongolia and the Lake Baikal region such cultures still dominate.