Nine Provinces (China)

Nine Provinces (China)

The Nine Provinces is a term used in ancient Chinese histories to refer to territorial divisions during the Xia and Shang dynasties, and has now come to symbolically represent China. "Province" is the term used to translate zhou since before the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE), a zhou was equivalent to a province and the largest territorial division of the time. Although the current definition of the Nine Provinces can be dated to the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, it was not until the Eastern Han Dynasty that the Nine Provinces were treated as actual administrative regions.