History
The first Wu nation was established in late Zhou Dynasty. Once considered as a foreign kingdom to Kingdom Zhou, it emerged to be a power overlord at the end of Spring and Autumn Period.
The most influential Wu nation was the Kingdom of Wu during the period of Three Kingdoms.
The city of Suzhou (also called Wu) has traditionally been the capital of the Wu nations. The dialect spoken in Suzhou is usually regarded as the standard Wu language.
Go-on (呉音), which is one of the sources of Japanese pronunciation for kanji (the others being kan-on, tō-on and kan'yō-on), is sometimes said to have originated from this region. The Go- component in the name Go-on is cognate to the Chinese word Wu (Wu is the pronunciation for the Chinese character 吳 in Mandarin. However, in Wu language 呉 is usually pronounced as Ho, Oh, Ng, or Nguu).
Read more about this topic: Wu (region)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)