Nine Provinces
Territorial division during the Xia and Shang dynasties / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the geographic division in ancient China. For the place in Japan also called "九州", see Kyushu.
"Jiuzhou" redirects here. For the area in Guangdong, see Zhuhai. For the area's port, Port of Zhuhai. For the towns in Hebei, see Guangyang District and Cang County. For the towns in Guangxi, see Lingshan County and Huangping County. For the town on Hainan, see Qiongshan District.
The term Nine Provinces or Nine Regions[1] (Chinese: 九州; pinyin: Jiǔ Zhōu), is used in ancient Chinese histories to refer to territorial divisions or islands during the Xia and Shang dynasties and has now come to symbolically represent China. "Province" is the word used to translate zhou (州) – since before the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), it was the largest Chinese territorial division. 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.