Guifang () 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, Xunyu, Xianyun, or Xiongnu peoples. They are seen as the ancestors of the Xiongnu and thus as one of the first proto-Turkic people. 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."
Guifang () 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, Xunyu, Xianyun, or Xiongnu peoples. They are seen as the ancestors of the Xiongnu and thus as one of the first proto-Turkic people. 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."
==Overview== Chinese annals contain a number of references to the Guifang. The earliest sources mentioning the Guifang are the Oracle Bones. Extant oracle bones record no military action between Shang and Guifang; the Guifang have been interpreted as hostile toward the Shang as well not hostile.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).