Talk:Fu Hao

Tu people and Tu-Fang

The Shang oracle bone inscriptions mention campaigns against the neighbouring Tu-Fang tribes. These battles occured at least a thousand years before the XianBei, identified in the Tu people article, occuring around the 2nd Century BC.If the Tu people were decendents of the Xianbei, then the "Tu" mentioned in the previous edits is incorrect, since there is a time gap of nearly a millenia. Please note that Shang oracle bone inscriptions mention the Tu-Fang people as 土方. Dylanwhs (talk) 20:53, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

She was a good warrior. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.77.138.99 (talk) 22:40, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Baifu Discovery

Probably merits mentionin: another tomb of a female general, discovered 1975 near Beijing, W.Zhou. Either a commander of Yan kingdom, or a di chieftain. Keywords: 昌平白浮M2墓, Baifu belongs to zh:马池口地区. --Shanghainese.ua (talk) 21:11, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Fu Hao/CommentsTalk:Fu Hao/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

This article previously had a B class rating, but it is only a stub. It needs major expansion to reach higher classes. --Danaman5 19:07, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Last edited at 19:07, 8 January 2007 (UTC). Substituted at 15:40, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Fu Hao Text Improvements

Some improvements I believe that could be made would be to possibly add more information. I know this may be hard because of the fact that there is not much information on this person but I do hope you could do so. I am currently a student researching Fu Hao for an assignment but am finding it a bit difficult to write anything because of the lack on information. It may just be me. Thank you! -Anonymous. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.161.132.193 (talk) 06:07, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

"Fu Hao" just a title and not a name?

Looking at the characters for Fu Hao 婦好 it potentially just means "loved/favored wife' and not that Hao was ever her surname. Women's names being lost to history is no new thing, but I wanted to see if any Chinese speakers had a better take on this. Currently the article claims 'Hao' is her surname but looking at the characters that just doesn't seem likely- otherwise her surname was just incredibly convenient for her future role of 'favorite wife'. It would be good to make that distinction and, if truly just a title, to recognize that her actual name has been lost to time and only her title has survived. Thanks in advance for any help! Tsukiakari (talk) 16:30, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi Tsukiakari. There are a couple of things to consider here. Looking at graphical consistency, all Shang queens have names written as "wife clan name". Why should Fu Hao be an exception? Secondly, our article claims her husband Wu Ding cultivated the allegiance of neighbouring tribes by marrying one woman from each of them. Is it safe for someone making so many marriage-based alliances to declare a particular wife to be "favourite"? Our article also states that Fu Jing was the primary wife, while Fu Hao was the secondary wife, which does not align with the idea of Fu Hao being the favourite, although I acknowledge this was only one of two of your proposed translations.

Having said that, I claim without sourcing or research that Shang queens do all seem to have the "woman" determinant in their surnames, and based on how royal names were written in the early Zhou dynasty (a different textual tradition in many senses), with the "king" character written next to the name of the king identically to how a determinant would be written, it seems possible that the surname of Fu Hao could be understood not as 好 but as 子 (although this was the surname of the male lineage of the Shang dynasts, and taboos against same-surname marriages go back quite a ways). However this is just a hypothesis, like your idea, and would not warrant inclusion in a Wikipedia article until it was published in a reliable secondary source. Folly Mox (talk) 18:46, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

Fixing ping for @Tsukiakari:. Folly Mox (talk) 18:51, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

The writer of this page is a Eurocentric racist

please stop implying that Fu Hao was from the steppe seima turbino culture. The genetic evidence of that region proves otherwise Chinese history buff (talk) 10:26, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

The content you removed seems to be well sourced at a glance, if you disagree please discuss it here Winston (talk) 23:34, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Yes, I don’t know if it is the Europeans suggesting that she is white person. Some people adopted this view already. ~2026-16477-70 (talk) 13:28, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

Please stop implying that Fu Hao was Indo European and being racist

 Yang, Melinda A.; Fan, Xuechun; Sun, Bo; Chen, Chungyu; Lang, Jianfeng; Ko, Ying-Chin; Tsang, Cheng-hwa; Chiu, Hunglin; Wang, Tianyi; Bao, Qingchuan; Wu, Xiaohong; Hajdinjak, Mateja; Ko, Albert Min-Shan; Ding, Manyu; Cao, Peng (17 July 2020). "Ancient DNA indicates human population shifts and admixture in northern and southern China". Science. 369 (6501): 282–288. Bibcode:2020Sci...369..282Y. doi:10.1126/science.aba0909. PMID 32409524.

 Yang, Melinda A.; Gao, Xing; Theunert, Christoph; Tong, Haowen; Aximu-Petri, Ayinuer; Nickel, Birgit; Slatkin, Montgomery; Meyer, Matthias; Pääbo, Svante; Kelso, Janet; Fu, Qiaomei (23 October 2017). "40,000-Year-Old Individual from Asia Provides Insight into Early Population Structure in Eurasia". Current Biology. 27 (20): 3202–3208.e9. Bibcode:2017CBio...27E3202Y. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.09.030. ISSN 0960-9822. PMC 6592271. PMID 29033327 Chinese history buff (talk) 11:06, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

That is why there are not enough of discussions about Chinese history on the internet because many people think that it must be the foreign ethnics contributed to the growth of Han Chinese, inventions of China and so on. I can’t stop their behaviours. ~2026-16477-70 (talk) 13:31, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

I looked into this as part of a broad look into improvements for the page. The chief issue is that the quote "The presence of these different weapon types in Fu Hao's tomb has by some been taken as a mark that she came originally from the borders or the steppe, where women were more likely to play a central role in battle. Her status as a leader in war was thus symbolised by the axes, her homeland by the knife." used in one of the main references is paywalled, and thus difficult to verify. I cannot find any studies that take broad looks at the weapons and categorise them by culture, only that said weapons are "generally" from the north. This is interesting, at the very least. I've contacted a few friends who do more work in Shang-Zhou bronzes and they didn't know much about this either, though their main fields are palaeography.

The problem is that while most people in that area were ethnic Chinese, Fu Zi's tomb is very unique compared to others, and not just because it wasn't looted. The items there are different to other unplundered tombs, which imply that she may have been from somewhere else; the bronzes have content that imply Turkic ties, the figurines are more like those from steppe cultures, and so on. As her body disintegrated, and there was a lot of cross-cultural marriage to ensure feudal ties, context implies she was from steppe areas. That seems to be the general theory being presented.

There are plenty of improvements that can be made, at least:

• Sourcing the "priestess" paragraph; it seems that it is outdated, as Western Zhou resources show 巫 were still active post-Shang
• Sourcing the "owned her land" paragraph and the precise practices; I don't know much about this.
• Realistically merge the military and biographical sections, prolly?
• Possibly update tomb stuff
• Add more things about her life
• Section about her name and Shang naming practices; biggest outlier
• Consider whether Fu Zi > Fu Hao but WP:COMMONNAME will get in the way, so I'll need to search around. At minimum it'll be in the lede; it's seen as soon as the 80s.
• More comparison to Fu Jing maybe
• See if she's ever called 妣 she almost certainly is
• Airlift stuff from zhwiki since the book 《婦好傳》 (very good btw pls read) is mentioned there at least

I'll be getting to this soon.

So while I am late...do you have any more sources regarding this? If there is anything disproving the general theory, it would be very useful. What you gave here just says that the native people are ancestors to modern Chinese ethnicities, not necessarily that Fu Zi was from the steppe. -Shira the Mogul (talk) 11:46, 31 October 2026 (UTC)