"Chuci", also known as "Songs of the South" and as "Ch'u Tz'u", refers to the poems and the style of those poems which compose this collection.The name literally refers to the state of Chu, which was to the south of the area from which the poems of the "Classic of Poetry" were collected, and south of the main area populated by people of Chinese culture in China at the time of its composition and for many centuries afterwards (in fact, until the great population change in the time of the Song Dynasty, or, perhaps more accurately, the time of the Tang-Song transition).