was a king of

Wa (Japan) Wa is the oldest attested name of Japan and ethnonym of the Japanese people. From Chinese and Korean scribes used the Chinese character to refer to the various inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago, although it might have been just used t ...

. He is the earliest Japanese person whose name appeared in a Chinese history. He is mentioned in Volume 85 of the ''

Book of the Later Han The ''Book of the Later Han'', also known as the ''History of the Later Han'' and by its Chinese name ''Hou Hanshu'' (), is one of the Twenty-Four Histories and covers the history of the Han dynasty from 6 to 189 CE, a period known as the Lat ...

'', which was compiled in 445 C.E. Although Suishō is the earliest figure in Japanese history to be named in a text, he was not the first.

Himiko , also known as the , was a shamaness-queen of Yamatai-koku in . Early Chinese dynastic histories chronicle tributary relations between Queen Himiko and the Cao Wei Kingdom (220–265) and record that the Yayoi period people chose her as ruler ...

, a shaman queen of Wa, lived over a century after Suishō, but was mentioned in a Chinese text written in 289 C.E., about 150 years before the text mentioning Suishō was written.

Historical references

The only historical record about Suishō is a brief sentence on Volume 85 of the

In the first year of Yongchu during the reign of the Emperor An (AD 107), Suishō, the king of Wa, presented 160 生口 (slaves?) o the emperor and entreated an audience.Translated from ''魏志倭人伝・後漢書倭伝・宋書倭国伝・隋書倭国伝'' edited by Kiyoshi Wada and Michihiro Ishihara, Iwanami Bunko, 1951, p. 58

Notes

External links

Volume 85 of the Book of the Later Han
{{DEFAULTSORT:Suisho Wajinden Aristocracy of ancient Japan People of the Yayoi period 2nd-century Japanese monarchs