"Chu Ci" is a verse-style work created by Qu Yuan, a great poet in the Warring States Period (ca. 300 BC) in ancient China. It depicts the landscapes, characters, historical events, as well as myths and legends of the Chu Kingdom (present Hunan and Hubei Provinces) through the application of the literary style and dialect phonology of the area, thus being endowed with intensive flavor of regional culture. In the Han Dynasty, works of Qu Yuan, Song Yu and other poets were compiled by Liu Xiang to constitute a collection named Elegies of Chu, which is, following The Book of Songs, a collected poetic works having exerted profound influence on Chinese literature.

With intense local features, Elegies of Chu was evolved from ballads of the Kingdom of Chu through processing and refining. Chu was in possession of unique local music (known as South Wind and South Tones in ancient China), and more importantly, it had a long-standing history, during which Chu people entertained gods by singing and dancing, thus contributing to the preservation of large quantities of myths, rapid development of poetic music and the intensive religious flavor imbued in the Chu ballads. All these factors jointly contributed to the existence of tones and rhymes exclusively possessed by the state of Chu in Elegies of Chu, and to its possession of profound romanticism and intensive witch culture.

Qu Yuan is a poet with the highest accomplishments and greatest influential force in "Chuci". Due to the profound influence of his representative work the Lament (lisao), some literati even use the Lament to refer to Elegies of Chu. In the meantime, the Lament has exerted immeasurable impact on the literary circle and literary creation in later generations.

Permeated with intense romantic flavor, Elegies of Chu is still quoted in the Chinese textbooks for middle school students.