From the Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD) to the Northern and Southern Dynasties Period (386-589), there had always been a special official in charge of music and songs in the central government, responsible for collecting and compiling melodies, which were performed with lyrics. The lyrics that can be sung with melodies were called Yuefu Folksongs, usually Yuefu for short.

The extant Yuefu Folksongs are large in scale, among which a great deal are folksongs, but even more are works by literati. Yuefu Folksongs were originally to support the music, but later a lot of poets created works in the form of Yuefu without matching the music, such as the New Yuefu in the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

Emperor Wudi of the Han Dynasty first set up an official to collect ballads and folksongs across the country, and this has been very significant for the development of Chinese poetry history. The Yuefu Folksongs in the Han Dynasty reflected the real social life of that time, and they were characterized both by sincere, penetrating ideas and brisk, vivid art form with noticeable vitality and hence influenced the later creations of Yuefu Folksongs in a very profound way. Many later poets like Bao Zhao, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Yuan Zhen and Pi Rixiu created a lot of first-class Yuefu Folksongs.

Yuefu Folksongs were mostly written in five-character lines, and some were in seven-character or multi-character lines as well. Ingenuity in syntax and fluency in language made this art form very easy to understand and read with a strong flavor of everyday life.