In the early years of the Western Han Dynasty, the imperial court only respected Confucianism. In the era of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, influenced by Confucianism, the imperial court gradually advocated a "ritualized system" to prevent the recurrence of the "collapse of rituals and music". Since then, the harps and string instruments have occupied a dominant position, which has provided strong conditions for the development of Yuefu. Yuefu was an institution established by the imperial court to manage music since the Qin Dynasty. During the period of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, it was expanded on a large scale and a large number of poems were collected from the people. Later generations collectively called it Han Yuefu. Later, Yuefu became a poetry genre (in 1976, a button bell was unearthed in the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin with a gold inscription: "Yuefu". In 2000, a clay seal with "Yuefu Seal" was unearthed at the Qin Site in Xi'an, further confirming this. This historical fact did not start during the period of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty)

Yuefu was a palace official office established by the feudal dynasty of the Han Dynasty to manage music. Yuefu originally started in the Qin Dynasty, and adopted the name of the Qin Dynasty in the Han Dynasty. In 112 BC, the Han Dynasty officially established the Yuefu during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty. It was mainly in charge of music and supervised the collection of folk songs from various places and set them to music so that they could be sung during court banquets or sacrifices.

According to the Records of Rites and Music in the Book of Han, during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, there was an organization called "Yuefu" that collected songs from various places and organized and formulated music scores. Later, people called the poems collected and composed by this institution Yuefu poems, or simply Yuefu. According to incomplete statistics, there were as many as 138 poems included in the collection at that time, but most of them were later lost, leaving less than 36 poems. By the Tang Dynasty, although the music scores of these poems had long been lost, this form was passed down and became a poetry genre without strict meter and close to five or seven character ancient poems.