“The state of Qu” doesn’t seem right to me, as this is being written during a unified era — hence ‘Quzhou’ as a place-name. For “people eating people,” I suppose it’s just a matter of preference — “men eating men” seems to me more shocking than “people eating people,” though I’ve got no better grounds on which to argue than that. I will say, though, that if I were going to translate this poem again now, I’d do it very differently in other areas.