Founding
First part of the Jin dynasty (266-316).
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The Jin dynasty or the Jin Empire, officially Jin, sometimes distinguished as the Sima Jin or the Two Jins, was an imperial dynasty in China that existed from 266 to 420 CE. It was founded by Sima Yan, posthumously known as Emperor Wu of Jin, who previously served as the regent of the Cao Wei dynasty.
There are two main divisions in the history of the dynasty. The Western Jin (266–316 CE) was established as the successor to Cao Wei after Emperor Wu usurped the throne from Cao Huan. The capital of the Western Jin was initially in Luoyang, though it later moved to Chang'an (modern Xi'an). In 280 CE, after conquering Eastern Wu, the Western Jin ended the Three Kingdoms period and reunited China proper for the first time since the end of the Han dynasty.
From 291 to 306 CE, a series of civil wars known as the War of the Eight Princes were fought over control of the Jin state which weakened it considerably. In 304 CE, the dynasty experienced a wave of rebellions by non-Han ethnicities termed by exonym as "Five Barbarians". The "barbarians" went on to establish nonpermanent dynastic states in northern China. This helped to usher in the Sixteen Kingdoms era of Chinese history, in which states in the north rose and fell in rapid succession, constantly fighting both one another and the Jin. Han-Zhao, one of the northern states established during the disorder, sacked Luoyang in 311, captured Chang'an in 316, and executed Emperor Min of Jin in 318 CE, ending the Western Jin era. Sima Rui, who succeeded Emperor Min, then reestablished the Jin dynasty with its capital in Jiankang (modern Nanjing), inaugurating the Eastern Jin (317–420 CE).
The Eastern Jin dynasty remained in near-constant conflict with its northern neighbors for most of its existence, and it launched several invasions of the north with the aim of recovering its lost territories. In 383 CE, the Eastern Jin inflicted a devastating defeat on the Former Qin, a Di-ruled state that had briefly unified northern China. In the aftermath of that battle, the Former Qin state splintered, and Jin armies recaptured the lands south of the Yellow River. The Eastern Jin was eventually usurped by General Liu Yu in 420 CE and replaced with the Liu Song dynasty. The Eastern Jin dynasty is considered the second of the Six Dynasties.
During the Three Kingdoms period, the Sima clan—with its most accomplished individual being Sima Yi—rose to prominence within the kingdom of Cao Wei that dominated northern China. Sima Yi was the regent of Cao Wei, and in 249 he instigated a coup d'état known as the Incident at the Gaoping Tombs, after which the Sima clan began to surpass the imperial Cao clan's power in the kingdom. After Sima Yi's death in 251, Sima Yi's eldest son Sima Shi succeeded his father as regent of Cao Wei, maintaining the Sima clan's tight grip on the Cao Wei political scene. After Sima Shi's death in 255, Sima Shi's younger brother Sima Zhao became the regent of Cao Wei. Sima Zhao further assisted his clans' interests by suppressing rebellions and dissent.
In 263, he directed Cao Wei forces in conquering Shu Han and capturing Liu Shan (the son of Liu Bei), marking the first demise of one of the Three Kingdoms. Sima Zhao's actions awarded him the title of King of Jin, the last achievable rank beneath that of emperor. He was granted the title because his ancestral home was located in Wen County, on the territory of the Zhou-era state of Jin, which was centered on the Jin River in Shaanxi. Sima Zhao's ambitions for the throne were visible, but he died in 265 before any usurpation attempt could be made, passing the opportunity to his ambitious son Sima Yan.
The Jin dynasty was founded by Sima Yan, who became known as Emperor Wu (the "Martial Emperor of Jin"). After succeeding his father as the King of Jin and regent of Cao Wei in 265, Sima Yan declared himself emperor of the Jin dynasty on 4 February 266 and forced the final Wei ruler Cao Huan to abdicate. Emperor Wu permitted Cao Huan to live the rest of his life with honour as the Prince of Chenliu, and he was later buried with imperial ceremony. In 280, Emperor Wu conquered the Eastern Wu and united China proper, thus ending the Three Kingdoms period.
Following the unification, China entered a decade of peace and economic prosperity, with accounts detailing the extravagant and outlandish lifestyles of the aristocracy. Internally, Emperor Wu upheld Confucian primogeniture by decreeing that his eldest son, Sima Zhong, posthumously known as Emperor Hui, would succeed him to the throne, despite his apparent developmental disability. To protect his heir and dynasty, he empowered his princes and dukes by appointing them to important military and administrative positions. Meanwhile, a few officials also began expressing concerns regarding the growing population and treatment of the various non-Han peoples ("Five Barbarians") that had been resettling in northern China for centuries.
Emperor Wu died in 290, and Emperor Hui's ascension began the War of the Eight Princes. In 291, Emperor Hui's wife, Empress Jia, seized power and began ruling the empire behind her husband's throne. Under her rule, the affluence of the aristocracy went unchecked, and corruption ran rampant within the government. She and her family were overthrown in a coup in 300, but a series of civil wars soon broke out between the Sima princes for the regency and succession of Emperor Hui, devastating most of northern China and the imperial military.
The short-lived unification of China came to an end in 304; that year, the Cheng-Han and Han-Zhao declared their independence from Jin. The Upheaval of the Five Barbarians carried on the chaos from the War of the Eight Princes, as uprisings and famines continued to erode Jin authority in the north. In 311, the Jin capital Luoyang was sacked by Han-Zhao forces under Liu Cong, and Sima Chi, posthumously known as Emperor Huai, was captured and later executed. Emperor Huai's successor Sima Ye, posthumously known as Emperor Min, was then also captured and executed by Han-Zhao when they seized Chang'an (present-day Xi'an) in 316, marking the end of the Western Jin. The surviving members of the Jin imperial family, as well as large numbers of Han Chinese from the North China Plain, subsequently fled to southern China. These refugees had a large impact on the lands they moved to—for example, they gave Quanzhou's Jin River its name upon their settlement there.
After the fall of Chang'an and the execution of Emperor Min of Jin, Sima Rui, posthumously known as Emperor Yuan, was enthroned as Jin emperor in 318. He reestablished the Jin government at Jiankang (modern Nanjing), which became the dynasty's new capital and marked the beginning of the Eastern Jin period. Since one of Sima Rui's titles was the prince of Langya, the newly established northern states, which denied the legitimacy of his succession, sometimes referred to his empire as "Langya".
The Eastern Jin period saw the peak of menfa (門閥 'gentry clan') politics. The authority of the emperors was limited, while national affairs were controlled by powerful immigrant elite clans like the Wang (王) clans of Langya and Taiyuan, the Xie (謝) clan of Chenliu, the Huan (桓) clan of Qiao Commandery, and the Yu (庾) clan of Yingchuan. Among the people, a common remark was that "Wang Dao and Sima Rui, they dominate the nation together" (王與馬，共天下). It was said that when Emperor Yuan was holding court, he even invited Wang Dao to sit by his side so they could jointly accept congratulations from ministers, but Wang Dao declined the offer.
In order to recover the lands lost during the fall of the Western Jin, the Eastern Jin dynasty launched several military campaigns against the northern states, such as the expeditions led by Huan Wen from 354 to 369. Most notably, in 383, a heavily outnumbered Eastern Jin force inflicted a devastating defeat on the state of Former Qin at the Battle of Fei River. After this battle, the Former Qin—which had recently unified northern China—began to collapse, and the Jin dynasty recovered the lands south of the Yellow River. Some of these lands were later lost, but the Jin regained them once more when Liu Yu defeated the northern states in his northern expeditions of 409–416.
Despite successes against the northern states like the Battle of Fei River, paranoia in the royal family and a constant disruptions to the throne often caused loss of support for northern campaigns. For example, lack of support by the Jin court was a major cause of Huan Wen's failure to recover the north in his expeditions. Additionally, internal military crises—including the rebellions of generals Wang Dun and Su Jun, but also lesser fangzhen (方鎮 'military command') revolts—plagued the Eastern Jin throughout its 104-year existence.
The local aristocrat clans of the south were often at odds with the immigrants from the north. As such, tensions increased, and rivalry between the immigrants and southern locals loomed large in the domestic politics of the Jin. Two of the most prominent local clans, the Zhou (周) clan of Yixing and the Shen (沈) clan of Wuxing, were dealt a bitter blow from which they never quite recovered. There was also conflict between the various northern immigrant clans. This led to a virtual balance of power, which somewhat benefited the emperor's rule.
Special "commanderies of immigrants" and "white registers" were created for the massive amounts of northern Han Chinese who moved south during the Eastern Jin. The southern Chinese aristocracy was formed from the offspring of these migrants. Particularly in the Jiangnan region, Celestial Masters and the nobility of northern China subdued the nobility of southern China during the Jin dynasty. Southern China overtook the north in population due to depopulation of the north and the migration of northern Chinese to southern China. Different waves of migration of aristocratic Chinese from northern China to the south at different times resulted in distinct groups of aristocratic lineages.
In 403, Huan Xuan, the son of esteemed general Huan Wen, usurped the Jin throne and declared the dynasty of Huan Chu. Huan Xuan was soon toppled by Liu Yu, who reinstated Jin rule by installing Sima Dezong on the throne, posthumously known as Emperor An. Meanwhile, the civilian administration suffered, as there were further revolts led by Sun En and Lu Xun, and Western Shu became an independent kingdom under Qiao Zong. In 419, Liu Yu had Sima Dezong strangled and replaced by his brother Sima Dewen, posthumously known as Emperor Gong. Finally, in 420, Sima Dewen abdicated in favour of Liu Yu, who declared himself the ruler of the new Song dynasty (which is referred to as the Liu Song dynasty by historians in order to prevent confusion with the Song dynasty established in 960). Sima Dewen was then asphyxiated with a blanket in the following year. In the north, Northern Liang, the last of the Sixteen Kingdoms, was conquered by Northern Wei in 439, ushering in the Northern dynasties period.
The Xianbei Northern Wei accepted the Jin refugees Sima Fei (司馬朏) and Sima Chuzhi (司馬楚之). They both married Xianbei princesses. Sima Fei's wife was named Huayang (華陽公主), who was a daughter of Emperor Xiaowen; Sima Chuzhi's son was Sima Jinlong, who married a Northern Liang princess who was a daughter of the Lushuihu king Juqu Mujian. More than fifty percent of Tuoba Xianbei princesses of the Northern Wei were married to southern Han Chinese men from the imperial families and aristocrats from southern China of the Southern dynasties who defected and moved north to join the Northern Wei. Much later, Sima Guang (1019–1086), who served as chancellor for the Song and created the comprehensive history Zizhi Tongjian, claimed descent from the Jin dynasty (specifically, Sima Fu, brother of Sima Yi).
The uprising of the five barbarians led to one in eight northerners migrating to the south. These immigrants were called qiaoren (僑人 'lodged people'), accounting for one-sixth of the population of the south at the time. With consideration of the material loss refugees had experienced before arrival, they were exempt from the diao (調) tax, and other services. Those whose registers were bound in white paper were called baiji (白籍), while the others with registers bound in yellow paper were called huangji (黃籍). When the crisis had subsided, this preferential increasingly seemed a heavy burden on the people, arousing dissatisfaction in the natives. Hence, tu duan was an increasingly important issue for the Eastern Jin.
The Eastern Jin court established three levels of administrative divisions which served as strongholds for the qiaoren: the qiaozhou (僑州, 'province'), qiaojun (僑郡, 'commandery'), and qiaoxian (僑縣, the lodged county), these lodged administrative divisions were merely nominal without possessing actual domain, or rather, they were local government in exile; what could scarcely be denied was their significance in Jin's legitimacy for the northern territory as somewhat an announcement. Furthermore, it was also an action done to appease the refugees' homesickness, which was evoking their desire to reacquire what had been lost.
During the rule of Emperor Yuan, Emperor Ming, and Emperor Cheng, the lodged administrative divisions were concentrated in the area south of the Huai River and the Lower Yangtze Plain. At first there was the lodged Langya Commandery within lodged Fei County in Jiankang, but when it began is not exactly known. Then the lodged Huaide County was also established in Jiankang, around 320. According to the Book of Song:
Text from the Wikipedia article “Western Jin Dynasty”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.