Jin Empire

The sword

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)formation

Sima Zhao died in 265 with the throne of Wei already his in everything but name, and his son Sima Yan finished the transaction his father and grandfather had spent three decades assembling the pieces for. He deposed Wei's last emperor without needing so much as the pretence of a battle, proclaimed a new dynasty under the name Jin, and took the title Emperor Wu. Boulger's judgement on the transfer is unsentimental: "the Jin won the Empire by the sword" — not their own sword, in the end, but the one Cao Cao had first drawn against the Han, which the Sima family had spent two generations learning to hold.

An emperor with one unfinished task

What Sima Yan inherited was not yet the whole of China. Wei's old rival in the south, the kingdom of Wu, still held the lower Yangtze under its ruler Sun Hao, and reuniting the fractured Han inheritance under a single throne became, in Boulger's phrase, the one object of Emperor Wu's life. Sun Hao sent an embassy to Luoyang to offer his congratulations and a nominal submission when Sima Yan first took power, and Emperor Wu received the ambassador with every courtesy — while neither man mistook the gesture for anything more than what it was.

The toils tighter

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)peak

Sun Hao's protestations of friendship convinced nobody at the Jin court for long. Emperor Wu's ministers drew the toils steadily tighter around Wu for years before striking: a fleet of war junks built in secret from the timber of Sichuan, far up the Yangtze where Wu's admirals could not see it take shape, while a separate army massed to sweep down the river from the north. Wu's own minister Lu Kai had urged moving the capital from Wuchang to the better-defended Jiankang, in the coastal province of Zhejiang, and the change was made — but Lu Kai died in 269, and his death left Wu, in Boulger's words, "a divided and headless state at the mercy of its powerful neighbour."

A war fought on the water

When Emperor Wu finally launched the campaign, the river fleet descended from Sichuan on admirals who had had years to prepare and had not used them well, while the land armies advanced along multiple fronts at once. The details of the individual river battles have not come down whole, but the outcome did: Wu's resistance collapsed faster than either side had expected, and Sun Hao's kingdom, the last of the three that had divided the Han inheritance sixty years before, surrendered.

What ten years bought

For the first time since the Han's own collapse, one government held the whole of the old imperial territory again. Emperor Wu had reigned over Wei's former lands for fifteen years before the conquest and would reign over the reunified empire for ten more after it — a decade in which, by his own court's later admission, the qualities that had won the war gave way to the comforts that came with having won it. The native historians who recorded his reign did not spare him the comparison: the ruler who had spent years building a secret fleet to finish a war his father and grandfather had started spent his last decade, by their account, indulging exactly the vices victory was supposed to have made unnecessary.

A mere puppet

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)contraction

Emperor Wu died in 290 and left the throne to his son Sima Zhong, a weak ruler already thirty years old, under the regency of a minister named Yang Jun whom Boulger describes as ambitious but weak-willed - a man more interested in advancing his own position than in serving the dynasty that employed him. It was not Yang Jun, in the end, who did the most damage to the new reign. It was the new emperor's own wife.

An empress with old scores to settle

Empress Jia had grievances from Emperor Wu's own reign that she had never forgiven, and she pursued them with a determination her husband entirely lacked. Her partisans stormed Yang Jun's palace and put him and his followers to the sword; Emperor Wu's widow, the dowager empress, was stripped of her rank and reduced to the status of a commoner. Empress Jia then installed ministers of her own choosing, who learned nothing from Yang Jun's fall except how to build their own factions in turn. Through it all, Boulger writes, the emperor himself remained "a miserable and harmless prince" - a puppet first of a scheming minister, then of his own wife, capable of neither ruling nor objecting to the fact that he did not.

What the paralysis at the centre cost the frontier

A court this consumed by its own intrigue had no capacity left to answer insults from its neighbours with any real vigour. Local risings, left unrepressed while the generals sent to put them down quarrelled over precedence instead, grew into larger ones. Tartar kings on the western frontier extended their authority over territories nominally still Chinese vassals, and the court's only response was that such places were too remote to be worth the trouble. The one bright exception was a eunuch named Mengguan, given command of an army as a last resort after every established general had already failed, who marched in the depth of winter and broke a major rebellion in a single decisive campaign - proof, Boulger notes, that the capacity for effective action had not vanished from the empire entirely, only from the people who were supposed to be exercising it at the top.

A poisoned heir

Mengguan's single victory changed nothing about the trajectory the dynasty was actually on. Empress Jia had the crown prince - not her own son, and therefore an obstacle to her own ambitions for the succession - poisoned on her orders, removing the one clear alternative to the chaos she had done so much to create. The dynasty Emperor Wu had spent ten years completing by force of arms was, within four years of his death, being dismantled from the inside by exactly the kind of palace intrigue his own family had once used to win it.

A Chinese education

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)contraction

In 304 the Xiongnu settled inside the empire's own northern frontier were organised, on the Jin court's own authority, into five clans under a single appointed chief: Liu Yuan. His son Liu Song had been given the full benefit of a Chinese education on top of the martial qualities expected of a Xiongnu noble, and between them father and son commanded a following that had never actually forgotten the tradition of independent rule its people held before the empire absorbed them.

Turning the opportunity to their own account

Liu Yuan and his people watched the disunion consuming the Jin royal family with the same eye that Empress Jia's rivals had watched each other, and drew the obvious conclusion. They concealed their intentions behind professions of loyalty, sided with the imperial party while the crisis was still in doubt, then withdrew to Liaodong once the moment was right and established an independent authority there. Liu Yuan had himself proclaimed king - and not merely a regional king, but a claimant to the empire itself, taking the title King of Han on the strength of a claimed descent from the Han imperial house through the female line. A Tartar seizure of power dressed itself, from the first, in the most legitimately Chinese costume its founder could find for it.

Twelve years at the gates

Liu Yuan's armies pressed south for the better part of a decade. Luoyang was threatened repeatedly and held, on one occasion, only through the efforts of a general who had built the river fleet for the conquest of Wu thirty years earlier and was still, in old age, the one commander capable of buying the dynasty more time. Liu Yuan's death interrupted the campaign only briefly: his son Liu Song secured the succession against his own brothers by killing two of them and their chief partisans, proclaimed himself King of Han in his father's place within a year, and resumed the advance on Luoyang immediately after.

Menial services

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)contraction

Emperor Hui died in 306, a release Boulger calls happy from a reign that had meant nothing to anyone, including its own occupant. His brother succeeded him as Emperor Huai with real intentions of governing in person, but intentions were not what the crisis required. Liu Yuan and his son kept advancing south through the years that followed, and in 311 an army under the King of Han's command finally appeared before the gates of Luoyang itself.

The capital taken

The city fell. Its captors pillaged it and put it to the torch, executed the crown prince, and carried Emperor Huai off in captivity to Pingyang, the Han kingdom's own capital. There he was kept under close watch for two years, until Liu Song, taking advantage of a separate military defeat to salve his own temper, chose to humiliate his prisoner before killing him: dressed in black, the Jin emperor was made to wait at table on his Tartar conqueror, and was then executed on a charge Boulger says no evidence whatever supported. It was, so far as the sources allow it to be judged, the first time a Chinese emperor had been made to perform menial service for a foreign conqueror's entertainment before being put to death for the spectacle of it.

A second capital, a second captivity

Word of Huai's death reached the Jin loyalists still holding out at Chang'an, who proclaimed his younger brother emperor there under the name Emperor Min. The new reign changed nothing about the direction the war was running. Three years into it, Liu Song's generals appeared before Chang'an in turn and took it after only a token resistance. Emperor Min was carried off to Pingyang exactly as his brother had been, held for a year under repeated humiliations, and then executed in his turn - the same catastrophe visited on the dynasty twice within half a decade, each time ending in the same captive city and the same result.

What remained

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)end

Emperor Yuan, a surviving Jin prince, took the throne over what was left once word of Emperor Min's death reached the south, and moved the capital from the twice-captured cities of the north to Jiankang, on the Yangtze - gaining, in Boulger's phrase, a temporary immunity from insult that the dynasty's two previous capitals had conspicuously failed to provide. China had, in effect, split again into the pattern the Jin's own founder had once spent a decade erasing: a northern half ruled by the Xiongnu kings who had broken Luoyang and Chang'an in turn, and a southern rump still carrying the Jin name.

A hundred and fifty-five years, fifteen emperors

Four more emperors followed Yuan over the next twenty-eight years, none of whose reigns Boulger judges worth individual description. What held the southern court together in this period was less any particular ruler's capacity than the simple fact of the Yangtze as a barrier the northern kingdoms could not easily cross - a defence of geography standing in for the military strength the dynasty itself no longer reliably possessed.

Liu Yu

The man who eventually ended the Jin was, like Emperor Wu's own ancestors, a soldier who rose on ability rather than birth - in Liu Yu's case, from genuine poverty: abandoned by his own father, raised on others' charity, and apprenticed for a time to shoemaking before he found his way into the army and discovered a talent for it that promotion could not keep pace with. He broke a pirate chief's reputation before anyone else managed to finish him off, defeated a rebel general in a battle fought with a smaller force on both land and water, and was rewarded with command of the whole Jin military establishment. From there his rise was rapid and, in the end, entirely predictable: campaigns that restored order province by province, victories over the northern state of Wei and the southwestern principality of Qin, and a growing recognition among his own soldiers that the man leading them had long since outgrown the modest rank the dynasty had first given him.

The scaffold in the field

Liu Yu forced one Jin emperor's murder by strangling and installed his brother, Emperor Gong, as a placeholder he had no intention of leaving on the throne for long. Gong reigned less than two years before Liu Yu deposed him in turn - though "deposed" undersells the theatre of it: a scaffold was built in an open field outside Jiankang, a throne placed on it, and before the assembled thousands of the capital and its great officials, Gong descended from it to make way for Liu Yu in person. With that staged ceremony, in the year 420, the house Sima Yan had founded on the strength of his own family's accumulated service a hundred and fifty-five years earlier reached what Boulger calls its consummation - fifteen emperors, over a century and a half, leaving behind, in his own final verdict, an impression "as vague and indistinct as the part they played in the history of their age."