regime had entered a state of total decline. Liu Xiu, a member of the royal family, seized the throne and relocated the capital to Luoyang, east of Chang’an and farther down the Yellow River. This move marked the divide between the Western and Eastern Han Dynasties. (A brief Xin Dynasty separated the two Han administrations.) Eastern Han suffered a perennial problem of endless infighting at the highest echelons of power among the various centers of power: the emperor, the empress’s family, the eunuch cliques, and the scholar‐officials’ cliques. Government was corrupt and incompetent.
True to the pattern of outbreaks of peasant rebellions in the final stage of a dynastic cycle, the Yellow Turban Peasant Rebellion erupted in 184 CE and lasted two decades. Its leader used a religion, the “Path of Peace,” to mobilize and organize its followers. He made the bogus claim that Lao Zi was its founder, and called it the Daoist religion. (Note: This should not be confused with the philosophy of Daoism.) As desperate peasants flooded its ranks, the rebellion spread like wildfire across China’s heartland. After capturing a place, they would kill local officials, and loot and burn in general.
The peasant rebellion posed such a serious threat to the establishment that the various power centers had to put their differences aside and join forces to fight their common enemy. They successfully squashed the rebellion. But in the course of fighting the peasant rebellion, the Han regime was weakened and collapsed in 220 CE. Regional warlords staked out their individual domains and fought one another even as nomadic tribes took advantage of Han weakness to invade China Proper. Thus, China entered its longest period of disunity.
The Qin and Han Dynasties, along with the preceding Xia, Shang, and Zhou Dynasties, shaped the broad contours of Chinese civilization. Their fundamental characteristics have survived to this day. The English words “China” and “Chinese” are derived from the Chinese word “Qin.” China’s overwhelming ethnic‐majority population is called the Han people, a word derived from the Han Dynasty.
Disunity and the “Melting Pot” (220–581)
The fall of the Han Dynasty ushered in a period of disunity that lasted for three and a half centuries. The fact that China’s disunity lasted for so long is an indication that the people of this vast area still didn’t share adequately in a common culture and economy. But by the time of the reunification by the Sui and Tang Dynasties after the period of disunity, the general population in “China Proper” had been mixed and kneaded into one people who shared all the essential characteristics of modern Han Chinese.
Map of Northern Wei and Southern Qi (ca. 4th‐6th centuries).
The main dynasties of the period of disunity were the Three Kingdoms (220–265), the Jin Dynasty (265–420), and the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420–581). The Three Kingdoms occurred at a time when three warlords divided up China Proper. The Jin Dynasty defeated the three kingdoms and reestablished its capital at Luoyang on the Yellow River. But the nomadic tribes had, in the meantime, taken over control of much of China Proper along the borders, and they soon advanced and captured the whole of North China. The Jin Dynasty was forced to relocate its capital from Luoyang to Jinling (modern Nanjing) on the Yangtze River in 317.
This ushered in the Northern and Southern States period, when northern nomadic states faced off with the Southern Han Chinese state across the Yangtze River. While the nomadic tribes took over what used to be Han Chinese territories in North China, Northern Han Chinese fled across the Yangtze River to settle in South China, and drove the local inhabitants into the mountainous regions. This was a huge population shift for the nomadic tribes, the Northern Chinese, and the Southern Chinese.
Northern Wei nomadic tribes founded 16 regimes to rule North China in a merry‐go‐round for one and a half centuries. Eventually, one of the 16 non‐Han regimes, Northern Wei (386–557), unified North China and ruled for another one and a half centuries. It was a nomadic Xianbei dynasty, but its early emperors believed that they could survive only if they abandoned their nomadic ways of life and adopted the Han Chinese ways of life. Their emperor relocated his capital to Luoyang (493) and began adopting Chinese ways on a grand scale. He encouraged, coaxed, and coerced his people into giving up their animal husbandry and roaming lifestyle, and adopt the Han Chinese agricultural way of life. He made them intermarry with Han Chinese, and give up their language and family names in favor of the Han language and names. He also adopted the Han Chinese form of centralized bureaucratic government, its system of tax collection, and its ideology of Confucianism. As a result, a centralized state took shape, their nomadic economy evolved into an agricultural economy, their aristocrats became landed feudal lords, and science and culture flourished. His efforts at Sinicization were so thorough that, by the time of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the Xianbei people had totally merged with the Han population and disappeared as a distinct ethnic group.
Meanwhile, the great amount of manpower, capital, and know‐how the Han population brought with them to South China combined with the vast natural resources of South China to create a flourishing economy. China’s economic center shifted from the North to the country’s Central and South. It would not be long before the Lower Yangtze Valley would be China’s granary, and its commerce and culture would thrive as well.
China became a huge “melting pot” during the four centuries of disunity. All the racial and ethnic groups were thrown in the pot to stew together. They were stirred, mixed, and blended mercilessly into a single stew. The lines of race and ethnicity were blurred in the long years of war and peace, migration and intermarriage, and learning to live and work in close proximity whether they liked it or not. This big heterogeneous mix eventually coalesced into a single multiethnic people that had all the essential characteristics of the modern Han Chinese population. Influence went both ways, but the main thrust was in the direction of the Sinicization of the non‐Han peoples.
Chinese have traditionally subscribed to the idea that unity under a strong, centralized government is a good thing, and disunity is bad. But this dictum does not always apply. Take the Han Dynasty, for example. The Martial Emperor had a very strong, centralized, and stable government that controlled a vast territory, a huge population, vital portions of the economy, and even people’s thinking, but it produced no outstanding intellectual figures. (Sima Qian wrote his great work, Historical Record, in secret.) On the other hand, during the periods of disunity of the Warring States and the Northern and Southern Dynasties, there was a galaxy of intellectual talents. It seems evident that a strong despotic government stifles intellectual creativity, while the removal of the heavy hand of government releases creative energies.
Two outstanding works, one on agriculture and the other on geography, were written during the sixth century. Jia Sixie’s Vital Technologies That Benefit the Common People is a systematic summery of the Han people’s methods of growing grains, fruit trees, and forests; raising domestic animals, fowl, and fish; processing and preserving foods; and utilizing feral plants. Li Daoyuan’s On the Waterways describes over a thousand rivers in China’s network of waterways; it also reports on the towns, cities, and produce along the rivers, and the local customs, legends, and histories. It is of great literary merit as well.
The decline and fall of dynasties throughout the ages have much in common. A manageable list of contributing factors might look something like this:
1 An emperor’s personal flaws were often the biggest problem. Since his primary qualification for becoming emperor was birth and not merit, his personal traits—such as his ignorance and arrogance, his extravagant lifestyles and costly construction projects, and worst of all his unnecessary wars—would often inflict irreparable damage to the dynasty. And since there were no institutional checks and balances on his power, or only inadequate ones, his destructive behavior would generally continue until his demise.
2 The existence of multiple centers of power was always a threat to the survival of a regime. These challengers usually came from the queen’s family, powerful bureaucrats at the imperial court, frontier generals, and eunuch cliques. The increase of power of these factions