Jin dynasty (1115–1234)

The Jurchens, a forest and river people of Manchuria, built one of the most powerful states in medieval East Asia. Under the Wanyan clan they overthrew the Khitan Liao, seized northern China from the Song, and ruled from Manchuria to the Huai River between 1115 and 1234, when the Mongols destroyed them. The dynasty took the name Jin, meaning "gold", and is often called the Jurchen Jin to distinguish it from earlier dynasties of the same name.

The Jurchens had long been subjects of the Liao. According to a well-known story, at a gathering on the Songhua River in 1112 the chieftain Aguda refused the Liao emperor's order to dance in homage. Elected leader of the Jurchens in 1113, he attacked Liao border posts in 1114 and in 1115 proclaimed himself emperor, adopting Chinese regalia on the advice of a Balhae-born official. In alliance with the Song, the Jin took the Liao capitals one after another, and the last Liao emperor, Tianzuo, was captured in 1125. One Khitan prince, Yelü Dashi, escaped west and founded the Western Liao, or Qara Khitai.

Turning on their former Song allies, the Jin invaded in 1125 and twice besieged Kaifeng. The city fell in January 1127, and the retired emperor Huizong and the reigning emperor Qinzong were carried off into captivity with much of their court. A Song prince fled south and refounded the dynasty, eventually settling at Hangzhou. After years of fighting, including the campaigns of the Song general Yue Fei, the Treaty of Shaoxing in 1141–42 fixed the border along the Huai River and obliged the Song to pay a large annual tribute.

The usurper Wanyan Liang, who seized the throne in 1150, moved the main capital from Manchuria to Yanjing, today's Beijing, in 1152, renaming it the Central Capital. His attempt to conquer the south ended in defeat at the Battle of Caishi on the Yangtze in 1161, and his own officers murdered him. His successor Shizong made peace in 1165 and presided over a long period of stability. Worried that his people were losing their identity, he promoted the Jurchen language, set up examinations in it and discouraged Chinese names and dress.

The Jin combined Jurchen tribal traditions with institutions borrowed from the Liao and Song. Jurchen settlers in northern China were organised into hereditary military units of households, while Chinese subjects were governed by a civil bureaucracy recruited partly through examinations. The state kept five capitals, a practice taken from the Liao and Balhae. Religion flourished: the Quanzhen school of Daoism was founded under the Jin by Wang Zhe, the state printed a Daoist canon in 1192, and a privately funded Buddhist canon of some 7,000 fascicles was completed in 1173.

From the 1190s the Jin faced mounting strain. A Yellow River flood in 1194 changed the river's course and devastated farmland, and the court built long defensive walls on the northern steppe frontier. A Song attack in 1206 was repulsed. Then in 1211 the Mongols under Genghis Khan invaded, crushing a large Jin army at Yehuling. The court fled south to Kaifeng in 1214, and the Central Capital fell in 1215.

Reduced to the lands around the Yellow River, the Jin held on for almost two decades. Under Ögedei the Mongols besieged Kaifeng in 1232, a siege noted for both sides' use of gunpowder bombs and fire lances. The emperor Aizong escaped to Caizhou, where, under Mongol siege, he handed the throne to a distant kinsman and killed himself; the city fell in February 1234.

Our 1200 map shows the Jin Empire (Jurchen) at its height, bordering the Song dynasty to the south, Western Xia to the west and Goryeo in Korea. It had replaced the Liao dynasty, whose survivors founded Qara Khitai, and its fall came at the hands of Genghis Khan's Mongol Empire; the capture of the Song emperors is covered under the Jingkang incident.