Sixteen Kingdoms

The Sixteen Kingdoms is the name Chinese historians give to the era from 304 to 439, when northern China broke apart into a succession of short-lived states after the collapse of the Western Jin dynasty. Most were founded by leaders of the so-called "Five Barbarians", the Xiongnu, Xianbei, Di, Jie and Qiang, while the Jin court survived in the south. It was the first time in the imperial era that non-Han rulers governed much of the Chinese heartland as emperors, and the period ended when the Northern Wei reunited the north.

The label comes from the sixth-century historian Cui Hong, who compiled records of sixteen states: five Liangs, four Yans, three Qins, two Zhaos, Cheng-Han and Xia. Several other regimes of the time, including Dai, the forerunner of the Northern Wei, were left out of his list, so the number is a historiographical convention rather than a precise count.

For centuries Chinese dynasties had settled frontier peoples inside their borders as soldiers, farmers and labourers, where they lived alongside Han Chinese, often facing discrimination. When the War of the Eight Princes (291–306) tore the Jin apart, rival princes relied on these tribal auxiliaries. In 304 Li Xiong founded Cheng-Han in Sichuan, and Liu Yuan, a Xiongnu noble, proclaimed a revived Han dynasty in Shanxi. His successors captured Luoyang and the emperor in 311, and in 316 took Chang'an, ending the Western Jin. A Jin prince then reigned at Jiankang, modern Nanjing, as the Eastern Jin.

The Jie general Shi Le founded the Later Zhao in 319 and by 329 controlled most of the north. His successor Shi Hu was remembered as cruel but backed Buddhism. After Shi Hu's death in 349 the state collapsed amid civil war and the mass killing of the Jie by Ran Min, a Han general. The Xianbei Murong clan's Former Yan then expanded into the Central Plains. In the north-west, the Di ruler Fu Jiān of the Former Qin, guided by his Chinese minister Wang Meng, built a strong state that conquered Former Yan in 370 and by 376 had unified the north and taken Sichuan.

In 383 Fu Jiān invaded the south, but his huge army was routed at the Fei River by a much smaller Eastern Jin force. His empire disintegrated: generals and princes founded the Later Yan, Later Qin, Western Qin, Later Liang and others, and by 400 as many as nine states coexisted in the north. The Later Qin under Yao Xing brought a period of stability until the Eastern Jin general Liu Yu destroyed it in 417.

The northern states adopted Chinese imperial titles, ministries and era names, and many introduced a dual system that governed tribal peoples separately from Chinese subjects. Much of the countryside was controlled by fortified manors of Chinese landowners, which sheltered refugees and limited state power. Buddhism, present in China since the first century, gained mass following in this era. Rulers employed monks as advisers, and Yao Xing sponsored the monk Kumārajīva, who arrived in Chang'an in 401 and translated many sutras. The first cave temples at Dunhuang's Mogao Caves were carved under the Former Liang.

The Tuoba Xianbei refounded their state as the Northern Wei in 386 and defeated the Later Yan in the 390s. Emperor Taiwu, who came to the throne in 423, overran the Xia, then the Northern Yan in 436, and in 439 forced the surrender of the Northern Liang, the last of the sixteen. Northern China then entered the period of the Northern Dynasties, and the country was reunified under the Sui dynasty in 589.

Our 400 map draws the Sixteen Kingdoms across northern China, at a time when the region was in fact divided among several rival states. The Jin dynasty (266–420) holds the south, and the period's turning point is covered under the Battle of Fei River. The first of the northern regimes was founded by a noble of Xiongnu descent, and the era's mixing of peoples fed into the cosmopolitan Tang dynasty.