Home / Dynasties / Division and Reunion / Jin Dynasty
Jin Dynasty晋朝
266 – 420
Reunification under the Western Jin proved brief; the court withdrew to the south.
Emperors
- Emperor Wu of Jin Sima Yan, 236 – 290 · founding emperor of the Western Jin Sima Yan, the founder of the Western Jin, inherited the government of Wei from three generations of his family and took the throne by abdication in 265, then spent fifteen years preparing the conquest that ended the division of China in 280. His reign produced the Taikang peace, a land and tax settlement, and a register of two and a half million households, but it also produced armed princes, disarmed provinces, and a crown prince who could not govern, so that the state he had unified began to break apart within a year of his death.
- Emperor Hui of Jin Sima Zhong, 259 – 307 · second emperor of the Western Jin Sima Zhong was the second emperor of the Western Jin, a man of limited mind at the centre of a state whose edicts were written by others, who reigned for seventeen years while his empress, his ministers and eight princes used his name to destroy one another. He was carried from Luoyang to Ye, to Chang'an and back, was deposed in 301 and restored in the same spring, and is remembered for asking why the starving did not eat meat gruel and for refusing to let the blood of a courtier who died shielding him be washed from his robe.
- Emperor Huai of Jin Sima Chi, 284 – 313 · third emperor of the Western Jin Sima Chi was the twenty-fifth son of Emperor Wu of Jin, a bookish prince who stayed out of the clan wars and was made heir in 304 because he had no party of his own. He took the throne in 307 at twenty-three, spent four years trying to govern through a regent who had taken the army and the administration to the frontier, and was captured when Luoyang fell in 311; he was killed at Pingyang two years later, after being made to pour wine at the conqueror's feast.
- Emperor Min of Jin Sima Ye, 300 – 318 · last emperor of the Western Jin Sima Ye was a grandson of the Jin founder who was adopted into a collateral line, made prince of Qin as a child, and set on the throne at fourteen in a Chang'an reduced to fewer than a hundred households. He surrendered to Liu Yao in 316 after a siege that reduced the imperial granary to a few cakes of brewer's yeast, was made marquis of Huai'an, and was killed in Pingyang fifteen months later, while the era name Jianxing that he had proclaimed went on being used in Liangzhou until 361.
- Emperor Yuan of Jin Sima Rui, 276-323 · the prince who carried the name of Jin across the river Sima Rui (276-323) was a great-grandson of Sima Yi who inherited the title Prince of Langye in 290 and, after the Western Jin collapse, founded the Eastern Jin dynasty at Jiankang, becoming King of Jin in 317 and emperor in 318. A cautious man without an army of his own, he ruled through an alliance with the Wang clan of Langye, survived Wang Dun's rebellion of 322 by conceding real power, and died in January 323, leaving a dynasty that lasted a hundred and three years.
- Emperor Ming of Jin Sima Shao, 299 – 325 · second emperor of the Eastern Jin Sima Shao, the second emperor of the Eastern Jin, came to the throne in 323 while the general Wang Dun, who had taken the capital months earlier, controlled the government from his camp on the Yangzi. In 324 he used Wang Dun's illness to strike first, broke the rebel advance at Yuecheng with a night raid of a thousand men, and spent the remaining year of his life dividing the provincial commands and restoring the three-clans punishment, leaving a state that was stronger than the one he inherited and no more securely the emperor's own.
- Emperor Cheng of Jin Sima Yan, 321 – 342 · third emperor of the Eastern Jin Emperor Cheng of Jin, born Sima Yan in 321, took the throne at five and grew up inside a regency divided between the chancellor Wang Dao and his uncle Yu Liang, until the rebel Su Jun took the capital in 328 and imprisoned the boy in a warehouse inside Stone City. Restored in 329, he presided over seventeen years of unusual internal peace, sustained by a balance among Wang Dao, Tao Kan, Xi Jian and Yu Liang, and in 341 issued the land register that first attached refugee households to the places where they lived; he died in 342, aged twenty-two, after naming his brother as his heir.
- Emperor Kang of Jin Sima Yue, 322 – 344 · second son of Emperor Ming, emperor of the Eastern Jin Sima Yue was the second son of Emperor Ming of the Eastern Jin who spent his first twenty years as a prince with titles but no following, and was placed on the throne in 342 because the ruling Yu clan judged that an adult emperor would keep them in power and an infant would not. His two-year reign was consumed by the Yu brothers' government and by Yu Yi's unfinished northern expedition from Xiangyang, and his death in 344 at twenty-three handed the throne to a two-year-old son.
- Emperor Mu of Jin Sima Dan, 343 – 361 · fifth emperor of the Eastern Jin Sima Dan was the fifth emperor of the Eastern Jin, put on the throne in 344 at the age of two and dead in 361 at nineteen, so that his entire reign was conducted in his name by his mother, a prince of the blood and a succession of ministers. Those years contained the dynasty's last sustained northern offensive, the destruction of Cheng Han, two campaigns under Huan Wen and the recovery of Luoyang, but also the loss of two armies and the rise of a general whom the court could no longer control.
- Emperor Ai of Jin Sima Pi, 341 – 365 · sixth emperor of the Eastern Jin Sima Pi was the eldest son of Emperor Cheng of the Eastern Jin, passed over as an infant in 342 and restored to the throne in 361, when the throne had no other heir. He reigned four years in a court run by his uncle Sima Yu and the general Huan Wen, signed the land-based registration of 364 that outlived him, and died at twenty-four in 365 after poisoning himself with the longevity drugs he had taken in the hope of living forever, leaving no son and no temple name.
- The Duke of Haixi Sima Yi, 342 – 386 · the only emperor deposed in the Eastern Jin Sima Yi was the second son of Emperor Cheng of the Eastern Jin and a prince of Langye who became emperor in 365 when his elder brother died childless, and who reigned six years and nine months without leaving one recorded act of government. In 371 General Huan Wen, needing to recover the authority he had lost at Fangtou, had him deposed on a charge that he was impotent and his three sons were not his, killed the boys and their mothers four days later, and left him fifteen years as the Duke of Haixi in Wu county, where he refused a plot to restore him and died in 386 without a posthumous name.
- Emperor Jianwen of Jin Sima Yu, 320 – 372 · eighth emperor of the Eastern Jin Sima Yu was the most celebrated talker of his generation and, for twenty-six years, the head of the civil government of the Eastern Jin: a prince who held every office except the one that mattered. Lifted onto the throne by the general he had never been able to check, he wept as he received the seals, spent eight months preserving what dignity the court had left, and died leaving a testament that one of his own officials tore up in front of him.
- Emperor Xiaowu of Jin Sima Yao, 362 – 396 · ninth emperor of the Eastern Jin Sima Yao was the ninth emperor of the Eastern Jin, who came to the throne in 372 at eleven and reigned for twenty-four years, longer than any other sovereign of that dynasty. His reign saw the victory at the Fei river in 383 and the recovery of the northern frontier, and it brought a late flourishing of Buddhist and artistic patronage at Jiankang, though real power passed from Xie An to his brother Sima Daozi and ended in 396 with a drunken night and a death that the Book of Jin records only as sudden, while later histories blame the Lady Zhang.
- Emperor An of Jin Sima Dezong, 382 – 419 · tenth emperor of the Eastern Jin Sima Dezong was the tenth emperor of the Eastern Jin, the eldest son of Emperor Xiaowu, who came to the throne in 396 at fifteen and died in January 419 after twenty-two years in which he never spoke a word in his own name. His reign saw the rebellion of Sun En devastate the eastern commanderies, the usurpation of Huan Xuan carry him upriver to Xunyang and Jiangling, and the rise of Liu Yu from the Beifu army to the mastery of the court and, at last, to the order for his death.
- Emperor Gong of Jin Sima Dewen, 386 – 421 · last emperor of the Eastern Jin Sima Dewen was born in 386, the second son of Emperor Xiaowu of the Eastern Jin and the younger brother of Emperor An, whose speech and body failed him and whom Dewen attended for more than two decades with a caretaker's patience. Made emperor in 419 to complete a prophecy, he wrote the abdication edict in his own hand in 420, kept a Buddhist household under guard at Moling, and was smothered with a quilt in 421 at thirty-six, leaving no son and a dynasty that ended in correct ritual.
Contemporary regimes
States that existed at the same time as the Jin Dynasty, in whole or in part.