Fall of the Han Dynasty
The last Han emperor abdicated in 220 and China was divided for the following three and a half centuries. The dynasty had been failing for forty years. The Yellow Turban rising of 184 was a millenarian peasant movement across eight provinces, and suppressing it required giving provincial governors independent military authority — which they kept. The court had been fought over by the empresses' families and the palace eunuchs for a century, and in 189 a general brought troops into the capital, some 2,000 eunuchs were massacred, and the warlord Dong Zhuo took the emperor, burned Luoyang and moved the court by force. Cao Cao took possession of the emperor in 196 and governed in his name for twenty years, which was the most effective arrangement anyone found. His son Cao Pi accepted an abdication in 220 and declared the Wei dynasty, and the rulers of Shu and Wu declared themselves emperors in response, producing the Three Kingdoms. The demographic figures are the part that is hard to absorb. The census of 157 records about 56 million people and that of 280 about 16 million, and while much of the difference is administrative collapse rather than death, the wars, famines and epidemics of the period killed on a scale comparable to anything in history. The period was written up a millennium later as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is why everyone knows the names. The division also broke the assumption that China was naturally one state, and it took Sui and Tang three and a half centuries to restore it. What survived unbroken was the bureaucracy's idea of itself, which every successor regime recruited and every dynasty afterwards used.
- Year: 220 CE
- Category: Military
