Emperor Taizong of Jin
Emperor Taizong of Jin destroyed two empires in twelve years, one of them the ally that had asked for his help. The Jurchen were a forest people of Manchuria subject to the Khitan Liao empire until his brother raised them in revolt in 1114. Taizong succeeded him in 1123 and finished the Liao within two years. The Song had allied with the Jurchen against the Liao, on the reasoning that a distant new power was preferable to a near old one, and had performed so poorly in their own part of the campaign that the Jurchen drew the obvious conclusion. In 1125 Jin armies turned south. Kaifeng fell in 1127 after two sieges. What followed is remembered in Chinese as the Jingkang incident: the retired emperor Huizong, the reigning emperor Qinzong, and several thousand of the imperial family, court women and craftsmen were taken north into captivity, where the women were distributed among Jurchen officers and the emperors given deliberately humiliating titles. Huizong died in Manchuria after eight years. Holding the north was a different problem from taking it. Taizong kept the Khitan and Chinese bureaucracies he had captured and ran them in parallel with the Jurchen tribal military organisation, which is the arrangement every steppe conquest dynasty in China arrived at and which steadily dissolved the conquerors into the conquered. Within two generations the Jin court wrote in Chinese, examined its officials in the Confucian classics, and had to legislate to stop Jurchen nobles adopting Chinese dress. A surviving prince re-established the dynasty south of the Yangtze, and the Southern Song lasted another century and a half - richer, more urban and more commercially sophisticated than the north it had lost, and permanently unable to recover it. The Jin ruled north China for a century as a conquest dynasty using Chinese administration, and were destroyed in their turn by the Mongols in 1234.
- Lived: 1075 CE – 1135 CE
- Nationality: Jurchen
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
