Jin Dynasty (Jurchen)

A dynasty founded by forest people from Manchuria who took northern China and then became Chinese enough to be destroyed as a Chinese state. The Jurchen were hunters and farmers subject to the Khitan Liao until Aguda rebelled in 1114, declared the Jin dynasty a year later, and destroyed the Liao within a decade. The Song, who had allied with him against their old enemy, found the new one worse: Jin armies took Kaifeng in 1127 and carried off the emperor, his father and thousands of the court in the Jingkang incident, forcing the Song south of the Yangtze in a humiliation that shaped Chinese historical memory for centuries. The Jin then governed some forty million subjects with a Jurchen minority, adopted Chinese administration and the examination system, moved the capital to Beijing, and created a script for their own language that was steadily abandoned. That assimilation left them fighting the Mongols as a conventional dynasty rather than as steppe cavalry. Genghis Khan invaded in 1211 and the dynasty fell in 1234. The Jurchen reorganised centuries later as the Manchus and took all of China. The dynasty ruled from 1115 to 1234 over northern China and Manchuria. Its capital moved from Huining to Beijing in 1153. The Jurchen script was based on Khitan and Chinese models and is only partly deciphered. Jin porcelain and printing continued Song standards. The dynasty issued paper money and suffered severe inflation from it. Jin earthworks against the Mongols ran for hundreds of kilometres and did not hold.

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