After reuniting China, Sima Yan founded the Jin dynasty. He looked at the Cao family before him and thought, let’s not repeat their mistakes. So he handed out power to his relatives. Unfortunately he didn’t look back far enough, or read part 1 of this series. His relatives quickly turned against each other, just like the Zhou dynasty.
The situation worsened into a country-level Family Feud. As they fought, some family members called in barbarian tribes from the north for help. The barbarians looked at the mess and said, nice country you’ve got here. Shame if something happened to it. Then the country split in two. The Han Chinese fled to the south.
The Sima family had one redeeming quality: they bred like rabbits. One of them happened to be in the south, so people made him the new emperor and started the Eastern Jin dynasty. They shouted, take back the north! But it was mostly a marketing slogan.
The barbarians were not one homogeneous group of people. There were five tribes, and they all hated each other. In the next 60 years of Royal Rumble, different tribes formed different states, and teammates often turned heel against one another. Eventually one defeated all the others, became the champion, and formed the Barbarian Union.
The Barbarian Union attacked south with 800,000 men. The south sent 80,000 homeless people. They met at Fei River. And they were like, you think you’re so tough? Cross the river and fight me. No, you cross the river. No, you. The barbarian leader decided to feign a retreat. But his army didn’t understand what a fake retreat was. So they retreated for real. Most of them were killed by the pursuers. Then Gorbachev resigned, and the Barbarian Union dissolved.
The south went back to infighting right after that. As per Jin Dynasty tradition.
Northern Wei spent 50 years swallowing up the leftover tribes like a game of Snake and reunited the north. Then an emperor decided to de-barbarian-ize the country. One day, he told a million soldiers and civilians, we are marching south to attack another country. When they reached Luoyang, he said stop. This is the new capital.
He banned barbarian clothing, barbarian language, barbarian surnames, even barbarian skills like Whirlwind. Everyone disliked that, so they rebelled. The country briefly split in two. In the end, Yang Jian got the last hit.
While the north was playing Snake, the south was stuck in the Useless Son Pattern: a capable person usurps the throne, establishes a new dynasty, and his son immediately ruins it. Repeat four times. Some highlights:
Liu Ziye brought his aunt into the harem. He treated his uncle like a pig: naked, in a pig farm, eating pig food. He also forced his servants to chase each other naked in the palace and killed those who disobeyed. The piggy uncle later became emperor and killed everyone who’d helped him get there.
Xiao Baojuan’s hobby was catching mice and stealing dogs at midnight, and cosplaying as a butcher (the supermarket kind). He was also a butcher (the human kind) because he killed ministers at random.
Xiao Yan was a wise ruler in his early reign. But when he got old, he became crazy obsessed with Buddhism. He sold himself to a Buddhist temple. Four times. The ministers had to buy him back with 100 million coins each time.
Chen Shubao was the last emperor in the south and a pioneer of lying flat. Yang Jian defeated him and ended the civil war. You’d think it was the start of a great dynasty. But the Useless Son Pattern came back. After Yang Jian died, his son launched several expensive infrastructure projects, and fought (and lost) against Korea three times.
These projects artificially boosted the GDP, but people were living in hell. At this point, a father-and-son duo decided they’d had enough.