Goodbye Jin Dynasty, We Hardly Knew You

So we are in the 5th century in China, which is ruled by the Jin Empire.

And the Jin Empire, when it falls, is going to usher in a period of political fragmentation that we call the 16 Kingdoms Period, named for the 16 states that sprung up in the wake of the Jin Empire's collapse.

So let's get into the Jin Dynasty, why they fell, and what happened afterward.

By the turn of the 5th century, China had been dealing with nomadic invasions for centuries.

China borders the Great Eurasian Step.

The Great Eurasian Step is just to the north of China.

And in ancient times, the Chinese handled these nomadic invasions into China by basically paying the nomads off.

And this got old really fast because the Chinese believed that their emperor was the ruler of the entire world.

And it gets really hard to, on the one hand, say that your emperor is the ruler of the whole world, while on the other hand, your emperor is paying huge bribes to these nomads, basically saying, please don't attack me.

And these nomads continue to ask for larger and larger bribes.

And they ask for Chinese wives and luxury goods and gold and silver.

And so eventually this gets really old.

And the Chinese also have an issue with this because the Chinese tend to be chauvinistic people.

They believe that their culture, their society is the best and that anybody who doesn't engage with their culture and their society is a barbarian.

You know, they're uncivilized.

And so the fact that they had to pay tribute to these quote unquote uncivilized barbarians really got under their skin.

So the Chinese do come up with a few different strategies to deal with the nomads.

And one of the most classic ones is they will hire one group of nomads to attack another group of nomads and then thereby weaken all the nomads because they they're going to be too busy fighting each other to worry about attacking China.

This is a very good tactic for the Chinese.

It works out very well for them.

It also works out for a variety of other states.

We talked about how the Sasanian Persians employed this strategy to get the Huns out of their territory in the last episode.

Another thing that the Chinese really start doing is they, anytime they defeat a nomadic tribe, they oftentimes will force that nomadic tribe to settle down, establish permanent settlements in on the far side of the imperial frontiers.

And what they are basically doing is they're forcing these ex-nomads to turn into buffers for the Chinese heartland so that any nomads invading China will basically get slowed down attacking their ex-nomadic cousins.

And so by the time they reach the Chinese heartland, the Chinese military has had more than enough time to get prepared to face this nomadic invasion.