Three Kingdoms
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The three kingdoms period lasted from 220, when the last Han emperor abdicated to Cao Pi, until 280, when the Jin dynasty unified the country again, and it is the age of China's most famous war stories. The Han had been weakened by eunuchs, the Yellow Turban rebellion and the warlords who fought over the crumbling central government; after the minister Cao Cao's death his son took the throne in the north as Wei, while Liu Bei declared Shu in the southwest and Sun Quan held Wu along the Yangtze. The battle of Red Cliffs in 208, fought before the formal split, stopped Cao Cao from crossing the river and is the climax of the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written more than a thousand years later by Luo Guanzhong. Zhuge Liang, the strategist of Shu, is remembered for the empty fort trick and his standing carriage. The kingdoms were exhausted by constant fighting, and in 263 Wei conquered Shu; two years later the Wei general Sima Yan took the throne himself and in 280 completed the conquest of Wu. The period left a vocabulary of loyalty and strategy that Chinese culture still uses. Its chronicles were written by Chen Shou in the third century.