Later Qin

The Later Qin, the Yao Qin, was the Qiang state of the Sixteen Kingdoms, founded in the wreck of Former Qin after the Battle of Fei River and ruling the Guanzhong from Chang'an between 384 and 417. The Yao clan of Nan'an, southeast of Longxi, alone among the sixteen houses a Qiang house, seized Former Qin's base and built an empire on the old Former Qin ground, held Henan, and counted Western Qin, the four Liangs, Southern Yan and the Ordos tribes as vassals. Its fame rests less on conquest than on faith: the second ruler Yao Xing, who called himself Heavenly King through much of his reign, brought the Madhyamaka monk Kumarajiva to Chang'an to turn Sanskrit sutras into Chinese, and the translation bureau he funded shaped East Asian Buddhism for a thousand years. All its rulers called themselves emperors, but the house fell in 417, leaving the sutras as its monument.