Jin dynasty

The Jin dynasty of the Sima house reunited China after the Three Kingdoms and then lost it faster than any unifier before or since. Its founder's family had served Cao Wei for three generations: Sima Yi seized power in the Gaoping Tombs coup of 249, his sons destroyed Shu Han in 263, and in 266 Sima Yan deposed the last Wei emperor, named his dynasty Jin, and fixed the capital at Luoyang. In 280 his fleets took the Wu capital Jianye, and China was whole for the first time in a century; the Taikang peace that followed is remembered as a brief golden age of full granaries. The rot was structural. The Sima princes, each enfeoffed with armies, tore the court apart after Emperor Wu's death: Empress Jia manipulated her feeble husband Emperor Hui, murdered the heir, and the Eight Princes then fought a sixteen-year civil war that bled the field armies white. The northern garrisons, stripped for the princes' wars, could not hold the frontier peoples settled inside the passes. In 311 the Han-Zhao generals took Luoyang in the Yongjia disaster, Emperor Huai was captured; in 316 Chang'an fell and Emperor Min with it. The remnant court fled south to Jiankang, where Eastern Jin would shelter Chinese civilisation for another century while the north drowned in the Sixteen Kingdoms. Western Jin's fifty-one years remain the shortest-lived unification in Chinese history.