Jin

Jin was the longest hegemon of the Spring and Autumn age, the northern great power whose ministers would carve it into three kingdoms. Founded when the Zhou king gave the old Tang lands west of modern Yicheng to his younger brother Tang Shuyu, the state took the name Jin under Shuyu's son Xie. Jin's peculiar institution was the absence of a royal clan: after the calamitous successions of the early period, every prince but the heir was sent abroad, so that by Duke Ling's time ministerial houses commanded the armies. The dukes compensated with talent: Duke Xian moved the capital to Jiang and destroyed seventeen states, and Duke Wen, returned from nineteen years of exile, won the hegemony at Chengpu in 632 BC and held it through his successors. Jin contained Chu in the south, managed the Rong and Di on its borders, and organised its forces into the famous upper, middle and lower armies. But the six ministerial houses that ran those armies grew past control: after Fan and Zhonghang fell, Zhi, Han, Zhao and Wei ruled, until Han, Zhao and Wei destroyed Zhi and the Zhou king recognised the three as vassals in 403 BC. The rump Jin kept two cities, Jiang and Quwo, for another twenty-seven years before fading in 376 BC, the longest-lived of the great feudal states.