Tuoba

Two major subdivisions of the Donghu had developed by the first century: the Xianbei in the north and the Wuhuan in the south.

The Xianbei, who by the second century CE are attacking Chinese farms south of the Great Wall, establish an empire, which, although short-lived, gives rise to numerous tribal states along the Chinese frontier.

Among these states is that of the Tuoba (T'o-pa in Wade-Giles), a subgroup of the Xianbei, in modern China's Shanxi Province.

The Wuhuan also are prominent in the second century, but they disappear thereafter; possibly they are absorbed in the Xianbei western expansion.

The Xianbei and the Wuhuan use mounted archers in warfare, and they have only temporary war leaders instead of hereditary chiefs.

Agriculture, rather than full-scale nomadism, is the basis of their economy.

In the sixth century CE., the Wuhuan will be driven out of Inner Asia into the Russian steppe.

Chinese control of parts of Inner Asia does not last beyond the opening years of the second century, and, as the Eastern Han Dynasty ended early in the third century CE, suzerainty is limited primarily to the Gansu corridor.

The Xianbei are able to make forays into a China beset with internal unrest and political disintegration.

By 317 all of China north of the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) had been overrun by nomadic peoples: the Xianbei from the north; some remnants of the Xiongnu from the northwest; and the Qiang people of Gansu and Tibet (present-day China's Xizang Autonomous Region) from the west and the southwest.

Chaos prevailed as these groups warred with each other and repulsed the vain efforts of the fragmented Chinese kingdoms south of the Chang Jiang to reconquer the region.

China’s Eastern Jin Dynasty has developed an alliance with the barbarian Tuoba, a clan of the Xianbei people, against the Xiongnu state Han Zhao, and the Tuoba chief had in 315 been granted the title of the Prince of Dai.

After the death of its founding prince, Tuoba Yilu, however, the Dai state had stagnated and largely remained a partial ally and a partial tributary state to Later Zhao and Former Yan, finally falling in 376 to the Di kingdom of Qin, known to history as Former Qin.

The Jin Dynasty had developed an alliance with the Tuoba against the Xiongnu state Han Zhao early in the fourth century.

In 315, the Tuoba chief had been granted the title of the Prince of Dai.

After the death of its founding prince, Tuoba Yilu, however, the Dai state had stagnated and largely remained a partial ally and a partial tributary state to Later Zhao and Former Yan, finally falling to Former Qin in 376.

After Former Qin's emperor Fu Jiān is defeated by Jin forces at the Battle of Fei River in his failed bid to unify China, the Former Qin state begins to break apart.

Tuoba Gui, the grandson (or son) of the final Prince of Dai, Tuoba Shiyijian, had reasserted independence by 386, initially with the title of Prince of Dai, and then as the Prince of Wei, and his state is therefore known in history as Northern Wei.

Chinese monumental stone sculpture becomes a tradition.

In the Yungang Grottoes ("Cloud Hill"), artisans begin the series of rock-cut shrines that contain a forty-five-foot tall sculpture of the Buddha.

The earliest caves reflect Central Asian and Gandharan influences, notably that of Afghanistan’s fourth-century Bamian cave-temples.

After the decline of the Jin Dynasty, the northern parts of China have come under the control of the Northern Wei, who had made the city of Pingcheng, now known as Datong, their capital.

Due to its promotion, Pingcheng had seen an increase in construction work.

The Northern Wei had early adopted Buddhism as their state religion.

Buddhism had arrived in this location via travel on the ancient North Silk Road, the northernmost route of about 2600 kilometers in length, which connects the ancient Chinese capital of Xi'an to the west over the Wushao Ling Pass to Wuwei and emerging in Kashgar before linking to ancient Parthia.

The work on this first period of carving lasts until the year 465, and the caves are now known as caves 16–20.

Beginning around the year 471, in a second construction phase that lasts until 494, the twin caves 5/6, 7/8, and 9/10 as well as the caves 11, 12, and probably 13 are constructed under the supervision and support of the imperial court.

The imperial patronage ends 494 with the move of the Wei court to the new capital of Luoyang.

All other caves emerge under private patronage in a third construction period, lasting until 525, when the construction comes to a final halt due to uprisings in the area.

The Rouran, only temporarily repelled by Northern Wei, had driven the Xiongnu toward the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea and are making raids into China.

In the late fifth century, the Rouran establish a powerful nomadic empire spreading generally north of Northern Wei.

It is probably the Rouran who first use the title khan.

The Tuoba dominate much of the region between the Chang Jiang and the Gobi, including much of modern Xinjiang, by the end of the fourth century.

Emerging as the partially sinicized state of Dai between 338 and 376 in the Shanxi area, the Toba establish control over the region as the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-533).

Northern Wei armies drive back the Rouran (referred to as Ruanruan or Juan-Juan by Chinese chroniclers), a newly arising nomadic Mongol people in the steppes north of the Altai Mountains, and reconstruct the Great Wall.

During the fourth century also, the Huns leave the steppes north of the Aral Sea to invade Europe.

By the middle of the fifth century, Northern Wei has penetrated into the Tarim Basin in Inner Asia, as had the Chinese in the second century.

As the empire grows, however, Tuoba tribal customs are supplanted by those of the Chinese, an evolution not accepted by all Tuoba.

The Three Kingdoms period in China’s history, part of an era of disunity called the Six Dynasties immediately following the loss of de facto power of the Han dynasty emperors, refers in a strict academic sense to the period between the foundation of the Wu in 222 and the conquest of the Shu by the Kingdom of Wei in 263.

Although the three kingdoms had been reunited temporarily in 278 by the Jin Dynasty founded in 265 by the Sima family, the contemporary non-Han Chinese Wu Hu ethnic groups had controlled much of the country in the early fourth century and provoked large-scale Han Chinese migrations to south of the Chang Jiang.

The Di people had rebelled in 303 and later captured Chengdu, establishing the state of Cheng Han.

Under Liu Yuan, the Xiongnu had rebelled near today's Linfen County and established the state of Han Zhao.

His successor Liu Cong had captured and executed the last two Western Jin emperors.

The Sixteen Kingdoms, or less commonly the Sixteen States, are a collection of numerous short-lived sovereign states that have coalesced in China proper and its neighboring areas from 304 after the retreat of the Jin Dynasty to South China in 317.

Almost all rulers of the kingdoms are part of the Wu Hu ethnicity and claim to be the emperors and wangs (kings).

Many nomadic ethnic groups are involved, including ancestors of the Turks, Mongolians, and Tibetans, most of which peoples had to some extent been "Sinicized" long before their ascent to power.

Some of them, notably the Qiang and the Xiongnu, had already been allowed to live in the frontier regions within the Great Wall since late Han times.

The Han Chinese have founded Former Liang and the state of Wei.

Six Chinese rulers of the Former Liang remained titularly under the government of the Jin Dynasty, whose emperors, who are of Chinese stock, now rule southern China from Nanjing.

The Tuoba seizure of China’s northern border areas in 386 has little affected the Chinese heartland, which boasts a large population and a well-integrated social and economic system organized along Confucianist and Buddhist principles.

By the close of the fourth century, a series of sixteen nomadic kingdoms have ruled North China since the erection of the first Xiongnu kingdom in the century’s first decade.

Emperors of Chinese stock rule southern China from Nanjing.

Prominent figure painter Gu Kaizhi, who flourishes in the latter half of the fourth century, is the putative creator of a hand scroll (the earliest surviving example) entitled Admonitions of the Instructress of the Ladies of the Palace.

Such scrolls typically portray human figures as edifying exemplars of good character.

The creator of Admonitions, employing a needle-fine brush point, brings a keen psychological sense to the delineation of his subjects, embodying them by their clothes, rather than by their flesh.

The Admonition Scroll, dated between the sixth and eighth century CE—probably an early Tang dynasty copy —illustrates nine stories from a political satire about Empress Jia Nanfeng written by Zhang Hua, who lived from about 232 to 302.

Beginning in the eighth century, many collectors and emperors left seals, poems, and comments on the scroll.

The Admonition Scroll will be stored in the emperor's treasure until it is looted by the British army in the Boxer Uprising in 1900.

It is today in the British Museum collection, missing the first three scenes.

There is another surviving copy of this painting, made during the Song Dynasty and is now held in the Palace Museum in Beijing.

The Song version is complete in twelve scenes.

Later Yan is under heavy attack by Northern Wei in 397, after its founding emperor Murong Chui had died and been replaced by Murong Bao.

Later Qin refuses to provide aid to Later Yan.

Empress Dowager She dies later in 397, and Yao Xing is described to be in such great mourning that he is unable to handle matters of state for some time.

After the period passes, however, he continues to wear mourning clothes.