HistoryMemes.com

Making Sense of History

Three Kingdoms: A Visual History

Get My 10 Best History Memes:

Visual history of a war

The century of Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Sun Quan and Zhuge Liang, when China's population fell by tens of millions and its history became its greatest novel.

Fought
184 to 280
Duration
96 years
Dates
184 to 280
Deaths
Registered population fell from about 56 million to about 16 million; tens of millions dead or unregistered
States
Cao Wei, Shu Han, Eastern Wu
Decisive battles
Guandu (200), Red Cliffs (208), Yiling (222)
Result
Reunification under the Jin, 280

The Three Kingdoms period (184-280) began with the Yellow Turban rebellion against the Eastern Han and the warlord wars that followed, and ended with the Jin conquest of Wu. Cao Cao unified the north but was stopped at Red Cliffs in 208; after the Han's formal end in 220 China was divided among Cao Wei, Shu Han and Eastern Wu. Decades of war between them ended when Wei's Sima family conquered Shu in 263, replaced Wei with the Jin in 266 and took Wu in 280. Registered population fell from about 56 million to under 20 million. The era's heroes and villains, embellished in the fourteenth-century Romance of the Three Kingdoms, remain the most famous figures in Chinese popular history.

When it was fought: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Three Kingdoms period. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

050100150200250300350Three Kingdoms period (184 to 280)Open: Eastern Han dynastyEastern Han dynasty (25 to 220)Open: Xianbei stateXianbei state (93 to 234)Open: Cao WeiCao Wei (220 to 266)Open: Shu HanShu Han (221 to 263)Open: Eastern WuEastern Wu (222 to 280)Open: Western Jin dynastyWestern Jin dynasty (266 to 316)

Registered population of China

Registration collapsed as much as population did; the true fall is disputed.

015304560157 (Han): 5656157 (Han)263 (three states): 7.67.6263 (three states)280 (Jin): 1616280 (Jin)millions

Timeline of the Three Kingdoms period

  1. 184
    Yellow Turban rebellion
  2. 189
    Dong Zhuo seizes power
  3. 200
    Guandu
  4. 208
    Red Cliffs
  5. 220
    Han abolished; Cao Wei founded
  6. 222
    Yiling
  7. 234
    Zhuge Liang dies
  8. 263
    Shu conquered
  9. 280
    Wu conquered; China reunified

The fall of the Han

In 184 the Taoist Yellow Turban rebellion, promising a 'Great Peace', swept the eastern provinces; suppressing it empowered regional commanders. In 189 the warlord Dong Zhuo seized the capital and the boy emperor, burned Luoyang and was murdered in 192. Yuan Shao, Yuan Shu, Lu Bu, Liu Biao and others carved up the empire; Cao Cao took custody of the emperor in 196 and defeated Yuan Shao at Guandu in 200.

Red Cliffs and the three states

Cao Cao's attempt to conquer the south in 208 was defeated by Sun Quan and Liu Bei's forces, who burned his fleet at Red Cliffs on the Yangtze. Liu Bei took Sichuan; Cao Cao's son Cao Pi deposed the last Han emperor in 220 and Liu Bei and Sun Quan followed with their own imperial titles. Zhuge Liang's northern expeditions from Shu (228-234) and Wu's Yangtze defence held the balance for a generation.

The Sima triumph

Sima Yi seized power in Wei in 249; his son Sima Zhao sent armies that conquered Shu in 263, and his grandson Sima Yan founded the Jin dynasty in 266. In 280 Jin fleets sailed down the Yangtze and Wu surrendered. The reunification lasted only a generation before the War of the Eight Princes and the Xiongnu destroyed Western Jin, but the period had bequeathed China its greatest store of legends of loyalty, cunning and brotherhood.

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

8 surprising things about the Three Kingdoms period

  1. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written about 1,100 years after the events, is 'seven parts fact, three parts fiction' and remains China's most influential novel.
  2. The Oath of the Peach Garden between Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei is fictional but the model of sworn brotherhood in Chinese culture.
  3. The Yellow Turbans' slogan was 'The Blue Sky has died; the Yellow Sky will rise'.
  4. Video game series such as Dynasty Warriors and Total War: Three Kingdoms have made the period famous worldwide.
  5. Guan Yu is worshipped as a god in Chinese temples, police stations and triad halls alike.
  6. The Red Cliffs battle site is still disputed among several places on the Yangtze.
  7. Cao Cao's poem 'Short Song' laments how short life is and how much he wants talent to serve him.
  8. The census figures for the Three Kingdoms suggest a fall from 56 million to under 20 million, one of the greatest demographic catastrophes in history.

Sources

Back to all empires and wars