ABSTRACT
In the year 280, shortly before a general named Diocletian established his authority over distant Rome, Sima Yan’s newly founded Jin dynasty in China attained the apogee of its power. The conquest of the southern state of Wu restored the imperial unity that had fractured with the collapse of the Eastern Han government at the end of the second century. Sima Yan’s grandfather Sima Yi, the scion of a prominent and wealthy landowning family in the flatland region of Henan on the south side of the Yellow River, had risen in the service of the Wei state in North China and, under a succession of weak emperors, emerged as the dominant figure in the northern government. By the time of his death in 251 he was ruler in all but name. His authority was inherited by his sons Sima Shi and Sima Zhao, and then by Zhao’s son Sima Yan. In 265 this new leader of the house of Sima deposed the last, feeble Wei emperor and took the throne for himself and his family; his reign lasted until 289, and he would be known posthumously by the title of “Emperor Wu of Jin.” The southwestern state of Shu having already fallen to the northern armies in 263, Sima Yan turned to the conquest of Wu. The final campaign began in the eleventh lunar month of 279 with 200,000 Jin troops marching against Wu in six columns, one of which descended the Yangzi River from the former Shu territories in Sichuan.1 The outnumbered southern defenders were overwhelmed in short order, and Sima Yan was soon in possession of almost all of the territories that had once been ruled by the mighty Han dynasty – from Lelang commandery in northern Korea to Dunhuang on the Silk Road, and south as far as the city that is now known as Hanoi.
