Disaster of Yongjia (311): The Sack of Luoyang by the Xiongnu

The Disaster of Yongjia was the fall and sack of Luoyang, capital of China’s Western Jin dynasty, to the armies of the Xiongnu-led Han-Zhao state in the summer of AD 311. The captured emperor, Huai of Jin, was carried off and later killed, and the destruction of the capital broke the dynasty’s hold on northern China. The event triggered a mass migration of Chinese families to the south and opened the long age of division between northern and southern China.

Background: a dynasty at war with itself

The Western Jin had reunited China only in 280, when it conquered Wu and ended the Three Kingdoms period, as described in the article on the Jin reunification of China. Its founder, Emperor Wu, gave Sima princes their own territories and troops while running down the provincial garrisons.

After his death in 290 the throne passed to Emperor Hui, who was widely regarded as incapable of governing. Court factions and princes fought for control in the War of the Eight Princes (291–306). Armies marched repeatedly on Luoyang and Chang’an, harvests were ruined, and famine and banditry spread across the north.

The rise of Liu Yuan’s Han state

Large numbers of non-Han peoples lived inside the northern frontier, including Southern Xiongnu groups settled in Shanxi since the Han dynasty. Their leaders had served Jin princes as allies and hostages. One of them, Liu Yuan, a Xiongnu noble educated in Chinese classics, used the chaos of the civil war to break away.

In 304 Liu Yuan proclaimed himself King of Han, choosing the name to claim descent through marriage from the old Han emperors. In 308 he took the title of emperor, and in 309 he moved his capital to Pingyang in southern Shanxi. After his death in 310 his son Liu Cong seized the throne by killing his elder brother. Historians call this state Han-Zhao or Former Zhao, because Liu Yao renamed it Zhao in 319.

The road to Luoyang

Han armies, together with the Jie commander Shi Le and the Chinese rebel leader Wang Mi, raided the plains around Luoyang for several years. The Jin court was dominated by the regent Sima Yue, Prince of Donghai, who quarrelled with the young Emperor Huai (Sima Chi), enthroned in 307.

Late in 310 Sima Yue led most of the remaining Jin army and many officials out of Luoyang, nominally to fight Shi Le. He died of illness in the spring of 311. As his army escorted his coffin east, Shi Le’s cavalry caught and destroyed it at Ningping, in modern Henan. The histories describe a massacre in which more than 100,000 soldiers and civilians were killed, a figure that may be exaggerated but reflects a catastrophic defeat.

Luoyang was left with few defenders, and famine gripped the city. Officials debated moving the court to a safer place, but transport was lacking and the roads were controlled by raiders. Some members of the court slipped away on their own, while those who stayed had little food and almost no troops.

The loss of Sima Yue’s army meant that the Jin state no longer had a mobile force capable of protecting the capital. Provincial governors who might have sent help were either fighting their own local wars or had already begun to look towards the south.

The fall of the city

In the summer of 311, in the sixth month of the fifth year of the Yongjia reign, Han forces under Huyan Yan, Wang Mi and Liu Yao converged on Luoyang. They broke into the city, burned palaces and government buildings, plundered the treasuries and looted the imperial tombs nearby.

According to the Book of Jin and the later Zizhi Tongjian, more than 30,000 people were killed, including the crown prince and many members of the imperial clan and the official class. Emperor Huai tried to flee towards Chang’an but was captured. Liu Yao took Yang Xianrong, the widow of Emperor Hui, as a consort, and she later became empress of his own state.

Emperor Huai was sent to Pingyang. Liu Cong at first gave him a noble title, but in 313 he made the former emperor serve wine to his guests dressed as a servant, a deliberate public humiliation. Shortly afterwards Huai was put to death.

Key people

• Emperor Huai of Jin (Sima Chi, 284–313): reigned from 307; captured at Luoyang in 311.
• Sima Yue (died 311): regent who led the last major Jin army out of the capital.
• Liu Yuan (died 310): Xiongnu founder of the Han state.
• Liu Cong (died 318): Han emperor at the time of the sack.
• Liu Yao (died 329): commander at Luoyang, later ruler of Former Zhao.
• Shi Le (274–333): Jie general who destroyed the Jin field army and later founded Later Zhao.

Consequences

After Luoyang fell, Jin loyalists enthroned Emperor Huai’s nephew Sima Ye, Emperor Min, at Chang’an in 313. Liu Yao besieged that city in turn, and Emperor Min surrendered in 316. Like his uncle he was taken to Pingyang, humiliated and executed in 318.

In the south, the Jin prince Sima Rui, based at Jiankang (modern Nanjing), declared himself King of Jin in 317 and emperor in 318. His court is known as the Eastern Jin. Northern China fragmented into a series of short-lived states, conventionally called the Sixteen Kingdoms, founded by Xiongnu, Jie, Xianbei, Di, Qiang and Han Chinese leaders.

The flight south was on a huge scale. Chinese histories describe it with the phrase “clothes and caps crossing south”, meaning that the educated elite moved below the Yangtze. Many hundreds of thousands of people are thought to have migrated over the following decades, although exact figures are unknown. The newcomers brought northern scholarship, family lineages and court culture, accelerating the development of the Yangtze region.

Legacy

Chinese historians have long treated the Disaster of Yongjia as one of the darkest moments in the country’s history, comparable to the later fall of the Northern Song capital in 1127. It was the second time in little more than a century that Luoyang had been laid waste: the warlord Dong Zhuo had burned the Han capital in 190, as described in Dong Zhuo Seizes Luoyang, and the city had been rebuilt as the capital of Wei and then Jin.

Older writing often framed the sack as an invasion by “barbarians”. Modern scholars stress instead that the Xiongnu and other groups had lived within the empire for generations and were drawn into power by the Jin princes’ own civil wars. The division of China that followed was finally checked in the south at the Battle of Fei River in 383 and ended only with the Sui reunification of 589.

Timeline

• 291–306: War of the Eight Princes devastates northern China.
• 304: Liu Yuan proclaims himself King of Han.
• 307: Emperor Huai comes to the throne.
• 308: Liu Yuan takes the title of emperor.
• 310: Death of Liu Yuan; Liu Cong seizes power. Sima Yue leaves Luoyang with the main army.
• 311, spring: Sima Yue dies; Shi Le destroys his army at Ningping.
• 311, summer: Han forces sack Luoyang and capture Emperor Huai.
• 313: Emperor Huai is executed at Pingyang; Emperor Min is enthroned at Chang’an.
• 316: Chang’an surrenders to Liu Yao, ending the Western Jin.
• 317: Sima Rui establishes the Jin court at Jiankang, the start of the Eastern Jin.

Why it matters

The sack of Luoyang in 311 marked the effective end of the Western Jin and the beginning of nearly three centuries of division in China. It shifted the centre of Chinese elite culture southwards to the Yangtze and opened the way for new northern states that would later shape the Sui and Tang dynasties.