2 Struggles between cliques under the Eastern Chin dynasty (A.D. 317-419)

The officials immigrating from the north regarded the south as colonial country, and so as more or less uncivilized.  They went into its provinces in order to get rich as quickly as possible, and they had no desire to live there for long:  they had the same dislike of a provincial existence as had the families of the big landowners.  Thus as a rule the bulk of the families remained in the capital, close to the court.  Thither the products accumulated in the provinces were sent, and they found a ready sale, as the capital was also a great and long-established trading centre with a rich merchant class.  Thus in the capital there was every conceivable luxury and every refinement of civilization.  The people of the gentry class, who were maintained in the capital by relatives serving in the provinces as governors or senior officers, themselves held offices at court, though these gave them little to do.  They had time at their disposal, and made use of it—­in much worse intrigues than ever before, but also in music and poetry and in the social life of the harems.  There is no question at all that the highest refinement of the civilization of the Far East between the fourth and the sixth century was to be found in South China, but the accompaniments of this over-refinement were terrible.

We cannot enter into all the intrigues recorded at this time.  The details are, indeed, historically unimportant.  They were concerned only with the affairs of the court and its entourage.  Not a single ruler of the Eastern Chin dynasty possessed personal or political qualities of any importance.  The rulers’ power was extremely limited because, with the exception of the founder of the state, Yuean Ti, who had come rather earlier, they belonged to the group of the new immigrants, and so had no firm footing and were therefore caught at once in the net of the newly re-grouping gentry class.

The emperor Yuean Ti lived to see the first great rising.  This rising (under Wang Tun) started in the region of the present Hankow, a region that today is one of the most important in China; it was already a centre of special activity.  To it lead all the trade routes from the western provinces of Szechwan and Kweichow and from the central provinces of Hupei, Hunan, and Kiangsi.  Normally the traffic from those provinces comes down the Yangtze, and thus in practice this region is united with that of the lower Yangtze, the environment of Nanking, so that Hankow might just as well have been the capital as Nanking.  For this reason, in the period with which we are now concerned the region of the present Hankow was several times the place of origin of great risings whose aim was to gain control of the whole of the southern empire.