Wang Tun had grown rich and powerful in this region; he also had near relatives at the imperial court; so he was able to march against the capital.  The emperor in his weakness was ready to abdicate but died before that stage was reached.  His son, however, defeated Wang Tun with the aid of General Yue Liang (A.D. 323).  Yue Liang was the empress’s brother; he, too, came from a northern family.  Yuean Ti’s successor also died early, and the young son of Yue Liang’s sister came to the throne as Emperor Ch’eng (326-342); his mother ruled as regent, but Yue Liang carried on the actual business of government.  Against this clique rose Su Chuen, another member of the northern gentry, who had made himself leader of a bandit gang in A.D. 300 but had then been given a military command by the dynasty.  In 328 he captured the capital and kidnapped the emperor, but then fell before the counterthrust of the Yue Liang party.  The domination of Yue Liang’s clique continued after the death of the twenty-one-years-old emperor.  His twenty-year-old brother was set in his place; he, too, died two years later, and his two-year-old son became emperor (Mu Ti, 345-361).

Meanwhile this clique was reinforced by the very important Huan family.  This family came from the same city as the imperial house and was a very old gentry family of that city.  One of the family attained a high post through personal friendship with Yue Liang:  on his death his son Huan Wen came into special prominence as military commander.

Huan Wen, like Wang Tun and others before him, tried to secure a firm foundation for his power, once more in the west.  In 347 he reconquered Szechwan and deposed the local dynasty.  Following this, Huan Wen and the Yue family undertook several joint campaigns against northern states—­the first reaction of the south against the north, which in the past had always been the aggressor.  The first fighting took place directly to the north, where the collapse of the “Later Chao” seemed to make intervention easy.  The main objective was the regaining of the regions of eastern Honan, northern Anhwei and Kiangsu, in which were the family seats of Huan’s and the emperor’s families, as well as that of the Hsieh family which also formed an important group in the court clique.  The purpose of the northern campaigns was not, of course, merely to defend private interests of court cliques:  the northern frontier was the weak spot of the southern empire, for its plains could easily be overrun.  It was then observed that the new “Earlier Ch’in” state was trying to spread from the north-west eastwards into this plain, and Ch’in was attacked in an attempt to gain a more favourable frontier territory.  These expeditions brought no important practical benefit to the south; and they were not embarked on with full force, because there was only the one court clique at the back of them, and that not whole-heartedly, since it was too much taken up with the politics of the court.