Love makes life so confusing but without love would you want to live Your position:Home->china history-> ThreeKingdoms
The collapse of the Han dynasty was followedby nearly four centuries of rule by warlords. The age of civil wars anddisunity began with the era of the Three Kingdoms (Wei, Shu, and Wu, whichhad overlapping reigns during the period A.D. 220-80). In later times,fiction and drama greatly romanticized the reputed chivalry of this period.Unity was restored briefly in the early years of the Jin dynasty (A.D.265-420), but the Jin could not long contain the invasions of the nomadicpeoples. In A.D. 317 the Jin court was forced to flee from Luoyang andreestablished itself at Nanjing to the south. The transfer of the capitalcoincided with China's political fragmentation into a succession of dynastiesthat was to last from A.D. 304 to 589. During this period the process ofsinicization accelerated among the non-Chinese arrivals in the north andamong the aboriginal tribesmen in the south. This process was also accompaniedby the increasing popularity of Buddhism (introduced into China in thefirst century A.D.) in both north and south China. Despite the politicaldisunity of the times, there were notable technological advances. The inventionof gunpowder (at that time for use only in fireworks) and the wheelbarrowis believed to date from the sixth or seventh century. Advances in medicine,astronomy, and cartography are also noted by historians. While there was a great deal of politicalactivity occurring during this period, most of it, consisting as it wasof various wars between different kingdoms (one of the great novels ofChina, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, is about this period), was notterribly important to the later development of China. Perhaps itsgreatest accomplishment was to reinforce in Chinese thought the importanceof having "one Emperor over China, like one sun in the sky." Socially, though, there were two importantdevelopments. The first was that the ethnic Han Chinese kept on movingsouth, while 'barbarians' moved into the north and assimilated themselvesinto Chinese society. The second development was Buddhism, which had hadits start in India sometime in the 6th century BC, when the Buddha probablylived. It was introduced into China around the middle of the first centuryAD (probably about the same time that the early Christians were writingthe Gospels), but really didn't catch on until the fall of the Han dynasty. Buddhism competed strongly with Confucianism,and for a long time, pretty much eclipsed it as a major cultural force.For various reasons -- some political, some social -- it spread very quicklythroughout China. It also changed somewhat from the Indian original, which,as far as I know, is not practiced anymore anywhere in the world. FromChina, Buddhism would spread into Tibet, Southeast Asia, Korea, and Japan. Buddhism also merged somewhat with Daoism,particularly as a popular religion; and while the process may be comparedto Christianity's appropriation of indigenous European beliefs and traditions,Daoism maintained its own identity and was not subsumed into popular Buddhism. 
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