Professor Andrew Meyer

But in the wake of these sort of civil wars that he sets off, Jin is partitioned.

So Jin had been a single state.

It had been an enormous state, larger than the modern state of Greece, which, you know, if you think about that in terms of the ancient world, the modern state of Greece housed more than a thousand city-states at the time that we're talking about.

So this enormous territory that ostensibly was operating as a single polity, it gets divided in three.

Three of dozens of clans that had been the vassals of the Jin dukes

the Han, the Wei, and the Zhao, they in effect sort of shrug off the control of the Jin Dukes.

They partition the state of Jin, and those three states are three of what they call the seven titans, the seven most powerful states of the subsequent Warring States period.

So the irony is that each of those states individually becomes vastly more powerful than the unified state of Jin had been.

This is sort of an object lesson in the importance of reorganization and reform, that Han, Wei, and Zhao all begin to emulate some of the kinds of internal reforms that the Tian clan was doing in chief.

Through this internal reorganization, through this institution of new mechanisms of control, each of those three states is individually more powerful.

can draw more deeply on the human and material resources of their terrain.

So again, very disorienting for political observers who know the history of the Zhou realm

The idea that the state of Jin would no longer exist, that its ancient house would be displaced, and that it would be partitioned, and that each of those states that came out of the partition of the state of Jin would be more powerful than the United State of Jin had been.

All of this is very disorienting.

And so by the time that happens, which is in the middle of the 5th century, by about 453 AD,

You know, those three crises, the Ku and Xi, the whole saga between Wu and Yuan in the South, and then the partition of Jin.

Every politically literate observer knows that we're in a different universe now.

Well, the state that occupied the original home base of the Zhou kings, so the Zhou kings got displaced.

They had occupied a valley formed by one of the tributaries of the Yellow River, the Wei River Valley.

And the Wey River Valley was an especially sort of powerful base of operations because it cut a pass through this mountain range.