war and conquest: Asia and the Pacific states, no single state had much power Thus, they joined into a series of continuously shifting alliances as a way of defending themselves from the northern barbarians The name of the second phase of the Eastern Zhou, the Warring States Period, gives a clear indication of the nature of Chinese life during this time Many of the military and political alliances that had been forged during the Spring and Autumn Period fell apart China descended into considerable chaos as various states tried to fi ll the power vacuum and absorb other states, and the Zhou emperor ruled in name only Warfare between states was nearly constant By the end of the period, instead of hundreds of city-states, the number was eight or nine, with each vying to gain control of all of China The nature of warfare changed dramatically during this period Earlier, war had been conducted in feudal fashion, with aristocratic nobles each leading his own small army During the Warring States Period armies became much larger and were made up of professional warriors It was during the brief, but ruthless Qin Dynasty that China’s kingdoms merged for the first time into an imperial nation The Qin emperors, who ruled from 221 to 207 b.c.e., confiscated all weapons, including those of the nobles who had fought during the Warring States Period This step was taken to prevent uprisings The Qin rulers also expanded China’s borders by going to war against the northern barbarians During the Warring States Period nobles had built walls and fortifications to defend their realms The Qin emperors ordered that all these walls be linked to form China’s first great wall to keep out foreign invaders (The Great Wall of China familiar to tourists was built much later, under the Ming Dynasty.) Despite the efforts of the Qin rulers to quell dissent and rebellion, they were unsuccessful Near the end of the dynasty the nobles began to reassert their power Peasants, prisoners, and soldiers rebelled The result was the overthrow of the Qin Dynasty and the creation of the Han Dynasty, which ruled until 220 c.e The Han Dynasty, however, began with an interregnum period from 206 to 202 b.c.e called the period of Chu-Han Contention During this period, in the vacuum created by the overthrow of the Qin Dynasty, two factions emerged that went to war to determine which would lead the kingdom One faction was the Han people; the other was the Chu These factions were led by the nobles who had been stripped of their power during the Qin Dynasty The numerous battles these two sides fought—the battles of Julu, Pengcheng, Lingbi, and Xi River, for example—became part of the cultural identity of the Chinese and are still depicted in Chinese movies, television shows, and even board games The power struggle was fierce; at times the warring armies were as large as half a million men After the tide shifted back and forth several times, the Han, led by Liu Pang (r 206–195 b.c.e.), emerged victorious and created the Han Dynasty The Han Dynasty tried to scale back the level of warfare To the north the rulers paid tribute to the Xiongnu and tried to buy peace through intermarriage The dynasty also tried to appease other neighboring nomads, which continued to be a 1137 threat At the same time, the Han Dynasty used its superior military force to extend its borders into the regions of presentday Vietnam and Korea The military also functioned to keep open the Silk Road, the trading route that eventually extended westward all the way to Rome In 154 b.c.e the military had to put down the Rebellion of the Seven States, led by several minor princes who objected to the Han Dynasty’s efforts to centralize the government The rebellion was marked by initial ferocious fighting, but in the end it lasted only three months Less than three decades later the Han Dynasty concluded that its treaties with the Xiongnu were ineffective and costly In 129 b.c.e a force of 40,000 Chinese cavalry attacked Warfare persisted intermittently until 119 b.c.e., when a Chinese force of 100,000 cavalry and 200,000 foot soldiers drove the Xiongnu into the Gobi Desert The campaign, while successful, was costly; the Chinese took 140,000 horses into the desert, but fewer than 30,000 returned The Xiongnu, however, just would not go away In the first century of the Common Era, China dispatched one of its most famous generals, Pan Ch’ao (31–101 c.e.), to subdue them and drive them out of the Tarim Basin to China’s west In 97 c.e he commanded an army of 70,000 men to drive them even farther west; he went as far as the Caspian Sea, where he struck an alliance with the Parthian Empire Despite all of China’s successes against the Xiongnu, in 311 c.e., 100 years after the end of the Han Dynasty, the Xiongnu sacked Luoyang, the capital of the Han One of the last military actions of the Han Dynasty was the suppression of the Yellow Turban Rebellion, sometimes called the Yellow Scarves Rebellion The rebellion took place in 184 and was led by Daoist peasants who objected to the regime’s decision to make China a Confucian rather than a Daoist state Despite fielding an army of 360,000, the rebels were unsuccessful and were put down in 185 Fighting erupted again in 186, 188, and 192, when the rebellion was finally ended For many historians, the Yellow Turban Rebellion, so called because of the yellow headscarves the rebels wore, was the unofficial start of the Three Kingdoms Period (220–263 b.c.e.) that followed the Han Dynasty Again, China was wracked by instability The “three kingdoms” were those of Wei, Shu, and Wu, though they were not really kingdoms but regions whose emperors each claimed to be the legitimate heir to the Han Dynasty The period was marked by a great deal of infighting, which eventually led to the defeat of the Shu by the Wei The Wei, in turn, were then defeated by an alliance of the Wu and the Jin Dynasty (265–420 c.e.) The period was extremely bloody, with a large percentage of the population killed during the wars that raged from about 190 to 280 On the heels of these civil wars came the War of the Eight Princes (also called the Rebellion of the Eight Kings or Rebellion of the Eight Princes), another period of civil war from 291 to 306 c.e The rebellion was centered in northern China Again, it led to huge population losses, which greatly reduced the power of the Jin Dynasty The dynasty itself was rent by divisions, leading to the creation of the Western Jin Dynasty (265–316 c.e.) and the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317–420