Fall of the Han Dynasty

The Han dynasty, which had ruled China for roughly four centuries, formally ended in 220 CE when the warlord Cao Pi forced the abdication of the last Han emperor, Emperor Xian, and founded the state of Wei in his place. The dynasty's authority had already been fatally undermined decades earlier by court intrigue among palace eunuchs after 92 CE and by the outbreak of the Yellow Turban Rebellion and the Five Pecks of Rice Rebellion, two large Daoist-inspired religious uprisings that spread across the empire in the 180s. Following Emperor Ling's death in 189 CE, the eunuchs who had dominated the court were massacred by military officers, and the resulting power vacuum let regional aristocrats and military governors carve the empire into independent warlord territories. Cao Pi's usurpation in 220 formally opened the Three Kingdoms period, in which the successor states of Wei, Shu Han and Eastern Wu competed for supremacy over roughly the next sixty years until reunification under the Jin dynasty.