Cao Wei seized China's throne by forced abdication and lost it the same way
In 220 AD Cao Pi made the last Han emperor step down and founded the state of Wei. Forty-six years later his dynasty got a taste of its own medicine, when the Sima family, who had spent decades running Wei from behind puppet emperors, forced the last Cao ruler to abdicate and founded the Jin dynasty.
Wei, often called Cao Wei to tell it apart from other Chinese states of that name, was the northern power of the Three Kingdoms period. Its foundations were laid by Cao Cao, chancellor to the powerless Han emperor Xian, who controlled northern China and was made Duke of Wei in 213 with ten cities as his domain, then King of Wei in 216. When Cao Cao died on 15 March 220 his son Cao Pi inherited the title, and on 11 December that year he took the throne itself. The rival warlords Liu Bei and Sun Quan soon declared themselves emperors of Shu and Wu.
Wei spent its early decades at war with both. Between 228 and 234 the Shu chancellor Zhuge Liang launched five campaigns against its western frontier and gained little, while clashes with Wu in the south mostly ended in stalemate. In 238 the general Sima Yi led 40,000 troops to take Liaodong after a three-month siege, and Wei armies later crushed the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo so thoroughly that Chinese histories stopped mentioning it for half a century. In 263 Wei conquered Shu.
Power drained away from the Cao family from 249, when Sima Yi toppled his fellow regent Cao Shuang in a coup. His sons Sima Shi and Sima Zhao kept control, deposing one emperor, and when the young emperor Cao Mao tried to fight back in 260 he was killed. Sima Zhao's son Sima Yan finished the job on 4 February 266, though the last Wei emperor, Cao Huan, was spared and lived until 302.
Wei left lasting institutions. The minister Chen Qun devised the nine-rank system for nominating officials, used until the Sui dynasty replaced it with examinations, though it also entrenched a hereditary aristocracy whose bonded farm workers paid their lords half or more of their harvest. Culture flourished too: the official Zhong Yao is the first known master of kaishu calligraphy, and looser intellectual rules gave rise to the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.
Source: Cao Wei
