Seventy years of Chinese breakup after Tang fell in 907
From 907 to 979 China lived through the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms era: five short-lived dynasties racing across the Central Plain while more than a dozen regimes—ten famous enough to name the age—held the south and peripheries. Song’s founding in 960 began the cleanup; Northern Han fell only in 979.
Late Tang fanzhen commanders had already acted like kings; foreign recognition of their sovereignty after 907 made the fiction official. Central Plain warlords donned imperial titles and fought almost continuously for seventy years. The eighth-century An Lushan rebellion of 755 to 763 and the later Huang Chao rising had earlier shredded court power, letting circuit commissions overlay the old prefectural grid and harden into future borders.
Song’s founding in 960 is the conventional climax, yet nineteen more years of campaigning were needed to pacify southern holdouts, and Liao power—later Jin, plus Western Xia—still owned the north. Northern Han was the last remnant extinguished in 979. For centuries afterward Song coexisted with those northern states until Yuan conquest rolled them all up.
In the Tang's last decades the regional military governors, the jiedushi, were no longer appointed by the court but passed power from father to son or patron to protégé, fielding armies that rivalled the palace troops and building lavish tombs. One of them, Zhu Wen, a defector from Huang Chao's rebels, forced the capital to Luoyang, executed Emperor Zhaozong in 904 and went on to found the first of the Five Dynasties. The other four, and the Song as well, grew out of a military organisation first led by Shatuo Turks whose commanders kept overthrowing one another.
The historian Hugh Clark divides the era into three stages: warlord chaos from 880 to 910, the proclaiming of new dynasties from 910 to 950, and forcible reunification by the Later Zhou and Song from 950 to 979. The south, though split among kingdoms, proved steadier than the north, and its rulers invested in trade, land reclamation and infrastructure that underpinned the Song economic boom; Guangdong and Fujian had thriving ports, while Sichuan and the middle Yangtze produced tea and porcelain. The Qing scholar Wang Fuzhi likened the age to the Warring States period.
Source: Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period
