China split north and south for 169 years before Sui reunited
From 420 to 589 AD, Northern and Southern dynasties divided China after the Sixteen Kingdoms and Eastern Jin. Sinicization sped among northern non-Han peoples and southern indigenous groups while Buddhism flourished and Daoist canons multiplied. Northern Wei united the north in 439; Sui conquered Chen in 589 to end the split.
The longer Six Dynasties frame runs 220–589. After Han collapse came Three Kingdoms; Sima control of Cao Wei led to Western Jin (266) and reunification in 280 when Wu fell. The War of the Eight Princes (291–306) and Five Barbarians upheavals shattered the north. Sima Rui refounded Eastern Jin at Jiankang in 318 with fleeing northern elites.
Former Qin briefly unified the north in 376 before Feishui (383) undid it. Liu Yu's rise closed Eastern Jin and opened the southern sequence. Northern history then passed through Northern Wei, Eastern and Western Wei, Northern Qi, and Northern Zhou—several founded by Xianbei elites—while southern courts claimed Chinese legitimacy.
Civil war and chaos defined the age, yet stirrups, Buddhist piety, and administrative borrowing crossed the Huai frontier. Division incubated technologies and faiths that the Sui and Tang would inherit as a reunited empire's toolkit.
In the north, Han gentry clans answered the turmoil by fortifying their villages, and those tight family strongholds hardened into private domains worked by tenant peasants. The Tuoba branch of the Xianbei, earlier rulers of Dai, rebuilt after Former Qin fell and founded Northern Wei, which Emperors Daowu, Mingyuan and Taiwu steadily enlarged with help from the father-and-son advisers Cui Hong and Cui Hao. Taiwu, urged by the Daoist Cui Hao, banned Buddhism after a revolt, the first of the persecutions remembered as the Three Disasters of Wu. Emperor Xiaowen, who reigned from 471 to 499 and had a Han mother, pressed sweeping reforms to curb the Xianbei military nobility.
Source: Northern and Southern dynasties
