The five divisions were the form in which the Southern Xiongnu lived under the Wei and the Jin. They cover the period between the end of the chanyu’s power in 216 and the rising of Liu Yuan in 304.[1] Each division had a Xiongnu commander of its own and a Chinese officer to watch him. Above them stood the inspector of Bingzhou.[2] The government of the chanyus had continued unbroken since Duman and Bagatur. It ended with the divisions.[3]

The southern court before 216

The southern court was shaken from inside for a generation before Cao Cao touched it. In AD 187 the former governor of Zhongshan, Zhang Chun, rose in revolt. He led the Xianbei against the frontier commanderies.[4] Emperor Ling ordered the Southern Xiongnu to send troops to serve under Liu Yu, the governor of You province. The chanyu Qiangqu sent his Left Worthy King with horsemen to You.[4] The people feared that he would call out troops without end. In 188 the right division rose together with the Xiuzhuge, more than a hundred thousand people, and killed him.[4]

His son Yufuluo, the Right Worthy King, took the title. The men who had killed his father rebelled against him as well and set up the Xubu Gudu Marquis as chanyu. Yufuluo went to the capital to plead his case. Then Emperor Ling died, and the empire fell into war. Yufuluo took several thousand horse, joined the White Wave bandits and raided Henei. The people there had gathered in walled places. There was nothing to take, and his force was mauled. His own people would not receive him back, and he stopped in Hedong. The Xubu Gudu Marquis was chanyu for a year and died. The southern court left the seat empty, with an old king acting for the realm.[4]

Yufuluo was chanyu for seven years. His brother Huchuquan took the throne in 195.[4] The Right Worthy King Qubei is the next man the Hou Han Shu names. When Emperor Xian came east from Chang’an in 196, Qubei and the White Wave leader Han Xian guarded him and beat off Li Jue and Guo Si.[4] The court went back to Luoyang and then moved to Xu. Qubei returned to his own country.[4] In 216 Huchuquan came to court. Cao Cao kept him at Ye and sent Qubei back to oversee his people.[4]

Cao Cao and Bingzhou

Cao Cao had already dealt with the Xiongnu tribes of Bingzhou before 216.[5] Liang Xi was made inspector of Bingzhou after the ruin of Gao Gan’s revolt. He found the barbarians on the border insolent and raiding.[5] The biography of Liang Xi in the Sanguozhi says that he summoned their headmen and drafted their able-bodied men as auxiliaries, yicong. He sent their families to Ye in successive transfers, tens of thousands of people in all. Those who refused were attacked. Thousands were killed, and tens of thousands were made to submit.[6] After that, the biography says, the chanyu was obedient. The named kings bowed their foreheads to the ground, and the tribal retainers served like registered households.[7]

Two later texts describe the detention of the chanyu as a lure. A memorial of Deng Ai to Sima Shi in the Jiaping years, 249 to 254, says that while the chanyu was outside nothing could restrain the Xiongnu.[5] Qubei lured him and brought him in to serve. With the chanyu inside the frontier, the Qiang and the other barbarians lost their unity and gathered and scattered with no master.[5] Jiang Tong’s discourse on moving the barbarians says that in the Jian’an years the Right Worthy King Qubei was set to lure Huchuquan and hold him as hostage.[5] According to these texts, the detention at Ye was no chance event. Cao Cao used the Right Worthy King to bring the chanyu in and keep him, in order to check the Southern Xiongnu.[5]

Chen Shou says the same in a line of the preface to his chapter on the Wuhuan and the Xianbei. In the Jian’an years, he writes, the Southern Chanyu Huchuquan came to court and was kept to serve within. The Right Worthy King, he writes, was set to look after his people.[8] The Xiongnu lowered themselves further than they had under the Han.[8]

The division

Within the Jian’an era, which ended in 220, Cao Cao divided the Southern Xiongnu into five divisions.[7] The Zizhi Tongjian sets the division directly after the chanyu’s detention. Whether it had grounds for that year is not known.[5] The aim may have been to destroy the Xiongnu as a single state and thereby remove a threat to the empire.[7]

Under the Han the chanyu had governed his people himself.[9] He gave the posts of king below him to his sons and kin. The families of other surnames, Huyan, Lan and Xubu, judged lawsuits.[10] Each year the court held three large assemblies. Sacrifices were made at them, and the affairs of the realm were discussed.[10] The Han Leader of Court Gentlemen and the inspector of Bingzhou only watched the chanyu and tried to stop his dealings with the outer barbarians.[10]

Cao Cao’s arrangement was different. Each division received a commander, shuai, drawn from the Xiongnu nobility. A Chinese sima was set over him to watch.[7] At the end of the Wei the commanders were renamed commandants, duwei.[7] The Jin Shu says that Cao Cao split the people into five divisions and made Liu Bao commander of the left one. The other commanders too, it says, were of the Liu clan. The Liu houses were scattered over the five divisions, but all kept their homes at Jinyang on the Fen.[11] There are two explanations of the Liu. The first takes them as the chiefs of the Tuge, the strongest of the nineteen tribes, to whom the Chinese gave the title. The other takes them as the old Luandi house under a new surname.[12]

The tribes of the divisions

The Jin Shu names nineteen tribes of the northern barbarians who had come to live inside the frontier. Each had its own camps and was not mixed with the others. The Tuge were the most distinguished. They therefore supplied the chanyu and ruled the rest.[13] It has been asked whether the name of the Tuge has anything to do with the name Türk, and a clan called Tuku among the Tuoba has been set beside it. The question is not settled.[14] The Jin Shu names four clans besides: the Huyan, Bu, Lan and Qiao. Of these, the Huyan stood highest.[13]

The divisions after Cao Cao

The divisions did not stay as Cao Cao had drawn them.[7] In the Jiaping years, Deng Ai heard that Liu Bao’s division had rebels in it. He advised splitting it in two to divide its strength, and Sima Shi had it done.[15] In the last years of the Wei, one division was cut into three sections. In the Taishi years of the Jin, 265 to 274, a division was cut into four.[15] Through all of this the Xiongnu of the divisions were still called, as a whole, the five divisions or the five divisions of Bingzhou.[3] Their seats were Zishi, Qi, Daling and Xinxing in Bingzhou, and Puzi in Pingyang, across the border of Bingzhou. One of the two commands made from a divided division lived in Yanmen.[3]

They were not quiet. The Jin Shu’s biography of the northern barbarians says that in 271 the chanyu Liu Meng revolted and left the frontier. In the next year, it says, an officer under him killed him and submitted.[16] The biography may be wrong to call him chanyu. Other chapters of the Jin Shu and the Wei Shu show him as the commander of a single division, the central one.[17]

Oversight

The Wei restored the post of Leader of Court Gentlemen and Protector of the Xiongnu in the fifth year of Taihe, 231.[18] Under the Wei and the Jin the post was held together with the office of inspector of Bingzhou.[18] The Sanguozhi names Sun Li and, in the first years of Zhengshi, Tian Yu in the combined post. The Jin Shu names Shi Jian and, last of all, Liu Kun.[19] The first Wei inspector of Bingzhou, Liang Xi, and the last Jin one, Liu Kun, are both recorded as having done great service in governing the Bingzhou Xiongnu.[19]

Numbers and dues

The Jin Shu counts more than ten thousand encampments in the Left division and more than six thousand each in the Right and the Central. All of these lay within Taiyuan, about twenty-two thousand in all. It adds more than three thousand of the Southern division at Puzi in Pingyang and more than four thousand of the Northern division in Xinxing.[20] The Jin register records thirteen counties and fourteen thousand households for the whole of Taiyuan.[21] Some scholars conclude that the Xiongnu of the divisions were therefore not counted in the household registers.[20]

The same scholars hold that they were not free of dues. The Jin Shu sets down rules for frontier peoples. A distant barbarian who did not till assigned fields paid grain, three hu a household, or five dou if he lived far off. If he lived very far, he paid a poll tax of twenty-eight cash a head. Barbarians also paid cloth, a bolt a household, or perhaps a zhang if they lived far off.[22] No source states what the divisions paid. The argument proceeds from the dues laid on surrendered barbarians elsewhere.[22] The phrases of the sources point the same way. One is the Sanguozhi’s retainers who served like registered households. The other is Liu Xuan’s complaint, quoted below, that kings and marquises had been reduced to the level of registered households.[23]

A Jin Shu biography adds that in the Taiyuan divisions the larger houses took Xiongnu as tenants, several thousand in the largest cases.[23] Some scholars take it to show tribesmen of the Left, Right and Central divisions going to the houses of their own nobles to escape the public levies.[23] Conditions varied with the strength of the court. In the unsettled years at the start of the Wei, the able-bodied Xiongnu were often drafted as auxiliaries. In the peace of the Jin, this was rare. Some poor Xiongnu were sold into China as slaves.[24] In that case, the position of the divisions is the reverse of that of the Southern Xiongnu under the Han. The Southern Xiongnu paid no dues and drew gifts that strained the Han court.[23]

The title of chanyu

The title of chanyu outlived its power.[25] When Cao Pi took the throne in 220, a Xiongnu chanyu stood among the tens of thousands who attended.[26] The memorial of the Wei officials urging him to accept was signed ‘Quan, subject, Southern Chanyu of the Xiongnu’.[26] In the first year of Huangchu the Wei court gave Huchuquan a seal and ribbon, a covered carriage and a sword.[26] A Southern Chanyu stood among the dignitaries at the accession of the first Jin emperor in 265. In the Xianning years, 275 to 280, a chanyu came to court and was ranked below the princes and dukes.[25] Liu Xuan, then Right Worthy King, complained in words the Jin Shu preserves. Since the fall of the Han, under Wei and Jin, he said, their chanyu had held an empty title without a foot of land.[25] Their kings and marquises, he said, had sunk to the level of registered commoners.[25]

The rising of 304

In 304 the Jin prince of Chengdu made Liu Yuan, the Left Worthy King, commander of the five divisions of Bingzhou. He gave him the title of Northern Chanyu, not Southern.[25] In the same year Liu Yuan broke with the Jin and proclaimed himself king of Han.[27] The five divisions ended in the Xiongnu Han state he founded. Liu Yuan said that his name Liu came from the Han princess who had been given to Bagatur. He claimed that under the old treaties of brotherhood the Xiongnu house had succeeded the Han when the elder brother died.[28] Four of the northern dynasties between 304 and 439, Former Zhao, Later Zhao, Northern Liang and Xia, are said to have taken pride in reckoning themselves to the house of the Xiongnu chanyus.[29]

References

  1. ^ 内田吟風 1934, p. 275,279
  2. ^ 内田吟風 1934, p. 276,289
  3. ^ a b c 内田吟風 1934, p. 277
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h Hou Han Shu, juan 89
  5. ^ a b c d e f g 内田吟風 1934, p. 275
  6. ^ 内田吟風 1934, p. 275,276
  7. ^ a b c d e f 内田吟風 1934, p. 276
  8. ^ a b Sanguozhi, juan 30
  9. ^ 内田吟風 1934, p. 272
  10. ^ a b c 内田吟風 1934, p. 273
  11. ^ 内田吟風 1934, p. 286
  12. ^ 内田吟風 1934, p. 282,285
  13. ^ a b 内田吟風 1934, p. 282
  14. ^ Rásonyi 1993, p. 20
  15. ^ a b 内田吟風 1934, p. 276,277
  16. ^ 内田吟風 1934, p. 280
  17. ^ 内田吟風 1934, p. 280,291
  18. ^ a b 内田吟風 1934, p. 289
  19. ^ a b 内田吟風 1934, p. 290
  20. ^ a b 内田吟風 1934, p. 291,292
  21. ^ 内田吟風 1934, p. 291
  22. ^ a b 内田吟風 1934, p. 292
  23. ^ a b c d 内田吟風 1934, p. 293
  24. ^ 内田吟風 1934, p. 294
  25. ^ a b c d e 内田吟風 1934, p. 279
  26. ^ a b c 内田吟風 1934, p. 278
  27. ^ 内田吟風 1935, p. 569
  28. ^ Lattimore 1951, p. 526–527
  29. ^ Rásonyi 1993, p. 67,75

Sources

Literature

  • Uchida Ginpū 内田吟風, 後漢末期より五胡亂勃發に至る匈奴五部の狀勢に就て (1934)
  • Uchida Ginpū 内田吟風, 五胡亂及び北魏に於ける匈奴 (1935)
  • László Rásonyi, Tarihte Türklük (1993)
  • Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1951)

Related

What links here3

States
Southern Xiongnu · Xiongnu Han
Institutions and Titles
Chanyu

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Five Divisions of the Xiongnu.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/polities/xiongnu-five-divisions/

Last revised: 8 November 2026