At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, it was originally the hegemony of the Wei, Shu, and Wu families, but in the end, the Sima clan unified the world, and history is such a paradox.
However, it is worth mentioning that the Sima family's usurpation of Wei was not a one-time thing, from Sima Yi to Sima Shi, Sima Zhao, and finally, to Sima Yan, they spent three generations to finally complete this change of throne, which can be described as protracted. However, history is always cyclical, and more than a hundred years later, the throne of the Sima family was also robbed by people with foreign surnames.
And this matter, when Sima Yi was alive, had already laid the groundwork.
To say that Sima Yi is really a very stoic figure, during Cao Cao's reign, he had a lot of strength, but he has always hidden his tiger claws and never exposed his ambitions. Later, Cao Cao and Cao Pi died one after another, and there were few capable people left in the Cao clan. It was only then that Sima Yi began his real performance.
Originally, before the death of the Wei Ming Emperor Cao Rui, he entrusted the government to Sima Yi and Cao Shuang, hoping that they could work together to assist his adopted son Cao Fang. In hindsight, Cao Rui's arrangement was obviously a major failure, because Sima Yi was an ambitious and powerful figure, and he was undoubtedly a potential threat to the Cao Wei regime.
And Cao Shuang, this kind of person who had not experienced any big scenes, could not shock Sima Yi at all. Sure enough, it didn't take long for Sima Yi to take advantage of Cao Shuang and Emperor Cao Fang's outing to visit the tomb and launch the GaopingLing Revolution, cleaningly eliminating Cao Shuang. Since then, the Cao family has no one who can compete with the Sima family. Along with Cao Shuang, there were many ministers loyal to Cao Wei, among whom there was a man named Huan Fan.
A hundred years later, the dynasty created by the Sima family was overthrown by people of the opposite sex, and its source was in this person. So why does a dead man have such a big impact, and listen to me.
Although Huan Fan was killed, he had a son who survived, named Huan Kai.
At that time, although Sima Yi already had real power in his hands, he was still a courtier of Cao Wei on the surface, so it was not easy to publicly suppress the relatives of those ministers who had been killed. And this is the reason why Huan Kai was able to survive. Huan Kai is very similar to Sima Yi, that is, hidden forbearance. Although the Sima family had a vendetta against him for killing his father, he only hid the hatred in his heart and never revealed it to outsiders.
He first lived in anonymity for a long time, until later, when the Jin Dynasty was first established, emperor Sima Yan was in urgent need of various talents to govern the country, and when he no longer settled historical accounts with those old ministers of Cao Wei, Huan Kai took the opportunity to enter the official field and silently prepare for his revenge. In order to win the trust of the Sima family, he has always maintained a very humble attitude, and he has repeatedly declared that his father's murder is a matter of course.
It is reasonable to say that a person like Huan Kai, who has a bloody feud with Sima Shi, the emperor is more or less uneasy, and even if he is made an official, he will not let him hold an important position. However, Huan Kai's attitude made the emperor gradually relax his mind, and in addition, Huan Kai himself was indeed capable, and soon he was given the opportunity to be promoted to the top level.
Of course, Huan Kai also saw the situation clearly, and he knew that it was too early to take revenge with his current strength.
So he pinned his hopes on the next generation. His son's name was Huan Wen, who was also a figure in the Jin Dynasty, and with his father's help and his own efforts, he was even more prosperous in the dynasty, and his name was not below his father. Soon, Huan Wen was valued by the people of the royal family because of his outstanding performance, and was recruited as a donkey.
Then again, the Western Jin Dynasty, like the previous Cao Wei, founded several heroes of the old predecessors, but the future generation is not as good as the next generation. Sima Yan, the Emperor of Jinwu, was wise in his life, but chose a son with intellectual problems, Sima Zheng, to succeed him. And this Sima Zheng is the inventor of the famous historical phrase "why not eat meat paste", and in terms of ability alone, he is even worse than Cao Fang before him.
In the end, under the rule of Sima Zheng, the Emperor of Jin, the Western Jin Dynasty was worse than a day, and when the throne passed to Sima Yi, the Emperor of the Jin Dynasty, the Western Jin Dynasty was destroyed by the ethnic minorities who went south. Even, in order to take refuge, the Sima family moved to the Jiangnan area, and eventually, the capital was built to Jiankang, in an attempt to make a comeback and reorganize the mountains and rivers. And this is the historical Eastern Jin Dynasty.
At this time in China, the sea was boiling, the Central Plains were bloody, the emperors of the Eastern Jin Dynasty were mostly not heroic, and the lack of ministers who could stand alone in the dprk and the middle of the country made Huan Wen take this opportunity to control the government.
At this time, Huan Wen, like Sima Yi before him, was ostensibly a minister of the Jin Dynasty, but in fact, he did not pay attention to the emperor at all, that is, the so-called power minister. Later, in order to fulfill the revenge task entrusted to him by his father, he began to purge the sima family and cultivate some of his own forces in the dynasty. Although at this time, the Jin Dynasty was not in order, and the group of subjects was centrifugal, it was not so easy to usurp power.
In the face of this, it was not until Huan Wen's son Huan Xuan appeared on the scene that the time gradually matured. In the first year of the reign of Emperor Xiaowu of Jin, Huan Wen died, and he left his brother Huan Chong to lead his army and take over as the Assassin of Yangzhou, with the then five-year-old Huan Xuan inheriting his title of Duke of Nan Commandery. After Huan Xuan grew up, he looked very good, looked cheerful, was artistic, and was also good at writing articles, and he was quite conceited about his talents and mendi, and always thought that he was a hero Haojie.
At this time, the Sima family had long lost the glory of that year, and the Huan family was gradually rising, and Huan Xuan forced the then Jin Emperor to "cede" the throne to himself. He also changed the yuan to "Eternal Beginning", established "Huan Chu", renamed Emperor An of Jin as the King of Pinggu, and soon moved to Xunyang. At this point, the Jin state withdrew from the stage of history, and the Huanchu regime established by the Huan family also began to stand in a corner of Jiangdong.
After Huan Xuan came to power, he was faced with all kinds of chaos in the last years of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, and he also wanted to cheer up and vigorously rectify, but Huan Xuan's regime represented the Door Valve clan and could not touch their own vested interests, so in the end, it could not be implemented.
For example, when he personally interrogated prisoners, regardless of the severity of the crime, they were released more often; those who stopped the royal driver and shouted wrongs could usually be relieved; however, he was cumbersome and harsh in his administration, and he liked to show off himself; officials mistakenly pronounced the word "chunju" in the edict as "chunju", and all the staff were demoted or dismissed. And Huan Xuan is also fond of hunting and building palaces, so people's minds change.
In the end, huan xuan reigned for only a few months, and the huanchu dynasty was overthrown. Even so, counting from Huan Kai, it took the Huan family three generations to pull the Sima family off the throne, and in the end, they repaid this vengeance. And the Sima family's fate can also be regarded as a kind of retribution.
Resources:
[History of the Southern and Northern Dynasties of Wei and Jin, Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms, Biography of Cao Shuang, Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms, Book of Wei IX]