Northern and Southern Dynasties
After the decline of the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317 – 420), the regime and territory of China could not avoid a fate of being split. Started from 420 and ended in 589, the Northern and Southern Dynasties were a period when the whole nation was divided into the Northern Dynasties (386 – 581) and the Southern Dynasties (420 – 589).
The Dynasties of the North and South were another lengthy period of disunity and internal strife for China. During this time period, the north and south were split and two separate successions of dynasties formed. In both the north and the south, there were different groups of rulers. Many of the dynasties overlapped each other in terms of time.
There were four successive Southern Dynasties, namely the Song (420 – 479), Qi (479 – 502), Liang (502 – 557), and Chen (557 – 589) Dynasties. In Northern Dynasties, there were five dynasties including Northern Wei (386 – 534), Eastern Wei (534 – 550), Western Wei (535 – 556), Northern Qi (550 – 577) and Northern Zhou (557 – 581).
The economy of the Southern Dynasties was better than that of the Northern one because people living in the Central Plains fled south to avoid war, which increased manpower and introduced new advanced manufacturing technologies. Yangzhou City was one of the key developed economic places in the Southern Dynasties.
map of Northern and Southern Dynasties
Northern and Southern Dynasties costumes
The Southern and Northern dynasties proved to be a period of national amalgamation most notably of the cultural exchanges between north and south. Although the chaos caused by war produced much suffering, it also provided an opportunity for cultural development.
The Chinese arts of poetry, calligraphy, painting, and music flourished during this period like never before, as Chinese aristocrats mainly in the south were socially expected to master these as their pastimes. Although the north had its cultural achievements, the south (specifically at the capital of Nanjing) was the place for higher cultural achievement, elitist culture, artistic refinement, and new standards of art that ranked artists according to their various abilities.