48 China in World History
The most far-reaching of Feng’s reforms was the institution of the
“equal-fi eld system.” Under this system, all land belonged to the state,
but the state in turn assigned every family twenty mu (a mu is one-third
acre) of land permanently for the cultivation of mulberry and other
trees. In addition, every family was given lifetime control over forty mu
of farm land for every able-bodied man in the family (including slaves)
and thirty mu for every ox the family possessed. Only offi cials’ fami-
lies could own more land than these standard allotments. In exchange
for these generous allotments of land, every family was obliged to pay
annual taxes on the land they farmed. This system was designed to
ensure that all available land was occupied by taxpaying farmers and
that no one could accumulate unlimited land holdings without being
taxed. It remained a viable taxation system into the eighth century.
Empress Dowager Feng’s step-grandson, the Xiaowen Emperor,
continued her policies, and when he moved the Northern Wei capital in
494 from Pingcheng to Luoyang, he began a further series of reforms
to continue the process of promoting Chinese cultural and political val-
ues. The ruling family took a Chinese surname, Yuan, and the emperor
had the early Confucian text The Classic of Filial Piety translated into
the language of the Xianbei. A major motivation behind the Xiaowen
Emperor’s various reforms was to curb the power of the military estab-
lishment in the Northern Wei system, and this alarmed several generals
so much that they rose in rebellion against him in 496. He managed
to suppress the rebellion, but he died in 499, and the Northern Wei
quickly declined in a spiral of plots and power struggles between Xian-
bei generals, Chinese offi cials, and child emperors and their regents at
the court. In 524 Xianbei troops rebelled against Luoyang, and those
sent to suppress the rebellion turned against each other. Luoyang was
sacked, and the Northern Wei collapsed in 534. Several generals pro-
claimed short-lived “dynasties,” including the Northern Qi dynasty
(552–77) and the Northern Zhou dynasty (557–81). In 581, a Xianbei
general with a Chinese name, Yang Jian, usurped power from the Zhou
and declared his own dynasty, the Sui. Taking the Chinese reign title of
Sui Wendi (the cultured emperor), he was in a very few years able to
send his armies successfully into south China and to reunify the north
and south in 589 for the fi rst time in three and a half centuries.
The long period of disunion from 220 to 589 was a time of extraor-
dinary political change that witnessed the ethnic and cultural hybridiza-
tion of Han Chinese and non-Han nomadic peoples and institutions in
north China, and the full incorporation of the Yangzi River valley under
Han Chinese control for the fi rst time in the south. During this time,