Fire from the Earth

In 200 BCE, the Han emperor rode home from a humiliating military defeat and sent a princess north to marry the enemy. It was a practical solution to an impossible problem - and the first link in a chain of consequences that would, three centuries later, shatter the most powerful empire on earth.

Fire from the Earth traces the full arc of one of history's most consequential and least-known catastrophes: the collapse of the Western Jin dynasty in 316 CE, the century of fragmentation that followed, and the four hundred years of war, migration, and transformation that remade the face of East Asia. From the slave markets where a future emperor was sold, to the mountain passes choked with millions of refugees, to the courts of warlord-kings who built new civilisations from the ruins of the old, this is the story of how a classical empire dies - and what rises from its wreckage.

Narrative in pace, scholarly in depth, and written for readers who know nothing about Chinese history and will finish this book unable to stop thinking about it, Fire from the Earth argues that the catastrophe did not end Chinese civilisation. It made it into something greater, stranger, and more enduring than the world it destroyed.