The Yellow Turban Rebellion

In the late Eastern Han, consort clans and eunuchs held power and government was deeply corrupt, land annexation was severe and taxes and corvée heavy; floods, droughts, locusts and plagues struck often, driving the poor from their homes, even to “people eating one another”. Zhang Jue of Julu founded the Way of Great Peace, healing with talisman water and preaching, and after over ten years among the lowest classes had several hundred thousand followers in eight provinces. He organized them into 36 divisions and raised the slogan “The blue heaven is dead, the yellow heaven shall rise; in the year jiazi, all under heaven will be blessed,” setting an uprising for the fifth day of the third month of the jiazi year (AD 184). After a betrayal, Zhang Jue was forced to rise early, in the second month. The rebels wore yellow cloth on their heads as a mark and were called the Yellow Turbans; Zhang Jue styled himself “General of Heaven,” and his brothers Zhang Bao and Zhang Liang “General of Earth” and “General of Man.” The capital was shaken. The court sent Huangfu Song, Zhu Jun, Lu Zhi and others to suppress them, lifted the Partisan Prohibitions, and allowed magnates to raise armed forces to join in. Zhang Jue died of illness during the revolt, Zhang Liang and Zhang Bao fell in battle, and the main uprising was put down after about nine months, though Yellow Turban remnants kept fighting for over twenty years. It was the first organized, prepared large-scale peasant uprising in Chinese history. In suppressing it, local magnates and governors built up armies of their own and became regional warlords; the Eastern Han survived in name only, and China entered an age of warlord wars and the Three Kingdoms.