Yellow Turban Rebellion

Also called: Yellow Turbans

Zhang Jue of the Way of Great Peace led peasants wearing yellow headbands in revolt against the Eastern Han. The rising was crushed within the year, but the local forces raised to fight it grew into warlord armies, opening the Three Kingdoms era.

In the late Han, consort clans and eunuchs fought over power while famine and epidemics ruined the peasantry. Zhang Jue spread the Way of Great Peace through faith healing and in 184, a jiazi year, rose in several provinces at once under the slogan "The Azure Heaven is dead; the Yellow Heaven shall rise." The court sent Huangfu Song, Zhu Jun and Lu Zhi, who broke the main forces that year, though remnants fought on for years. In suppressing the rebels, local leaders such as Cao Cao, Liu Bei and Sun Jian gained armies of their own. The era is recorded in Chen Shou’s official Records of the Three Kingdoms and was popularised by the fourteenth-century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms attributed to Luo Guanzhong.