d. His son, however, defeated Wang Tun with
the aid of General Yue Liang (A.D. 323). Yue Liang was the empress's
brother; he, too, came from a northern family. Yuean Ti's successor also
died early, and the young son of Yue Liang's sister came to the throne as
Emperor Ch'eng (326-342); his mother ruled as regent, but Yue Liang
carried on the actual business of government. Against this clique rose
Su Chuen, another member of the northern gentry, who had made himself
leader of a bandit gang in A.D. 300 but had then been given a military
command by the dynasty. In 328 he captured the capital and kidnapped the
emperor, but then fell before the counterthrust of the Yue Liang party.
The domination of Yue Liang's clique continued after the death of the
twenty-one-years-old emperor. His twenty-year-old brother was set in
his place; he, too, died two years later, and his two-year-old son
became emperor (Mu Ti, 345-361).

Meanwhile this clique was reinforced by the very important Huan family.
This family came from the same city as the imperial house and was a very
old gentry family of that city. One of the family attained a high post
through personal friendship with Yue Liang: on his death his son Huan Wen
came into special prominence as military commander.

Huan Wen, like Wang Tun and others before him, tried to secure a firm
foundation for his power, once more in the west. In 347 he reconquered
Szechwan and deposed the local dynasty. Following this, Huan Wen and the
Yue family undertook several joint campaigns against northern states--the
first reaction of the south against the north, which in the past had
always been the aggressor. The first fighting took place directly to the
north, where the collapse of the "Later Chao" seemed to make
intervention easy. The main objective was the regaining of the regions
of eastern Honan, northern Anhwei and Kiangsu, in which were the family
seats of Huan's and the emperor's families, as well as that of the Hsieh
family which also formed an important group in the court clique. The
purpose of the northern campaigns was not, of course, merely to defend
private interests of court cliques: the northern frontier was the weak
spot of the southern empire, for its plains could easily be overrun. It
was then observed that the new "Earlier Ch'in" state was trying to
spread from the north-west eastwards into this plain, and Ch'in was
attacked in an attempt to gain a more favourable frontier territory.