Yellow Turban Army

The Yellow Turban Army, also known as the Yellow Turban Bandits (After the publishing of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms), is a peasant army led by the late Eastern Han Dynasty peasant leader Zhang Jue from Julu Commandery, which openly rebelled against the central government in 184, the year of the Jiazi in the Sexagenary cycle. The Yellow Turban Rebellion became one of the biggest rebellions in Chinese history, but because it was quelled within a year by the Eastern Han government, Chinese historiography has always placed it as the progenitor of the Three Kingdoms Era.

The Yellow Turban Army was composed of commoners, rabble and other people of opportunity. Zhang Jue and his brothers Zhang Bao and Zhang Liang treated many of them, and thus were very popular. When Zhang Jue saw that followers of the Way of the Taiping grew more numerous by the day, he openly revolted in the large-scale Yellow Turban Rebellion. The scale of the Rebellion involved almost a million people, Zhang Jue passed away during the rebellion, with his brothers falling in battle. The Rebellion was put down within the year, but laid the foundations of the fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty.

The Rebellion may have been put down within the year, but it laid the foundations of the fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty. The central government handed local officials immense authority with regards to the recruitment of soldiers, which resulted in the warlordism of the late Eastern Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms Era, undeniably a fatal blow to the Eastern Han. The Rebellion accelerated the demise of the Eastern Han, and even after the defeat of the rebellion, small scale conflicts continued under the Yellow Turban banner along the Yellow River. This is also why the Yellow Turban Rebellion is often documented in Chinese historiography as the beginning of the Three Kingdoms Era.

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