Belligerents
Jin
Wu
Background
With Shu gone in 263 and Sima Yan replacing Wei with his new Jin dynasty in 265, only Jin and Wu remained. Wu’s last emperor, the cruel Sun Hao, bled away his people’s loyalty while Jin spent nearly twenty years preparing — Wang Jun building a great river fleet in the old land of Shu. In the winter of 279, Jin launched two hundred thousand men along six axes.
Course
Wang Jun’s fleet swept down the Yangtze, burning through Wu’s famous chain barriers with giant rafts and torches. On land, Du Yu took Jiangling and rolled up the south — answering the council that asked whether to press on with the immortal line: "our momentum is that of splitting bamboo." Front after front collapsed in sequence, and in the third month of 280, as the fleet reached the Stone Fortress of Jianye, Sun Hao came out bound, dragging a coffin, to surrender.
Outcome & impact
Wu’s surrender ended ninety-six years of division that had begun with the Yellow Turbans in 184. That the unifier was neither Wei nor Shu nor Wu but Jin gave the saga its famous coda: "long divided, the realm must unite." Though united Jin, too, would shake apart within a generation.
History vs. the novelHistoryvsNovel
The novel hurries through this finale in its last chapter, leaving Du Yu and Wang Jun strangers to most readers — though in the histories they are the executors of a twenty-year, six-front grand design. The idiom "splitting bamboo" is the campaign’s brightest legacy.