Map of the Northern and Southern Dynasties

This map covers the years from the founding of Liu Song in 420 to the Sui reunification in 589. For every year it records which dynasty held each major city at the end of the year, taken from the histories, and draws each dynasty's territory from that. Move the year to watch the borders shift; click a city to see who held it, year by year, with the passages behind each change. The years 420–439 overlap the Sixteen Kingdoms map, and for those twenty years both maps use the same cities, the same holders and the same drawing method, so the same year gives the same map.

The darker bands mark the borders between dynasties. Where the colour fades out, no city's control can be said to have reached (nomad lands, mountains), and no border is drawn. The red square marks the capital that year. The bands under the year slider show the Northern Dynasties on the upper row (split into two rows while Eastern and Western Wei were divided) and the Southern Dynasties on the lower row; click one to jump to that dynasty's first year.

For 130 major cities, we took from the histories which dynasty's inspector, governor or commanding general was there at the end of each year, and attached the source passage to every change of hands. Cities are not shown for years before their walls or garrisons existed: the Six Garrisons appear from the year each garrison was set up, and Yubi from 538, when it was built. The main source is the Zizhi Tongjian, checked against the Book of Song, the Book of Southern Qi, the Book of Liang, the Book of Chen, the Book of Wei, the Book of Northern Qi, the Book of Zhou, the Book of Sui, the History of the Southern Dynasties and the History of the Northern Dynasties: 695 passages for the years a city changed hands, each machine-checked to appear word for word in the text. Sieges and occupations given up within the year do not change a city's holder.

The borders are inferred by machine from who held the cities. The land is divided into 4 km squares, and each square is given to the dynasty whose city can be reached from it with the least effort, allowing for steep mountains and the difficulty of crossing great rivers. Land far from every city (steppe, plateau, the lands of upland peoples) is left uncoloured, with the colour fading out.

Where the cities of one dynasty lie apart and its colour breaks off, they are joined by a band along a route that does not cross another dynasty's land (up to about 400 km on level ground), on the view that the dynasty kept the road between its cities open. Gaps surrounded on all sides by the dynasties' land and the sea, and gaps in the mountains south of the Qinling that reach deep into a dynasty's land (today's Guizhou, western Hunan and so on, the lands of the peoples called Man and Liao), are filled with the colour of the nearest dynasty. A city surrounded by another dynasty's land (an exclave) is drawn as a circle about 36 km in radius, since dividing the land halfway between cities would make an exclave look larger than it was. Commanderies and counties also lay inside that circle, but with no city dot on the map for them, control there is shown more thinly than around the cities.

Borders at the time were zones rather than lines, and the lines on this map show only roughly where those zones lay.