Fan Wen of Linyi seizes Rinan from the Jin

The Chinese histories describe Fan Wen as a foreigner who rose in the service of King Fan Yi of Linyi. According to the Book of Jin, he was the slave of a barbarian chief of Xijuan county in Rinan; he caught two carp that turned into iron, forged swords from them and split a rock with them as a sign of his destiny; travelling with merchants, he saw the institutions of China and, coming to Linyi, taught the king to build palaces, city walls and weapons. Other texts make him a Chinese from Yangzhou; George Coedès, who allowed that he may have been a Sinicized native, says that he went to China in 313 and 316. Fan Yi made him a general; Wen set the king against his sons, and when Fan Yi died without an heir in 336 (337 in the Book of Liang) he took the throne, subdued several neighbouring peoples and gathered a host of forty to fifty thousand. He sent the Jin court a letter written entirely in a foreign (‘Hu’) script, and in 340, according to Coedès, asked that the frontier be fixed at the Hoành Sơn range.

The Book of Jin blames the war partly on the governors of Rinan, who had long preyed on the foreign sea trade — one of them took more than half of its value — and on Linyi, which had little farmland, coveting Rinan’s fields. In 347 Wen took the commandery, killed its grand administrator Xiahou Lan, offered his body to Heaven, razed the walls of Xijuan and asked the inspector of Jiao province, Zhu Fan, to accept the Hoành Sơn range at the northern edge of Rinan as the frontier; according to the Book of Liang, Zhu Fan refused. Wen then wiped out a garrison sent to Rinan, in 348 raided Jiuzhen further north and in 349 defeated a Jin army of Jiao and Guang provinces at Lurong. He died the same year. His son Fan Fo held Rinan for a while, but after defeats by the Jin governors he gave it back and, according to Coedès, sent embassies to China in 372 and 377. Wars between Linyi and the Chinese governors of northern Vietnam went on for centuries.