Sun Jun and Sun Chen depose Sun Liang, and Sun Chen is killed

The episode in which Sun Jun and Sun Chen depose Sun Liang, and Sun Chen is killed, presents Wu’s court as a succession crisis driven by factional power rather than secure imperial rule. A sixteen-year-old ruler, Sun Liang, tries to overthrow the regent Sun Chen, but the plot is disclosed within the family; Sun Chen deposes him and makes Sun Xiu ruler in his place. Later, when Sun Chen moves toward taking imperial power, Sun Xiu and Ding Feng exploit a palace festival to seize and execute him. The rulers change, but the deeper contest is over who controls the court and its armed support.

Sun Liang’s failed attempt

Sun Liang is already described as entirely under Sun Chen’s control when he tries to remove him, acting with his brother-in-law in a plan to take the city and kill the regent. The intended ally instead informs his father, who is married to Sun Chen’s eldest sister. That family connection gives Sun Chen immediate warning of the conspiracy and demonstrates how kinship networks shape the political struggle as decisively as formal office.

Sun Chen answers by deposing Sun Liang, accusing the young ruler of moral corruption and incompetence in the rituals required of an emperor. The accusation supplies a public justification for a change of ruler, but the action follows the exposure of Sun Liang’s threat to Sun Chen’s power. Sun Liang is seized and sent into internal exile, weeping as he leaves. A poem mourns him as a wise ruler who will never again enter the court, giving the abrupt loss of his position a personal and elegiac counterpoint to the regent’s political success.

Sun Chen’s ascendancy

After removing Sun Liang, Sun Chen takes power directly into his own hands and places relatives in key positions. He brings the bewildered Sun Xiu, a relative of the deposed ruler, to court and has him made ruler despite Sun Xiu’s unwillingness. In AD 258, Sun Chen becomes prime minister. The arrangement preserves an emperor in name while concentrating practical authority in the regent and his family.

The arrangement does not satisfy Sun Chen for long. Later that year, offended by something Sun Xiu has done, he decides to proceed toward seizing imperial power himself. The account marks a change in the stakes: Sun Chen has already controlled the government through his appointments and dominance over the previous ruler, but now the nominal ruler recognizes the threat and acts against him. The same court that enabled Sun Chen’s rise becomes the setting for his removal.

The festival counterplot

Sun Xiu turns to his adviser Zhang Bu and summons the veteran commander Ding Feng. Together they plan to use a great festival to invite Sun Chen to court and kill him. The scheme depends on drawing the regent into a public, apparently formal occasion, where the ruler and his allies can act at close quarters rather than challenge Sun Chen openly beforehand.

Inauspicious signs appear during the night and alarm Sun Chen’s household, but he dismisses them. In the morning he collapses after rising, yet insists on attending. He believes that his brothers control the palace guards and challenges the prospect that anyone could oppose him; if there is danger, he says, a fire will bring them quickly. At the festival, flames erupt around the palace. Taking the fire as his signal, Sun Chen rises, only to find Zhang Bu entering with thirty guards. He is seized.

Sun Chen asks to be allowed into internal exile, the same form of removal imposed on Sun Liang. Sun Xiu rejects the appeal by recalling the people Sun Chen had arbitrarily killed and asking when Sun Chen had ever shown mercy. He orders an immediate execution, carried out in the great hall. The reversal is compact and consequential: Sun Chen’s confidence in his command of the palace guards gives way to Sun Xiu’s coordinated use of Zhang Bu, Ding Feng, and the festival gathering.

Political meaning and aftermath

The episode’s changes of ruler expose the gap between imperial title and effective control. Sun Liang holds the throne but is dominated by Sun Chen; Sun Xiu is installed against his wishes while Sun Chen governs as prime minister; then Sun Xiu uses court allies and armed guards to end the regent’s ascendancy. The episode makes access to people, positions, and the palace itself the practical basis of authority, while ritual competence and moral fitness serve as language with which rulers and regents justify their actions.

The wider story frames these reversals within the collapse of the Han and the division of the empire into rival kingdoms, a world in which claims to legitimate rule repeatedly accompany struggles for power. Elsewhere, Xuande is urged to become emperor in response to Cao Cao’s seizure of authority and the displacement of the Han ruler; the account of the Han’s abdication likewise presents dynastic change through appeals to Heaven, popular feeling, and precedent. Against that backdrop, Wu’s internal crisis offers a more immediate pattern: Sun Chen invokes the ruler’s failure in ancestral rites to depose Sun Liang, while Sun Xiu ends Sun Chen’s rule by recalling his victims. The episode’s conclusion is not a stable settlement so much as another transfer of power, secured by a new ruler’s ability to command the court and the men around him.