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The Sixteen Kingdoms (simplified Chinese: 十六国; traditional Chinese: 十六國; pinyin: Shíliù Guó), also known as the "Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians" (simplified Chinese: 五胡十六国; traditional Chinese: 五胡十六國; pinyin: Wǔhú Shíliù Guó), lesser known as the Sixteen States, was a period of political disorder and division in northern and southwestern China from 304 to 439 AD. It ran concurrently with the Jin dynasty (266–420 AD) and later overlapped with the early decades of the Northern and Southern dynasties era.
The period was preceded by the brief reunification of China under the Western Jin following the Three Kingdoms (220–280 AD) before it was violently disrupted by the War of the Eight Princes. The princely civil wars led to widescale famines and numerous uprisings, and the imperial court was eventually driven out from the northern and southwestern parts of their empire. As they reestablished themselves as the Eastern Jin in the south at Jiankang, the political vacuum they left behind was filled by a series of dynastic states that rose and fell in quick succession. These states were founded by non-Han peoples who had resettled and lived in northern China for generations, known in recent historiography as the “Five Barbarians” (Xiongnu, Jie, Di, Qiang, Xianbei), although a few regimes were also established and led by Han Chinese.
While the resettled non-Han groups had long been sinicized to varying degrees, the process was heightened during this period as their rulers adopted Chinese institutions of imperial governance and customs. Their states were all short-lived due to fierce competition between them and the Eastern Jin as well as internal political instability. The Former Qin briefly unified northern China for seven years from 376 to 383 AD, but this ended when the Eastern Jin inflicted them a crippling defeat at the Battle of Fei River, after which they splintered and fell. Amidst the chaos and fighting, Mahayana Buddhism became increasingly accepted and popular, receiving official state backing for the first time in China. The Sixteen Kingdoms ended with the reunification of the north under the Northern Wei dynasty of Xianbei ethnicity, which would last for roughly a century.
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General info from Wikipedia.org