Zhi Yao dismissed every warning his allies would turn — Jin's strongest house vanished

In 453 BCE the house of Zhi was the strongest of the great families of Jin, and its head Zhi Yao had been warned about what he was before he ever took power. When his father Zhi Xuanzi chose him as heir, the clansman Zhi Guo objected: Yao had five talents and one flaw — he was not humane. If he used his five talents to ride roughshod over others, who could stand with him? If Yao became heir, the Zhi clan would perish. His father did not listen, and Zhi Guo quietly moved his own family off the clan register and took a new surname.

Zhi Yao insulted his Han and Wei allies at a banquet; Zhi Guo warned him that trouble would follow, and was told that trouble would come only if Zhi Yao started it himself. He demanded land from Han and Wei, and each gave him a city of ten thousand households; he demanded land from Zhao, and Zhao refused. Zhi Yao led the armies of Han and Wei against Jinyang and flooded it. Watching the water rise, he boasted that he now knew water could destroy a state — and the two allied lords beside him nudged and trod on each other's feet in silence, because their own capitals sat beside rivers too.

The adviser Chi Ci told Zhi Yao that Han and Wei were about to rebel, and read it in their faces; Zhi Yao dismissed it. Zhao's envoy Zhang Mengtan needed no better invitation. The three houses turned on Zhi, broke the dikes the other way, killed Zhi Yao and divided the Zhi lands among themselves. Fifty years later the same three families divided the state of Jin.