Background
After the killing of Zhuge Ke, Sun Jun seized control of Wu's military and civil administration, appointing himself Chancellor and Supreme Commander while ruling with high-handed arrogance. Throughout the Jianxing and Wufeng eras, discontent accumulated within Wu, and members of the imperial clan and the great families all hoped that someone would step forward to remove this overbearing strongman. In the second year of Wufeng, the Wei commanders Guanqiu Jian and Wen Qin rose in revolt at Huainan against Sima Shi; Sun Jun took the opportunity to send forces north in support, but Liu Zan died of illness and Wen Qin's forces were routed, leaving the northern expedition nearly fruitless [c:16692]. After the army returned, Sun Jun's prestige suffered a blow, and his opponents saw a brief window of opportunity — especially since a Shuhan envoy had arrived, requiring a grand state banquet at court that placed "the strongman must attend in person" on a predictable, pre-announced schedule.
Key Figures
Sun Yi and Sun Shao were both outer-circle imperial clan commanders who, from their position in the sources, belong to the second or third tier of imperial relatives: they held no direct command of the palace guard and carried only limited prestige among the officials. Their chosen partner "Chen Xun" and the others were also, by the record's account, not heavyweight figures in the military, meaning this coup lacked reliable armed support from the very beginning. The accomplice drawn in — the Grand Princess Sun Luban and Princess Sun Luyu — were daughters of Sun Quan, sisters who had long been at odds with each other; Sun Luban's act of pulling Sun Luyu into the list of conspirators to be killed is a textbook example of private grievances being made public through a political event [c:16692]. The intended victim Sun Jun, on the other hand, was already at his most vigilant after the military setback in the north and reacted to any irregular movement with speed.
Core Issues
This failed coup exposes two fundamental weaknesses of the anti-Sun Jun forces inside Wu. First, without palace-guard support, merely a few marginal imperial relatives hoping to "seize the moment" at a state banquet offered almost no chance of success. Second, the opposing coalition had established no advance intelligence protection, making exposure extremely likely. Compared with the later combination of Sun Xiu, Ding Feng, and Zhang Bu, who succeeded in killing Sun Chen at the year-end court banquet, one can see precisely what the minimum threshold for a successful coup in Sunwu required: the cooperation of mid-level palace guard officers, the endorsement of a core imperial-clan figure, and an insider close to the strongman to relay signals. Sun Yi and his associates possessed none of these three. Sun Luban's false accusation then transformed what was already a failed coup into an internal purge of the imperial clan, dragging the sisterly bond of Wu's own princesses into the gutter.
Political Consequences
After the incident, "several dozen people committed suicide" represents a purge of substantial scale, eliminating in one stroke a group within the imperial clan and officialdom who might have harboured dissatisfaction toward Sun Jun [c:16692]. In the short term, Sun Jun's power reached another peak in the backlash following the failed coup attempt. In the medium term, the death of Sun Luyu became the most severe political sacrifice at the princess level in all of Sunwu's history, deepening the rifts within the imperial clan. In the long term, precisely because this episode demanded such deep sacrifice, after Sun Xiu came to the throne he had the added posthumous punishment of "opening Sun Jun's coffin, removing his official seals, and reburying with a wooden marker," publicly pinning the killing of Luyu permanently on Sun Jun — evidence that this failed coup left ripples in Sunwu's political memory for years.
Counterfactual Analysis
If Sun Yi had chosen to act while Sun Jun was on his northern campaign — staging a carefully prepared ambush on the march or at a vulnerable point during the return — the odds of success would not necessarily have been much lower than acting at a court banquet, yet the coup would at least not have been rolled up instantly by the palace intelligence network. The more instructive comparison is the Sun Xiu combination a few years later: they waited three or four years before striking, and completed the action entirely within the established ritual of the year-end court gathering, with every step of the sequence precisely designed. Sun Yi and his associates acted in haste with no imperial authorisation, no palace-guard cooperation, and no time for planning — a gamble that was almost certain to fail. This episode's contribution to the historiography of middle-to-late Sunwu is to confirm once again a recurring pattern: in an autocratic structure, "striking back at a strongman" had to be led personally by the emperor and carried out in conjunction with at least one palace-guard commander; otherwise it was merely an addition to the body count.