Xiazhou Ningzhou Western Ningzhou (Xiningzhou) Southern Ningzhou (Nanningzhou) At the same time, the Chen dynasty in the south had similar provinces with its forerunners (Liu Song, Southern Qi and Liang dynasty), but some provinces in the north and west were ceded to northern dynasties. Chen redesigned administrative divisions. It set 42 provinces, but gave provinces different ranks. Tier-1 provinces of Chen dynasty include: Yangzhou Southern Yuzhou Jiangzhou Guangzhou Xiangzhou Jiaozhou () Eastern Ningzhou (Dongningzhou) In their later years, however, Northern Qi and Northern Zhou set up many new provinces to represent areas not under their control. For example, Northern Qi set up Guangzhou which were controlled by Chen dynasty and Yizhou which were controlled by Northern Zhou. In the area between Yangtze and Huai rivers, people who ran away to escape from wars in earlier periods started to move back to their hometowns. However, many of their original hometowns were destroyed completely. As a result, people from the same town gathered and established new towns and named those towns with original names. This led to the situation that many towns with the same name were established. For example, within Luozhou and Yuzhou, there were multiple counties named Chenliu. Chen dynasty also set up a series of new immigrant provinces along the Yangtze River, such as the Southern Xuzhou and Northern Jiangzhou, etc. The administrative division began to mess up. Northern and Southern dynasties were eventually reunified by Sui dynasty in 589. At that time, there were hundreds of provinces all over China. Zhou under Sui dynasty By the time unity was finally reestablished by the Sui dynasty, the provinces had been divided and redivided so many times by different governments that they were almost the same size as commanderies, rendering the two-tier system superfluous. As such, the Sui merged the two together. In English, this merged level is translated as "prefectures". In Chinese, the name changed between zhou and jun several times before being finally settled on zhou. Based on the apocryphal Nine Province system, the Sui restored nine zhou. The Sui had 9 provinces, 190 prefectures, 1,225 counties, and about 9 million registered households or approximately 50 million people. Circuits under the Tang dynasty Emperor Taizong (r. 626−649) set up 10 "circuits" (道, dào) in 627 as inspection areas for imperial commissioners monitoring the operation of prefectures, rather than a new primary level of administration. In 639, there were