Accounts of the city only came to popular fame after 200 AD, around the time that the crumbling Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 AD) was at an end. As with most cases of dynastic decline, it was the military strategists most capable of instigating the discontented masses that were to rise to the fore. These were the warlords that were soon to become kings of their own fiefdoms, most famously the Shu Han Kingdom (221-263 AD), the Wei Kingdom (220-265 AD) and the Wu Kingdom (222-280 AD). 

Hefei, a small town at that time, was of strategic importance since practically it was the center of this region. For the town it was the bloody battles that occurred between Caocao's Wei forces and the troops of the Wu Kingdom's Sun Quan that remain as popular stories. There remain a few relics around town that remember these times, most notably the battleground of Leisure Ford, that is now a park, and the site of the troops drill ground, that is now the Mingjiao Temple.

The city was to return to its position as an administrative and economic area. Almost eight centuries after the struggles of the Three Kingdoms period, in the Northern Song (960-1127 AD), came the birth of a Hefei child who was to become a paragon for Chinese. Named Bao Zheng, this child was to grow up to become known as the most conscientious and uncorrupt high official in all of China. The area where he was born, Hefei, still commemorates his honest name, by displaying the tools of his trade, his execution cutters, and the area where he allegedly used to live, in a park just to the southeast of the city center.