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RouranFirst GöktürkTang ruleSecond GöktürkUyghurKirghizHunsWestern GöktürkTürgeshKarlukKhazar
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For fifty years after 630, the Göktürks of the east lived along the Tang frontier and in the six prefectures of the Ordos loop. They were governed through their own chiefs under Chinese protectorates. The war that ended that arrangement was fought twice. The first attempt failed completely. Its khan was beheaded in a public market. A man whose grandfather had been a Tang-appointed chieftain began the second, with a band that the Chinese history calls robbers. It produced a state that lasted sixty years.

The first rising (679–681)

The Ashide chiefs had been in revolt since 679.[1] In 680 they fetched Ashina Funian, the son of an elder cousin of Ilig, from Xiazhou. They meant to cross the Yellow River and make him khan. The tribes rose with them.[1] Pei Xingjian’s army drove Funian to surrender. Funian was beheaded in the eastern market of Chang’an in 681.[1]

In the Tang record, that is the whole of it. A legitimist rising formed around a man of the old royal blood, and the Tang put it down inside two years. It matters because of what it left behind: scattered fugitives with nothing to lose, and a demonstration that the Ashina name alone did not raise a state.

The second rising (682)

“When Funian had been crushed, Gudulu gathered the scattered fugitives, went into the Zongcai mountains and made himself the head of a band of robbers, more than five thousand strong. He raided the Nine Surnames as well and took great numbers of sheep and horses; gradually he grew strong, and then he set himself up as khan.”[1]

Gudulu is Ilterish. He made his younger brother Mochuo shad and Duoxifu yabgu. He also fortified the town of Heisha, the Black Sands, north of the frontier.[2] The Xin Tang Shu dates the rising to 682. The Jiu Tang Shu dates it to 683. Modern accounts follow 682.

The man who turned a band into a state came over from the Tang side. Ashide Yuanzhen had charge of the surrendered tribes under the Shanyu protectorate. He was in prison for some offence. He asked to be released to bring the tribes to order, and went straight over. “Gudulu was delighted to get him, made him Apa Tarkan and put him in sole charge of military affairs.”[1] Whether that man is Tonyukuk is the question the Tonyukuk article treats. The Tang history has Yuanzhen fall against the Türgesh before Gudulu died. The equation has to explain that away.

Ten years of raiding (683–687)

The Tang history counts the raids. In 683 the Göktürks raided Weizhou, where the governor of Fengzhou was killed. In 684 they raided Shuozhou, and a frontier commander was appointed against him.[1] In 686 they raided Shuozhou and Daizhou. A relieving Tang force met them at Xinzhou and lost five thousand men. In 687 they raided Changping in Hebei, and Shuozhou again in the eighth month.[1]

Then came the one Chinese success and the one Chinese catastrophe, in the same season. Heichi Changzhi beat the Göktürks heavily at Huanghuadui and drove them forty li and across the desert. But a Tang colonel, hungry for the credit, took thirteen thousand picked men two thousand li beyond the frontier to finish the khan. Before the attack he sent a message, and so warned the Göktürks. He lost his entire army. He was executed. Empress Wu took her revenge in writing: she had the khan’s name Kutluk, possessed of Kut, rewritten with characters meaning not finishing his fortune.[1]

The same years from inside

The Tonyukuk inscription tells it as the state’s own founding. At first the rebels lived north of the frontier, at Čogay Kuzı and Kara Kum. They lived on deer and hare and were ringed by enemies. A fugitive brought word that the new khan of the Nine Oguz was building a coalition with China and the Kitañ, in his own words[3]

so that no master should arise in the land of the Türk Sir people.

Tonyukuk inscription

The counsellor persuaded the khan to strike first. He beat the Oguz on the Tola with two thousand men against an army put at three or six thousand.[4][5] Then he brought khan and people into the Ötüken land. After that, he says, the peoples of the four quarters came in.[6]

That move is the hinge of the war. Everything before it is raiding from the margin. Everything after it is a state holding the sacred country of the steppe. The move was directed not against the Tang but against the Oguz, because the Tang could only take the frontier as long as the Ötüken decided who ruled the steppe.

The Kül Tegin inscription gives the constitutional side. After gathering seven hundred men, Ilterish set in order a people that had lost its realm, a people that had lost its khan, according to the law of the forefathers. He organised the Tölis and the Tarduš and gave them a yabgu and a shad.[7] “My father the khan campaigned forty-seven times and fought twenty pitched battles.”[7] The counsellor counts differently: seventeen battles with the Chinese, seven with the Kitañ and five with the Oguz. He adds: “and in all of it his counsellor was I myself, and his commander was I myself.”[8]

Three accounts of one war

The Tang history has a band of robbers that grew. The sons’ monument has Heaven taking a man by the crown of the head so that the Göktürk people should not perish. The man goes out with seventeen men and gives the people back their realm and their law. The counsellor’s monument has a shad with seven hundred men. It also has a counsellor who asked himself “Shall I make him khan?” and did.[9]

Each is the version its author needed. The numbers do different work in each: five thousand, seven hundred, seventeen. The three stand side by side, unreconciled.

Scope of the war

The Tang record treats 679–681 and 682 onward as separate affairs.[1] They had different leaders and different outcomes. They are taken together because the second began out of the wreckage of the first: in the same country, among the same tribes, against the same administration, with a gap of one year. The question is open. The result is not in question: by 687 there was again a khan in the Ötüken. The Tang had no means of removing him.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
  2. ^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215
  3. ^ Tekin 1994, p. 5, 32
  4. ^ Tekin 1994, p. 8–9
  5. ^ Orkun 1994, p. 104–105
  6. ^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 285
  7. ^ a b Kül Tegin inscription
  8. ^ Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 289
  9. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194; Kül Tegin inscription; Tonyukuk inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 283

Sources

Literature

  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Talât Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (1968)

Related

What links here8

Persons
Ashide Yuanzhen · Pei Xingjian
States
The Göktürk interregnum, 630–682
Conflicts
Fall of the Second Khaganate, 741–744
Places
Hebei · Shanyu Protectorate · Xiazhou · Yunzhong

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Göktürk war of restoration, 679–687.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/conflicts/gokturk-war-of-restoration/

Last revised: 8 November 2026