Rouran epochGöktürk epochUyghur epochKirghiz epoch
RouranFirst GöktürkTang ruleSecond GöktürkUyghurKirghizHunsWestern GöktürkTürgeshKarlukKhazar
  • 400
  • 500
  • 600
  • 700
  • 800
  • 900

The name covers a sequence rather than a single war. In that century the successor states of the Northern Wei fought one another for northern China. The Göktürks fought beside and against each of them. The Sui and then the Tang ended the contest by reuniting China and, in 630, taking the Göktürk khan captive. The wider frame is longer at both ends. It begins with the fall of the Xiongnu and the Han. It runs through the migrations that followed the collapse of the Xianbei, the sinicised Tuoba states in the south and the Rouran in the north. It ends with the Tang as masters of the steppe and their weakening at Talas in 751 and in the rebellion of An Lushan. In the narrower sense the name covers the part from the break-up of the Wei to the founding war of the Tang. The rest belongs to the articles on the Xiongnu, the Rouran and the Uyghurs. The wars have their own articles.

Background

After the fall of the Han in 220, the Southern Xiongnu, the Xianbei and various Tibetan peoples founded a series of short-lived dynasties in northern China. These were some sixteen kingdoms of the Five Barbarians between 304 and 439. Four of them were of Xiongnu origin: the Former Zhao, the Later Zhao, the Xia and the Northern Liang. Much of the north then came under the Tuoba, the Northern Wei. Under Taiwu (423–452), the Wei controlled all of it, defeated the Rouran in 429 and reached into Inner Mongolia and eastern Turkistan. The fall of the Wei came down to the estrangement of a sinicising dynasty from its own tribesmen. Under Xiaowen (471–499) the Tabgach language, names and dress were banned. In 523 the Tiele, Rouran and Xianbei elements in Tuoba service revolted.[1] The war that followed, from 524 to 534, broke the Wei into two short-lived dynasties. These were the Eastern Wei (534–550) and the Western Wei (535–557).[1] The Göktürk state took shape inside the Rouran polity and in the context of Tuoba–Rouran relations.

Two Weis (534–557)

The field wars between the two Weis belong to the Chinese histories of the Wei, the Qi and the Zhou. They were the campaigns of Gao Huan for the east and Yuwen Tai for the west along the Yellow River bend. For the Göktürks, the western court’s turn to the steppe was what counted. In 542 a Göktürk army, probably under Bumin, tried the Western Wei frontier at Suizhou. According to the Zhou Shu’s biography of the governor Yuwen Ce, fire and a false alarm turned it back. The raid has its own article.[2] In 545 Yuwen Tai, chancellor of the Western Wei, sent the Sogdian An Nuopantuo of Jiuquan to the Göktürks. They congratulated one another that the envoy of a great state had come. In 546 Bumin sent tribute in return.[3] In 551 Yuwen Tai gave Bumin the Western Wei princess Changle. In the same year Bumin sent two hundred horses in condolence for the Wei emperor’s death.[3] Modern accounts read the sequence as a Wei bid to turn a raider into an ally against the Rouran. They also read it as the beginning of thirty years of Wei and Zhou alliance with the Göktürks.

Qi and Zhou replace the Weis (550–557)

The Eastern Wei gave way to the Northern Qi under the house of Gao in 550. The Western Wei gave way to the Northern Zhou under the house of Yuwen in the twelfth month of 556, which falls in January 557.[4] In the same year the Chen replaced the Liang in the south. As a result, from 557 three Chinese states faced one another, and the Göktürks stood over the two in the north. The Zhou Shu records that Yuwen Tai had been promised a daughter of Mukan and died before the match was settled. It also records that the promise passed to his son, the emperor Wu.[3]

War for the Rouran remnant (552–555)

The Göktürk victory over the Rouran in 552 was fought north of Huaihuang, on the Chinese frontier. The Chinese states then fought over the Rouran who survived it.[3] Anagui’s son Anluochen fled to the Qi. The remnant set up Anagui’s uncle Dengshuzi. Issik broke Dengshuzi at Mount Mulai, north of Woye, in 553.[5] Dengshuzi fled with some three thousand to the Western Wei. At Mukan’s request, the Western Wei handed them to the Göktürk envoys to be killed outside the Qingmen gate of Chang’an.[3] On the best reckoning, the Qi attacked Göktürk territory in the late summer of 552. They also built a wall of four to five hundred kilometres against the Göktürks.[6] They forced Dengshuzi to march against them in 553. They destroyed Anluochen when he rose against his protectors in September of that year.[6] Turkic Atlas gives the detail under the Rouran and the Qi.

Zhou and Göktürks against Qi (563–564)

Mukan settled a marriage with the Zhou and cut off the Qi envoys, who had come with a richer offer. He then asked for a campaign against the Qi to the east himself.[3] In 563 the Zhou general Yang Zhong marched with ten thousand men. Mukan met him with a hundred thousand horse.[3] In the first month of 564 they attacked the Qi ruler at Jinyang, that is Taiyuan, and failed. Mukan let his men plunder and went home.[3] Yang Zhong told the emperor that the Göktürks had bad armour, light rewards, many chiefs and no laws, and that they were not hard to handle. The emperor did not listen to him.[3] In the same year a second campaign went out towards Luoyang. Yang Zhong marched out by Woye, and Yuwen Hu made for Luoyang. Yuwen Hu was beaten, and Mukan withdrew.[3] In 568 Mukan’s daughter, Empress Ashina, reached Chang’an and was made empress of the Zhou.[3]

Taspar between two emperors (572–580)

Under Taspar the Göktürks were paid rather than fought. The Zhou gave a hundred thousand pieces of silk a year and kept thousands of Göktürks in brocade and meat at the capital. The Qi, fearing his raids, emptied their treasury likewise.[3] Taspar told his followers that he need not fear to lack anything as long as his two boys in the south were filial.[3] Taspar took from both courts. This silk was the same silk that the Sogdian Maniakh carried west to Persia and Byzantium.[7]

In 577 the Zhou destroyed the Qi. The Qi prince Gao Shaoyi fled from Mayi to Taspar. Taspar set him up as emperor of Qi and called his people together to avenge the Qi.[3] In the fourth month of 578 Taspar raided Youzhou and killed the Zhou general Liu Xiong. The emperor Wu took the field himself with six armies and died. The army turned back.[3] That winter Taspar raided again and besieged Jiuquan.[3] In 579 he asked for a marriage and was promised the princess Qianjin on condition that Shaoyi be surrendered. He took the princess in 580 and kept Shaoyi. He gave Shaoyi up only when a further envoy came.[3]

Sui and the Göktürk (581–589)

Yang Jian took the Zhou throne in 581 and founded the Sui. His slaughter of the Zhou court made an enemy of Qianjin, now Ishbara’s wife.[8] At her urging Ishbara invaded China in 582 with Apa, Tardush and Bagha beside him. For the first time, he held a broad strip of the north. A Tiele rising in the west drew Tardush off. A Sui surprise attack near Baidao in June 583 broke the Göktürk army. Disease and Chinese agents did the rest. Modern accounts read the Sui as a state that fought the Göktürks with agents rather than soldiers and kept all the Ashina princes off balance. The Sui received Ishbara’s submission in 585 not through the success of Chinese arms but through the centrifugal forces pulling the Göktürk state apart. The civil war has its own article. The Sui conquest of the Chen in 589 ended the division of China.

Göktürks as Sui clients (597–609)

Yami, Ishbara’s son, sought a Sui princess in 597. He had Tulan’s wife murdered at the Sui chancellor’s price. He received the title of khan as a rival to Tulan.[8] Tulan was killed by his own followers in 599. After Tardush’s fall, Yami marched into Ötüken with Göktürk and Chinese troops. He settled at the edge of the Gobi and ruled as a Sui client until 609.[8] Most plausibly, the year 603 marks the final division of the khaganate, with the eastern khan a Chinese client and Tardush gone.

Fall of the Sui (609–618)

Shibi reversed his father’s dependence on the Sui and rebuilt the Göktürk army. In September 615 he besieged the Sui emperor at Yanmen. He withdrew on a false report spread by his own Chinese wife. In the risings that followed he armed the warlords of northern China, among them Li Yuan, the founder of the Tang. He gave Göktürk titles and wolf’s-head standards to others. The Sui Shu names Liang Shidu and Liu Wuzhou among them.[8] In essence, only the fall of the Sui forestalled the collapse of the eastern khaganate.[1]

Founding war of the Tang (618–630)

Li Yuan took the throne in 618 and founded the Tang. For a decade the new dynasty reunited China province by province, often by force, with the Göktürk holding the balance in the north. Ilig, khan from 620, fought the Tang almost every year. In August 621 he pushed into Taiyuan and was offered tribute and a princess.[9] In 626, eighteen days after Li Shimin had killed his brothers at the Xuanwu gate and taken the throne as Taizong, Ilig stood with an army before Chang’an and withdrew. Raiding was the only means by which Ilig could hold his power.[1] The failure of the raiding is the reason his state broke from inside. Natural disasters, hunger, an attempt to tax an exhausted people, the secession of the Xueyantuo and the flight of a nephew to China added to it.[1] Tang cavalry struck in the winter of 629 and 630. Taizong pressed a last offensive in March 630 while peace talks were under way. Ilig was captured and died at the Tang court. The eastern khaganate had effectively come to an end. Members of the Ashina and other high clans were encouraged to enter Tang service. The Jiu Tangshu gives the Göktürks’ own account of the loss.[10] Ilig entrusted everything to the various hu, that is the Sogdians, and kept his own people at a distance. The laws multiplied. The army was mobilised year after year. The tribes deserted.[10]

Assessment

For eighty years the Göktürks were the third party in every Chinese war. The Chinese paid them for it. The price was a princess from the Wei, a hundred thousand pieces of silk a year from the Zhou, the treasury of the Qi, a princess from the Zhou and one from the Sui. Modern accounts draw two opposite conclusions from the same sources. The first sees the Göktürks as the arbiters of northern China, who took what they wanted from both sides and sold the surplus silk to the Persians and the Romans. The second sees them as the instrument of whichever Chinese state was cleverest. The Sui played them against their own kin, and the Tang broke them, so that the reunification of China was completed on the steppe in 630. Both are true of different decades. The century of the Hegemony Wars is the century in which the first was true and became the second.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Golden 1992
  2. ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 27
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  4. ^ Bei Qi Shu (Book of Northern Qi), juan 4
  5. ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 165
  6. ^ a b Bei Qi Shu (Book of Northern Qi), juan 8
  7. ^ de la Vaissière 2005a
  8. ^ a b c d Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
  9. ^ Yavuz 2025, p. 375
  10. ^ a b Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194

Sources

Literature

  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
  • Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)

Related

What links here15

Persons
Empress Ashina · Gao Huan · Yuwen Tai
States
Eastern Wei · Northern Wei · Northern Zhou · Sui · Western Wei · Xiongnu
Conflicts
The Zhou–Qi war, 557–577
Battles & Events
The Göktürk Campaign of 622
Places
Huaihuang · Jiuquan · Yanmen · Youzhou

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Hegemony Wars in Northern China.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/conflicts/hegemony-wars-northern-china/

Last revised: 8 November 2026