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

The Uyghur–Kirghiz War was the war between the Uyghur khaganate and the Kirghiz of the upper Yenisei. It was fought from about 820 until 840.[1] It began when the Kirghiz ruler Are took the title of khan.[2] It ended when a Kirghiz army killed the Uyghur khan and burned his camp. A defector from the Uyghur court had brought the army to the Orkhon.[3] The Xin Tang Shu counts the war at twenty years.[2] The fall of Ordu-Balık was its last act. It ended the khaganate that had controlled the steppe from Ordu-Balık on the Orkhon since 744.

Before the war

In the inscriptions of the Second Khaganate, those of Kül Tegin and Tonyukuk, the ruler of the Kirghiz is a khan. The inscriptions also report that the Göktürks killed one of these khans in a winter campaign over the Kögmen.[4] The inscriptions use the title khan only for the rulers of China, Tibet and the Kirghiz, and for their own rulers.[5] The Uyghurs overthrew the Göktürks in 744. In the following years they campaigned against the Karluks and the Çik, allies of the Kirghiz.[6] In 758 they reported to the Tang court that they had destroyed an army of 50,000 Kirghiz.[7] From then on the Kirghiz sent no envoys to China. The Uyghurs gave the Kirghiz ruler the title Bilga Ton Irkin, a title without the word khan.[8]

The Kirghiz looked west.[6] The Xin Tang Shu says that they relied on the Arabs, the Tibetans and the Karluks. Tibetan travellers, afraid of Uyghur raiders, waited among the Karluks for a Kirghiz escort. Every third year the Arabs sent the Kirghiz twenty bolts of heavy brocade.[2]

Are takes the title of khan

When the Uyghurs grew weaker, Are called himself khan.[2] The Chinese text names his mother and his wife. His mother was a Türgesh woman and became mother-katun. His wife was the daughter of a Karluk yabgu and became katun.[2] The Uyghurs sent a chancellor against him. The chancellor did not win.[2] The two peoples then fought for twenty years without a decision.[2] The Zizhi Tongjian is reported to make the Uyghurs the aggressors in this war. In the same report the Uyghurs lose several times.[9]

Are took the title at about 820. The Uyghurs answered with an attack. The Kirghiz turned it back.[1] The title was an old one among the Kirghiz. The Chinese text of the Karabalghasun inscription also calls the Kirghiz ruler whom the Uyghurs had beaten a khan.[10]

After this success Are cursed the Uyghur khan.[2]

Your luck has run out. I will take your golden tent, and in front of it I will race my horses and plant my banner. If you can stand against me, come at once. If you cannot, be gone.[11]

Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang)

The golden tent was the tent in which the Uyghur khan sat.[2] Gold stood for imperial rule.[9] The Zizhi Tongjian is reported to add that the Kirghiz had sworn to take the tent.[9] The Arab envoy Tamīm ibn Baḥr visited the Uyghur capital a few years after the Chinese princess Taihe married the Uyghur khan. He describes a tent covered with gold on the flat top of the khan’s castle. The tent was large enough for a hundred men and visible from far outside the city.[9]

The year 839

In 832 the Uyghur khan was killed by his ministers. His nephew became khan.[12] Seven years later the court broke apart again. The two Tang histories tell the end of the old khan differently. According to the Jiu Tang Shu, the minister Jueluowu kept soldiers outside the capital. Out of resentment at the execution of two conspirators, he killed the khan.[13] According to the Xin Tang Shu, the minister led Shatuo troops against the khan. The khan took his own life.[2] The people then made Prince Hesa khan.[2]

That year there was famine and pestilence in the Uyghur lands. Heavy snow killed many sheep and horses.[2] An envoy of the Tang came to announce the accession of the emperor Wuzong. He reached the Uyghurs in 840 and found the state in disorder.[2]

A general named Julu Mohe hated the minister and fled to the Kirghiz.[13] His Turkic title is taken to be Külüg Bagha.[10]

The attack of 840

Külüg Bagha led the Kirghiz against the Uyghur fortresses. The Chinese annals give the size of the army as 100,000 horse.[3] The Kirghiz killed the khan and beheaded the minister. They set fire to the royal camp. All the Uyghur tribes were scattered.[3] The Kirghiz are also said to have taken the capital Ordu-Balık and killed the last khan there. It adds that the Uyghurs left their country in large groups. They went to the Karluk land, to the Chinese frontier and to the trading cities of Inner Asia.[14]

Are took the field in person.[2] He burned the camp and the golden tent where the Uyghur khan used to sit.[2] He carried off the treasure. He found the princess Taihe, the Tang woman who had been married into the Uyghur court.[2] Then he moved his own camp to the south side of Mount Lao, also called Duman. The new camp lay fifteen days’ ride from the old Uyghur camp.[2]

Are sent Taihe home as the daughter of the Tang house. He did so because the Kirghiz said that they descended from the Han general Li Ling and shared the clan name of the Tang emperors.[13] He gave her an escort of ten dagan, the lowest of the six grades of Kirghiz officials.[15] The Uyghur prince Wujie had fled south to the Tang frontier and made himself khan there. He met the Kirghiz envoys on the road and killed them. He took the princess with him across the desert.[16] In 843 the Tang commander Shi Xiong came upon her tent and brought her home.[13] The claim of kinship with the Tang house has its own article, as does the princess.

Beginning of the war

The Xin Tang Shu gives the length of the war and the year of its end. It gives no year for the beginning.[2] Three dates have been proposed.

The first puts the beginning about 820, with Are’s title and the first Uyghur attack.[1] The second ties it to the death of the Uyghur khan Baoyi in 821. After his death the empire is said to have come apart.[17] The third comes from summaries of Kirghiz-language histories. It has an Uyghur campaign on the upper Yenisei in 810. Afterwards the Kirghiz refused to submit. In 836 they broke with Uyghur rule.[18] Mustafa Kalkan reports these dates. He takes them from other historians and names no Chinese source for them.[18]

A reservation comes from a Chinese inscription of the reign of the Uyghur khan of 808 to 821. The inscription is reported to tell of a war with the Kirghiz. It is also reported to give the Kirghiz 400,000 bowmen and to call their state destroyed.[19] Set beside the twenty years of war, that report leaves little room for a complete Uyghur victory in between. A further proposal puts the clash that the stele tells after 795, when the Uyghur throne passed from one clan to another. The Uyghurs then had to march against the Kirghiz to assert their rule. The stele says that they won and killed the Kirghiz ruler. The Kirghiz began again about 820.[5][5] The stele and its date have an article of their own.

Causes of the war

No Chinese source gives the reason. The explanations in the literature do not exclude each other.

The first explanation looks west. It links the war with an Uyghur raid into Usrushana in 821. The raid is held to have followed fighting with the Tibetans and the Karluks, allies of the Kirghiz.[20] Whether the two belong together is unclear. If they do, the Kirghiz moved against Uyghur interference with their allies and trading partners in the west.[20]

The second looks to the weather. Nicola Di Cosmo and his colleagues read in the tree rings of the Orkhon country a drought from 783 to 850. A second reconstruction marks a severe drought from 804. The tree rings of the Orkhon country set its most severe phase from 805, for thirteen years.[21] The Tang annals report the famine and the hard winter of 839, the year before the attack.[2] The measurements date a drought. They do not say whether the drought or the Kirghiz brought the khaganate down.

The third looks to the court. A khan was killed by his ministers in 832, and another died in 839. A general changed sides.[15]

The fourth looks to the position of the Kirghiz khan. His mother was a Türgesh woman, and his wife was a Karluk. The Kirghiz had trade and allies in the south-west.[2] Meanwhile factions at the Uyghur court were weakening Uyghur power.[5]

After 840

Michael R. Drompp finds that the Kirghiz did not replace the Uyghurs in the Orkhon valley. They remained centred on their homeland on the upper Yenisei.[22] He reads the letters that Li Deyu, the Tang chancellor, wrote to the Kirghiz in 843 and 845.[23] The Kirghiz asked for the title Tängri Khan and spoke of taking over the Uyghur lands. However, they also complained that the Stelae Road was blocked. The road probably ran through central Mongolia.[24] In his judgement a lasting Kirghiz post on the plateau would have kept the road open.[25] Their influence beyond their own country lasted a few years.[26] For several years after 840 the Kirghiz sent raids into Mongolia to mop up the Uyghur remnants. No Kirghiz foray is known after the strike against the Shiwei in 848.[27]

The Xin Tang Shu says the same in one sentence. The Kirghiz sent envoys and received titles, but in the end they could not take the Uyghurs.[2] In 848 the Kirghiz chancellor Apa attacked the Shiwei with a reported 70,000 men. The Shiwei had divided the Uyghur remnants among their seven tribes. Apa took the Uyghurs back to the land north of the desert.[13]

Are was dead by then. One of his own officials had killed him some time before 6 February 847. The news reached the Tang court later.[28] The article on the embassies tells of the envoys of 842 to 844, the title of 847 and the register of the imperial clan.[29]

The older scholarship spoke of a Kirghiz empire that replaced the Uyghur one and reached the northern Tarim.[30] Drompp calls it a hypothesis that came to be written as fact.[30] He traces how it grew. Scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries wrote carefully. They said that the Kirghiz had been unable to set up a stable government in Mongolia. They said that their withdrawal seemed to go with the rise of the Khitan. A French history of the steppes of 1948 turned this remark into a Kirghiz rule of some eighty years on the Orkhon, which the Khitan ended in 924. Later handbooks repeated it without testing it.[31] Three other reconstructions have been proposed.

L. R. Kyzlasov reconstructs a realm from the Minusinsk basin and the Altai. It reaches the Irtysh in the west, the Ob and the Angara in the north, and Tuva, north-western Mongolia and Lake Baikal in the east. In it some Uyghur tribes live on under Kirghiz overlordship. Külüg Bagha is left on the Orkhon as the khan’s representative.[32] The reconstruction is judged to rest largely on conjecture.[32]

The national historiography of Kyrgyzstan speaks of a Great Kirghiz State from 840 to 924.[33]

The commentary to the Persian geography Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam has the Kirghiz empire last until about 917. At that time the Khitan united northern China and Mongolia, and the khan went back to the Yenisei.[34] A commentary by the same scholar on the geographer Marvazī, by contrast, has the Khitan founder push the Kirghiz back from the Orkhon in 924.[35]

The year 924 is the conventional end of Kirghiz power on the steppe. In that year the Khitan founder Abaoji reached the Orkhon. In Drompp’s account, Abaoji met no Kirghiz empire and no organised state there. He met only scattered groups. The Kirghiz stayed beyond Khitan rule.[36] The Khakas name debate covers the name of the Kirghiz in the Chinese texts, Xiajiasi, and its link with the modern Khakas. Turkic Atlas tells what the Kirghiz made of their victory under the Yenisei Kirghiz khaganate.

References

  1. ^ a b c Drompp 2005, p. 36–37
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
  3. ^ a b c Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217; Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
  4. ^ Kül Tegin inscription; Tonyukuk inscription
  5. ^ a b c d Drompp 2002, p. 482
  6. ^ a b Golden 1992, p. 180
  7. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195; Mackerras 1972, p. 66
  8. ^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217; Drompp 2005, p. 36
  9. ^ a b c d Mackerras 1972, p. 182–183
  10. ^ a b Drompp 2005, p. 37
  11. ^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217; Drompp 2005, p. 37
  12. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195; Mackerras 1972, p. 123
  13. ^ a b c d e Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
  14. ^ Kafesoğlu 1997, p. 135
  15. ^ a b Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
  16. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195; Tang Huiyao (Institutional History of the Tang), juan 98
  17. ^ Mackerras 1972, p. 12
  18. ^ a b Kalkan 2005, p. 86
  19. ^ Barthold 1927, p. 15
  20. ^ a b Golden 1992, p. 180–181
  21. ^ Cosmo 2018; Hessl 2018
  22. ^ Drompp 2005, p. 38, 140–141, 147–148, 200–203
  23. ^ Drompp 2005, p. 136, 139–141, 146–148
  24. ^ Drompp 2005, p. 103–105, 139–141, 146–148
  25. ^ Drompp 2005, p. 147
  26. ^ Drompp 2005, p. 197
  27. ^ Drompp 1999, p. 396–397
  28. ^ Drompp 2005, p. 158
  29. ^ Drompp 2005, p. 103, 131, 138, 145
  30. ^ a b Drompp 2005, p. 200
  31. ^ Drompp 1999, p. 391–393
  32. ^ a b Golden 1992, p. 181
  33. ^ Kalkan 2005, p. 87–88
  34. ^ Minorsky 1970, p. 282
  35. ^ Minorsky 1942, p. 78
  36. ^ Drompp 2005, p. 203

Sources

Literature

  • İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Türk Millî Kültürü (1997)
  • Colin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories (1972)
  • Michael R. Drompp, Tang China and the Collapse of the Uighur Empire: A Documentary History (2005)
  • Michael R. Drompp, Breaking the Orkhon Tradition: Kirghiz Adherence to the Yenisei Region after A.D. 840 (1999)
  • Michael R. Drompp, The Yenisei Kyrgyz from Early Times to the Mongol Conquest (2002)
  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Nicola Di Cosmo; Amy Hessl; Caroline Leland; Oyunsanaa Byambasuren; Hanqin Tian; Baatarbileg Nachin; Neil Pederson; Laia Andreu-Hayles; Edward R. Cook, Environmental Stress and Steppe Nomads: Rethinking the History of the Uyghur Empire (744–840) with Paleoclimate Data (2018)
  • Amy E. Hessl; Kevin J. Anchukaitis; Casey Jelsee; Benjamin Cook; Oyunsanaa Byambasuren; Caroline Leland; Baatarbileg Nachin; Neil Pederson; Hanqin Tian; Laia Andreu Hayles, Past and future drought in Mongolia (2018)
  • V. V. Barthold, Kirgizy: istoričeskij očerk [Киргизы: исторический очерк] (1927)
  • Mustafa Kalkan, Kırgız Boylarının Yenisey'den Çıkarılmaları ve Coğrafî Dağılımları (2005)
  • Anvarbek Mokeev, Yenisey ve Altay Kırgızlarında siyasi unvan olarak aco ve idi terimlerinin menşesi ve anlamı (2019)
  • V. Minorsky, Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam, "The Regions of the World": A Persian Geography 372 A.H. – 982 A.D., translated and explained, with the preface by V. V. Barthold, 2nd ed. (1970)
  • V. Minorsky, Sharaf al-Zamān Ṭāhir Marvazī on China, the Turks and India (1942)

Related

What links here9

Persons
Abaoji · Are Khan · Külüg Bagha · Kürabir
States
Yenisei Kirghiz Khaganate
Battles & Events
Abaoji's campaign to the Orkhon (924) · Kirghiz Embassies to the Tang (842–848) · Uyghur victory over the Kirghiz (758)
Controversies
The Khakas name debate

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Uyghur–Kirghiz War.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/conflicts/uyghur-kirghiz-war/

Last revised: 8 November 2026