Wusun

The Wusun held the Ili valley and the country north of the Tianshan for some four centuries. They matter for two reasons that have nothing to do with each other. First, they were the Han’s instrument against the Xiongnu in the west, which is why the Chinese wrote about them at all. Second, the story of their founder is the story of the Ashina, told six centuries earlier.

The oldest notice

The first Chinese to mention them is Zhang Qian, who had spent years as a prisoner among the Xiongnu and reported what he had heard there.^[1] He places the Wusun some two thousand li north-east of Dayuan. They were a state on the move, following the herds, with the same customs as the Xiongnu. They had tens of thousands of bowmen and were bold in a fight.^[1]

Zhang Qian raised them for a strategic purpose. In his plan, the Han could bribe the Wusun east into the old Hunye lands and bind them to the Han as brothers. The Wusun would then cut off the Xiongnu’s right arm. Once they were joined, the states beyond them as far as Bactria could be drawn in too.^[1] The emperor agreed. Zhang Qian went with three hundred men, six hundred horses and tens of thousands of cattle and sheep.^[1]

The legend of Kunmo

In the same report Zhang Qian gives the origin of the Wusun king. It is the passage that bears on the Ashina.

Kunmo’s father ruled a small state on the western border of the Xiongnu. The Xiongnu attacked and killed him. Kunmo, newly born, was cast out in the open country. A raven flew above him carrying meat, and a wolf came and gave him suck. The Chanyu wondered at it and took him for a being of divine favour. He took him in and raised him.^[1] When he grew up, he was given troops and distinguished himself repeatedly. He was given his father’s people back to hold on the western frontier.^[1] When the Chanyu died, Kunmo led his people far away. He stood neutral and would not attend the Xiongnu court. The Xiongnu sent a picked force against him and failed. They held him divine and left him alone under a nominal allegiance.^[1]^[2]^[3]

The Han Shu tells the opening differently. In its version Kunmo’s father Nandoumi ruled a small state that lay, like that of the Yuezhi, between the Qilian mountains and Dunhuang. The Yuezhi, not the Xiongnu, attacked and killed him, took his land and drove his people to the Xiongnu. The marquis Bujiu, who had charge of the newborn child, carried him away and laid him in the grass. The wolf suckled him and a bird flew over him with meat. The chanyu took the child home as a being of divine favour and raised him.^[4]^[5]

The shape is the one the Zhou Shu gives the Ashina: the house destroyed, the infant left to die, the she-wolf, the survival, the rise, the refusal of the old overlord. The Ashina most likely took the legend from their older neighbours rather than inventing it. Turkic Atlas sets out that position under the ethnogenesis debate. Some scholars take the wolf legends of the Wusun, the Gaoche and the Göktürks as one line that begins inside the Xiongnu realm.^[6] What the sources establish on their own is narrower and still considerable: a wolf-and-exposed-child foundation story was current in the eastern steppe in the second century BC and was told of a ruling house there.

Country, numbers and offices

The Han Shu describes them as a going concern. The Great Kunmi had his seat at the Red Valley city, eight thousand nine hundred li from Chang’an. There were a hundred and twenty thousand households, six hundred and thirty thousand people, and a hundred and eighty-eight thousand eight hundred men able to bear arms.^[7]^[8] The same chapter puts the Red Valley city six hundred and ten li north of Wensu, the kingdom on the northern road that is identified with Uch Turfan today.^[7]^[9] The chapter lists the offices by name: a chancellor, a Great Lu, two Great Generals of left and right, three marquises, and the rest down to a master of horse.^[7]

The country is flat, with much rain and cold, and the mountains carry pine and fir.^[7] They did not till the ground or plant trees. Like the Xiongnu, they moved with their herds in search of water and grazing, and their customs were the same.^[7] There were many horses, and a rich man might have four or five thousand.^[7] The chapter’s verdict on the people is a Chinese one and should be read as such. It calls them hard and bad, greedy as wolves and without faith, and much given to robbery. In the same passage, it calls them the strongest of the states.^[7]

The Han Shu also says where they came from: the ground was not theirs first. It was Saka country. The Yuezhi drove the Saka king west and took it. The Wusun then broke the Yuezhi, who moved west again and became subjects of Bactria. The Wusun settled where the Yuezhi had been.^[7] Hence, the chapter adds, the Wusun people include Saka and Yuezhi stock.^[7] Where the Shiji speaks of the old land of Hunye, which Zhang Qian proposed to give to the Wusun, the Han Shu writes the land of Kunmo.^[1]^[4] Some scholars regard the Han Shu’s wording as a misunderstanding of its author. The same view divides the Hexi between the two peoples, with the Yuezhi in the east, around Liangzhou, and the Wusun in the west, around Shazhou.^[10] A people formed by conquest out of the remnants of two others is the ordinary way a steppe polity comes into being. The Han Shu says so of the Wusun in a single sentence.

A wooden label from the Han frontier north of Dunhuang lists among the goods sent by the military commandant of Dunhuang “a woman of the Wusun”, with a donkey and two horses.^[11] The editor of the label takes her for a slave.^[11]

The Han marriages

The alliance was sealed the way such alliances were. The Wusun offered a thousand horses as bride-price. The Han sent the princess Xijun, with carriages, robes, several hundred attendants and officials, and a great train of gifts.^[7] The old Kunmo made her his right-hand consort. The Xiongnu sent a woman too, and she became the left-hand consort, which was the senior place.^[7]

Xijun built herself a house and saw her husband once or twice a year. She made a song that the chapter records: my family married me off to the far side of heaven, sent me far to a strange country, to the king of the Wusun; a tent is my house and felt my walls, meat is my food and curds my drink; I think always of my own land and my heart is wounded; would I were a yellow swan, and could go home.^[7]

When the old king proposed that she pass to his grandson, she refused and wrote to the emperor. The emperor answered with four characters, 從其國俗: follow the custom of that country. He gave the reason with them: the Han meant to destroy the Hu together with the Wusun.^[7] She married the grandson.^[7] The second princess, Jieyou, followed her. In 71 BC the Han and Wusun together broke the Xiongnu. Fifty thousand Wusun horse took the right Guli king’s court and came away with tens of thousands of prisoners and some seven hundred thousand head of stock.^[7]

The two Kunmi

When the old king died, the Wusun nobles kept to the old agreement. They set up Nimi, a son of the previous Kunmi Cenzou by a Xiongnu wife, who was called the Mad King. He was cruel and lost his people. Two Han envoys, sent to escort a hostage prince, plotted with the princess Jieyou to kill him at a banquet. The sword glanced off, and the king rode away wounded. His son besieged the envoys and the princess in the city for months. The Protector General Zheng Ji then came with troops of the oases and relieved them.^[7] Wu Jiutu, a son of the old king by a Xiongnu wife, had fled with the marquises into the northern mountains at the time of the attack. He gave out that Xiongnu troops of his mother’s house were coming and gathered a following. He then killed the Mad King and made himself Kunmi. The Han sent a general with fifteen thousand men to Dunhuang to move against him.^[7]

The Han Shu tells how the matter was settled without a battle. A woman of Jieyou’s household, Feng Liao, could write and knew the business of the states. She had carried Han credentials and gifts to the oases for the princess and was known as Lady Feng. She was the wife of the Right Great General of the Wusun, who was close to Wu Jiutu. The Protector General sent her to him. Han troops were coming, she told him, and he would be destroyed unless he gave in. Wu Jiutu was afraid and said that he wanted a small title. The emperor Xuan called Lady Feng to court, questioned her himself and sent her back in a brocade carriage with the tally of an envoy. Wu Jiutu was summoned to the Marquis of Changluo at the Red Valley city. There the Han made Yuan Guimi, the eldest son of Jieyou and the old king, Great Kunmi, and Wu Jiutu Little Kunmi. They gave both of them seals and ribbons.^[7] Wu Jiutu did not hand over all the people of the marquises. The Han sent the Marquis of Changluo back with three divisions to the Red Valley to fix the peoples and the boundaries. The Great Kunmi received more than sixty thousand households and the Little Kunmi more than forty thousand. The hearts of the people, however, were with the Little Kunmi, the Han Shu says.^[7] The division falls about 60 BC and lasted until AD 83 at least.^[12]

Language

Nothing of the Wusun language survives beyond names and titles in Chinese transcription. The usual classification is Indo-Iranian, based on the Saka ground they took and on the names. It is an inference from very little. An older position, held by Otto Franke, took the Wusun to be probably of Turkic descent.^[8] A later view also counts the Wusun among Turkic speakers, without giving a ground in the work where it appears. It adds that they were subject to the chanyu while they were weak, and that they stopped obeying his summons once they had grown strong.^[13] Some scholars take the title of their king, kunmi, 昆靡, for Turkic kün bag, “great lord”.^[14] A third position takes their language for a Tocharian one, from the final element of the royal titles.^[15] The marquis title xihou is found among the Wusun, the Yuezhi and the Kangju. It is no doubt the title later used by the Turks as yabgu, but, according to some scholars, not of Turkic origin, and a Tocharian word that the Turks took over in Bactria.^[16]^[17] What the sources do establish is that they lived as their Xiongnu neighbours lived, in the same way and by the same reckoning. This says something about a way of life and nothing at all about a language.^[7]

References

^ a b c d e f g h Shiji, juan 123
^ Ögel 1993, p. 13–14
^ Ögel 2015, p. 345,349
^ a b Han Shu, juan 61
^ Ögel 2015, p. 348–350
^ Ögel 1993, p. 13–20
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Han Shu, juan 96
^ a b Herrmann 1910, p. 88
^ Herrmann 1910, p. 88–89
^ Kurakichi 1930, p. 15–23
^ a b Chavannes 1913, p. 78
^ Herrmann 1910, p. 89
^ Kurakichi 1930, p. 28–29
^ Kurakichi 1926, p. 17–19
^ Pulleyblank 1962, p. 227
^ Pulleyblank 1962, p. 95
^ Pulleyblank 1962, p. 256

Sources

Shiji, juan 110, 123
Han Shu, juan 61, 96 (after Shiji)

Literature

Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Albert Herrmann, Die alten Seidenstrassen zwischen China und Syrien. Beiträge zur alten Geographie Asiens, Bd. 1 (1910)
Édouard Chavannes, Les documents chinois découverts par Aurel Stein dans les sables du Turkestan oriental (1913)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Mitolojisi (Kaynakları ve açıklamaları ile destanlar) I (1993)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Büyük Hun İmparatorluğu Tarihi I (2015)
Shiratori Kurakichi, On the Territory of the Hsiung-nu Prince Hsiu-t'u Wang and His Metal Statues for Heaven-worship (1930)
Shiratori Kurakichi, A Study on the Titles Kaghan and Katun (1926)
Edwin G. Pulleyblank, The Consonantal System of Old Chinese, Part I (1962)
Edwin G. Pulleyblank, The Consonantal System of Old Chinese, Part II (1962)