Huyandi was a young man when he was made chanyu of the Xiongnu. He held the throne for seventeen years.[1] The Han Shu shows him under the influence of his mother and of the Han renegade Wei Lü.[1] It spends most of its account of his reign on the defeats of the Xiongnu. These were the failed raids on the Han frontier, the five-army campaign of 72 BC and the winter that followed.[1] In that winter three neighbours, the Dingling, the Wuhuan and the Wusun, fell on him. The peoples that Bagatur’s empire had bound to it came apart.[1]

Accession by forged order

Hulugu died in 85 BC, the second year of the Shiyuan era. Wei Lü and the Zhuanqu Yanzhi, the consort, hid the death. They forged the chanyu’s order.[1] They drank the covenant with the nobles. They set up Hulugu’s son, the Left Guli King, as Huyandi.[1] Hulugu had asked that his brother, the Right Guli King, take the throne, because his own son was too young to rule.[1][2]

On taking the throne he hinted to the Han envoys that he wanted a heqin.[1] The Han Shu records no answer.[1]

The Left Worthy King and the Right Guli King

The Left Worthy King and the Right Guli King were angry at being passed over.[1] They set out to lead their people south to the Han. Fearing that they could not reach the frontier by themselves, they threatened the Lutu King. They asked him to go west with them, submit to the Wusun and plan an attack on the Xiongnu.[1] The Lutu King betrayed the plan.[1][3] The chanyu sent men to question the kings. The Right Guli King would not submit and turned the charge on the Lutu King. The people thought the Lutu King wrongly accused.[1] The two kings withdrew to their own lands. They never agreed to come to the assembly at Longcheng again.[1] The Han Shu puts the great assembly of the year at Longcheng in the fifth month. There the chiefs sacrificed to their ancestors, Heaven and Earth and the spirits.[1] It counts the Left Worthy King and the Right Guli King among the greatest of the Xiongnu rulers.[1] Two of them now stayed away from the assembly.[1]

Wei Lü’s proposal to build walls

Two years later, in autumn, the Xiongnu entered Dai and killed a commandant.[1] The Han Shu describes the chanyu as young and newly set up, his mother the consort as not upright, and the country as drifting apart. He lived in constant fear that a Han army would attack.[1] Wei Lü advised him to dig wells, build walls and put up towers to store grain. The places were to be held with men of Qin, so that the Han could do nothing when they came.[1] Men of Qin were Chinese. Several hundred wells were dug and several thousand timbers cut.[1] Then someone said that the Hu could not defend a walled place and that the plan would only leave grain for the Han. Wei Lü gave it up.[1][4] The refusal to hold walled towns may be the same rule that Tonyukuk later urged on the Göktürks.[5]

Su Wu and Ma Hong

Wei Lü’s next proposal was to send back the Han envoys who had refused to submit.[1] One was Su Wu.[1] The other was Ma Hong, the deputy of Wang Zhong. The Xiongnu had intercepted Wang Zhong on a mission to the western countries, and he had died fighting. Ma Hong, taken alive, would not submit either.[1] The chanyu sent them back to open a way to goodwill.[1] This was in the third year of his reign.[1]

The chapter on Su Wu tells the release differently.[6] The Xiongnu told a Han envoy that Su Wu was dead. Then Chang Hui, who had been held with him, instructed the envoy what to say. The emperor had shot a wild goose in the Shanglin park, and it carried a silk letter on its leg saying that Su Wu was in a marsh.[6] The chanyu looked at his attendants in surprise and apologised. Su Wu and his men were in fact alive.[6] Su Wu had been in the Xiongnu country nineteen years. Nine men came home with him.[6] The Xiongnu chapter makes the release a gesture of the chanyu’s own. The chapter on Su Wu makes it the end of a ruse.

Li Ling, who had come over in 99 BC, died among the Xiongnu after more than twenty years there. Counted from his surrender, his death falls within this reign.[6]

Raids and the Left Guli King

In the following year the Xiongnu sent twenty thousand horse of the left and right in four columns across the frontier.[1] The Han pursued them. They killed or took nine thousand and captured the Outuo King alive.[1] The Xiongnu feared that he would guide the Han to them. They retreated far to the north-west. They did not dare go south for water and grazing.[1] They put people into garrisons at the Outuo. The year after, they put nine thousand horse at the Surrender-Receiving City. They laid a bridge over the Yuwu River north of it to ease flight.[1][7]

Wei Lü was dead by then.[1] One modern account places his death in 79 BC and describes these years as a time of drought, famine and poverty among the Xiongnu.[7] While he lived he had often spoken for the benefits of a heqin. The Xiongnu had not believed him.[1] After his death their armies often fell into difficulty. The state grew poorer.[1] The chanyu’s brother, the Left Guli King, remembered Wei Lü’s words and wanted a heqin. He feared that the Han would refuse and would not be the first to speak. He had his attendants hint at it to Han envoys.[1] Raids grew rarer. Han envoys were treated better, so as to bring on a heqin by degrees.[1] The Han kept the Xiongnu on a loose rein.[1] Then the Left Guli King died.[1]

The next year the chanyu sent the Liwu King to look at the frontier.[1] The king reported that the forces at Jiuquan and Zhangye were growing weak. He said that an attack might win back the land.[1] A defector who had come over to the Han earlier had heard the plan. The emperor ordered the border on alert.[1] Not long afterwards the Right Worthy King and the Liwu King, with four thousand horse in three columns, entered Rele, Wulan and Fanhe.[1] The Grand Administrator of Zhangye and a commandant of a dependent state beat them. Only a few hundred escaped.[1] A cavalryman of the Yiqu King, a thousand-chief of the dependent state, shot the Liwu King dead.[1] The Han rewarded him with gold and horses and gave him the title of Liwu King. They made the commandant Guo Zhong Marquis of Cheng’an.[1] After that the Xiongnu did not dare to enter Zhangye.[1]

The Wuhuan

In the next year three thousand Xiongnu horse entered Wuyuan and killed several thousand people. Tens of thousands came later to hunt along the border and take frontier officers.[1] Han beacons and lookouts were now sharp. The raiders got little.[1] A Xiongnu deserter told the Han that the Wuhuan had dug up the tombs of earlier chanyus. He said that the Xiongnu resented it. He said that they were sending twenty thousand horse against the Wuhuan.[1][8] Some scholars take the Wuhuan raid on the tombs as evidence that at least some chanyu tombs lay in the east.[9]

The general Huo Guang wanted to send troops to cut the Xiongnu off. He asked Zhao Chongguo.[1] Zhao Chongguo said that the Wuhuan had often raided the border and that a Xiongnu attack on them suited the Han. He said that to attack barbarians who were fighting each other was to invite trouble.[1] Huo Guang asked Fan Mingyou, who said that it could be done. Huo Guang made him General Who Crosses the Liao, with twenty thousand horse out of Liaodong.[1] The Xiongnu heard that the Han were coming and withdrew.[1] Huo Guang had told Fan Mingyou not to go out for nothing. Fan Mingyou arrived behind the Xiongnu and attacked the Wuhuan, who had just been struck by them.[1] He took six thousand heads and the heads of three kings. He was made Marquis of Pingling.[1]

The Wusun and the five generals

The Xiongnu were frightened by this. They did not dare send out troops.[10] They sent envoys to the Wusun to demand that the Wusun hand over the Han princess. They attacked the Wusun and took the land of Cheyan and Eshi.[10] The Wusun princess wrote to the Han court. The officials debated without deciding.[10] The emperor Zhao, the son and successor of Wudi, died. Xuandi came to the throne.[10] The Wusun king wrote again that the Xiongnu had been cutting into his land. He added that he would send half his best troops, fifty thousand horsemen, if the emperor sent an army to rescue the princess.[10]

In the second year of Benshi, 72 BC, the Han called out picked horse from east of the pass. They sent five generals with more than a hundred thousand cavalry, each going more than two thousand li out of the frontier.[1] The Colonel Chang Hui went to the Wusun. The Wusun king came in from the west with fifty thousand horse and his marquises.[1] Together, the Han Shu says, they were more than two hundred thousand.[1] The Xiongnu heard that the Han were out in force. The old and weak ran, driving their herds far away. The five generals therefore took little.[1] The Duliao general took seven hundred heads and some ten thousand animals.[1] The Pulei general took the chanyu’s envoy, the Puyin King, and three hundred others.[1] The Huya general took nineteen hundred heads and seventy thousand animals.[1] The Qilian general knew that the enemy was ahead and told the returning envoys to say there was none. The Huya general had padded his count. Both were handed to the officials and killed themselves.[1]

Chang Hui and the Wusun did better.[10] They reached the court of the Right Guli King. There they took the chanyu’s elders, his sister-in-law, a princess, named kings, a Liwu commandant, thousand-chiefs and officers, and more than seven hundred thousand horses, cattle, sheep, donkeys, mules and camels.[10] The chapter on the Western Regions counts about forty thousand heads.[10] Chang Hui was made Marquis of Changluo.[10] The Han Shu adds that the Xiongnu people who died and fled, and the herds that died far away, meant that the chanyu could no longer count on winning.[1] The Xiongnu fell into decline. They resented the Wusun.[1]

The winter after the campaign

That winter Huyandi himself took ten thousand horse against the Wusun. He got some old men and weak people.[1] As he turned for home, snow fell, a zhang deep in a day. Men and herds froze, and fewer than one in ten of them came back.[1] The Dingling came in from the north, the Wuhuan from the east and the Wusun from the west.[1] Together they killed several tens of thousands. They took tens of thousands of horses and many cattle and sheep.[1][11] Then famine came on top of it. Three in ten of the Xiongnu people and five in ten of their herds died.[1][12][13] This account has been found close to what the Göktürk inscriptions say about a people that scattered and perished.[11] It has also been argued that the origins of Attila’s Huns are to be sought in the dispersal of the Xiongnu after this winter.[14] The Han Shu says that the peoples subject to the Xiongnu all fell apart.[1]

The Han then sent three thousand horse in three columns into the Xiongnu country. They took several thousand captives.[1] The Xiongnu did not dare to face them. From then on, the Han Shu says, they wanted a heqin and the border had little trouble.[1]

Death

Huyandi died after seventeen years on the throne.[1] His brother, the Left Worthy King, followed him as Xulüquanqu in 68 BC, the second year of Dijie.[1]

Assessment

Some scholars count him with Hulugu as one of only two chanyus between 114 and 60 BC who reigned more than ten years.[15] They call him a weakling under his mother’s domination. They add that he alienated much of the nobility and made the Xiongnu people afraid of Han attack.[16] In the Han Shu the reign runs from a forged order at its start to a winter at its end in which the snow and three neighbours cost the Xiongnu three in ten of their people.[1]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao ap aq ar as at au av aw ax ay az ba bb bc bd be bf bg bh bi bj bk bl bm bn bo bp bq br bs bt bu bv bw bx by bz ca cb Han Shu, juan 94
  2. ^ Ögel 2015, p. 113
  3. ^ Ögel 2015, p. 114
  4. ^ Ögel 2015, p. 114–115
  5. ^ Ögel 2015, p. 114, 160–161, 163
  6. ^ a b c d e Han Shu, juan 54
  7. ^ a b Ögel 2015, p. 116
  8. ^ Ögel 2015, p. 117–118
  9. ^ Ögel 2015, p. 118
  10. ^ a b c d e f g h i Han Shu, juan 94; Han Shu, juan 96
  11. ^ a b Ögel 2015, p. 122
  12. ^ Khazanov 1994, p. 73
  13. ^ Lattimore 1951, p. 470
  14. ^ Ögel 2015, p. 112, 122
  15. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 136
  16. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 136,138

Sources

  • Han Shu, juan 54, 94, 96 (after Shiji)

Literature

  • Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)
  • Bahaeddin Ögel, Büyük Hun İmparatorluğu Tarihi II (2015)
  • Anatoly M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (1994)
  • Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1951)

Related

What links here7

Persons
Hulugu Chanyu · Qiedihou Chanyu · Su Wu · Wei Lü · Xulüquanqu Chanyu
Institutions and Titles
Women among the Turkic Peoples · Worthy Kings of the Left and Right

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Huyandi Chanyu.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/persons/huyandi-chanyu/

Last revised: 8 November 2026