Qiedihou took the throne of the Xiongnu in 101 BC and held it for five years.[1] Three men of the Han whom the Han Shu follows at length belong to his reign. He held the envoy Su Wu. The general Li Ling surrendered to him and married his daughter. He nearly destroyed the army of the general Li Guangli.[2]

Accession

When the chanyu Xulihu died after a year on the throne, the Xiongnu set up his younger brother, the Left Great Commandant Qiedihou.[3] The Han Shu dates this to the fourth year of the Taichu era, 101 BC.[1] In that year Wudi issued an edict against the Xiongnu. The conquest of Ferghana had made the Han feared abroad.[1] According to the edict, the founder had left him the trouble at Pingcheng. There the Xiongnu had besieged the first emperor at Baideng.[1] In the time of Empress Lü the chanyu had written an insolent letter.[1] The edict adds that Duke Xiang of Qi had avenged a wrong done nine generations before, and that the Chunqiu praises him for it.[1] The Han Shu says that the emperor meant to wear the Xiongnu down.[1]

The first year

Qiedihou feared that the Han would strike him first. He sent back every Han envoy who had refused to submit, Lu Chongguo among them.[3] He called himself a child who would not presume to look up to the Han emperor. The Han emperor, he said, belonged to the generation of his elders, 丈人行.[3] A century of treaties had made the two rulers brothers. The emperor Wen had written to the chanyu in those terms.[1] Qiedihou now set himself a generation below the emperor.[1]

Wudi answered by sending Su Wu, a general of the palace gentlemen, with rich gifts.[1] The Han Shu says that the chanyu grew more arrogant and received him with great rudeness. This was not what the Han had hoped.[1] The next year the Han general Zhao Ponu escaped and reached the Han lines. The Xiongnu had taken him in 103 BC.[4]

Su Wu

Su Wu’s years in the steppe are told in the chapter on Li Guang and Su Jian.[5] According to the chapter, he had come to see home the Xiongnu envoys whom the Han held. He had also come to thank the chanyu for his goodwill with gifts.[5]

While Su Wu was at the court, the king of Gou planned with the men Wei Lü had led over from the Han. The plan was to seize the chanyu’s mother and take her to the Han side.[5] The king of Gou was a nephew of the Hunye king. He had gone over to the Han with his uncle and had later fallen back into Xiongnu hands with Zhao Ponu.[5] Su Wu’s deputy, Zhang Sheng, had agreed to help one of the plotters.[5] The chanyu was out hunting. The plotters, seventy men and more, were about to move.[5] One of them slipped away in the night and reported it.[5] The chanyu’s sons and brothers raised troops. The king of Gou died, and Yu Chang was taken alive.[5]

The chanyu gave the case to Wei Lü.[5] When Yu Chang named Zhang Sheng, the chanyu was angry. He called his nobles to discuss killing the Han envoys.[5] The Left Yizhizi King said that if they had plotted against the chanyu himself, no heavier penalty could be added. He said it was better to make them all submit.[5] Su Wu tried to kill himself rather than submit to Wei Lü’s questioning. Wei Lü saved him.[5] The chanyu admired his conduct. He sent men morning and evening to ask after him.[5]

The chanyu then wanted Su Wu to submit.[5] Wei Lü’s threats and offers failed. The chanyu had Su Wu shut in a cellar without food.[5] For days Su Wu lived on snow and the felt of his bedding. The Xiongnu took him for a spirit. He was sent to the North Sea to herd rams, with leave to go home when the rams gave milk.[5] Su Wu stayed in the Xiongnu country for nineteen years in all. The end of his story falls in the reign of Huyandi.[6]

The campaigns of 99 BC

In the second year of the Tianhan era, 99 BC, the Han sent out three armies.[7] Li Guangli went out from Jiuquan with thirty thousand horse. At the Heavenly Mountains he beat the Right Worthy King and took more than ten thousand heads.[8] The Xiongnu then closed round him. He barely got out. Six or seven men in ten of his army were dead.[1] The general Gongsun Ao went out from Xihe and met the commandant Lu Bode at Zhuoxie Mountain. He took nothing.[1] The third army was Li Ling’s.[1]

Li Ling

Li Ling was a cavalry commandant. He had asked Wudi to let him lead five thousand foot soldiers against the chanyu’s court, in place of carrying Li Guangli’s supplies.[5] He marched out of Juyan and went north for thirty days. He camped at Junji Mountain, where the chanyu came on him with some thirty thousand horse.[5] The chanyu called in the troops of the left and right lands, more than eighty thousand horse.[5] Li Ling fell back to the south for days, fighting each day. The Han Shu says that he killed and wounded more than ten thousand Xiongnu.[6]

A Xiongnu captive told the Han what the chanyu had said: these were picked Han troops who could not be broken, and they were drawing him day and night toward the frontier, where there might be an ambush.[5] His chiefs answered that the chanyu, with tens of thousands of horse, had failed to destroy a few thousand Han. They said that he could not again use his border ministers if he gave up. They said that the Han would think less of the Xiongnu.[5] Then a Han officer, Guan Gan, whom his superior had shamed, went over to the Xiongnu. He told the chanyu that Li Ling had no relief force and that his arrows were nearly spent.[5] The chanyu was delighted.[5] His horsemen cut the road. They called on Li Ling and Han Yannian, who led the other half of the vanguard, to surrender.[5]

Li Ling’s arrows ran out.[6] He said that he had no face to report to the emperor. He gave himself up.[6] Four hundred of his men reached the frontier.[6] The chanyu honoured him. He married him to his daughter and made him Right Xiao King. He made Wei Lü king of the Dingling.[2] Both were given a voice in affairs.[2] Some scholars take the two appointments as an attempt to control conquered peoples by setting a loyal outsider over them.[9] The chief consort wanted Li Ling dead. The chanyu hid him in the north until she died.[5]

Wudi had wanted Li Ling to die in battle.[5] He learned of the surrender in a rage. When the Han heard a report that Li Ling was teaching the Xiongnu to make war, Wudi killed Li Ling’s mother, brother, wife and sons.[5] Li Ling said that the teacher was Li Xu, another Han renegade. He had Li Xu killed.[5]

The campaign of 97 BC

Two years later the Han came again.[8] Li Guangli led sixty thousand horse and seventy thousand foot out of Shuofang. Lu Bode and the general Han Yue went with other columns. Gongsun Ao went out from Yanmen.[8] The Shiji gives the infantry as a hundred thousand.[10] Qiedihou sent his baggage and families north of the Yuwu River. He waited south of it with a hundred thousand horse.[1] He fought Li Guangli for more than ten days. Li Guangli drew off.[1] Gongsun Ao fought the Left Worthy King without success. Han Yue took nothing.[1]

The Shiji ends the campaign differently.[10] It says that Li Guangli heard that his family had been wiped out for sorcery. He went over to the Xiongnu with his army. An edict ordered the arrest of the court physician Sui Dan for spreading the news.[10] The Han Shu has Li Guangli withdraw here. It places his surrender seven years later.[8]

Death and succession

Qiedihou died the next year, in the fifth year of his reign.[1] He had named his eldest son, the Left Worthy King, to follow him.[1] The nobles thought that son must be ill, since he had not come. They set up the younger, the Left Great General.[1] The Left Worthy King did not dare to come forward. The younger brother offered him the throne.[1] The Left Worthy King became Hulugu in 96 BC.[1]

Assessment

The Han Shu has a Xiongnu minister date the decline of the Xiongnu from his reign.[1] In 53 BC the Left Yizhizi King told Huhanye that the Xiongnu had been cut down day by day since the time of the Qiedihou Chanyu. He said they could not recover.[1] Some scholars count Qiedihou as the fourth of seven chanyus between 114 and 60 BC. They hold that none of them gave the Xiongnu strong leadership.[11]

He left Su Wu at the North Sea, Li Ling and Wei Lü as kings in his service, and a throne that his younger son had given up to his elder.[6]

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 Han Shu, juan 94
  2. ^ a b c Han Shu, juan 94; Han Shu, juan 54
  3. ^ a b c Han Shu, juan 94; Shiji, juan 110
  4. ^ Han Shu, juan 94; Shiji, juan 110; Han Shu, juan 6
  5. ^ 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 Han Shu, juan 54
  6. ^ a b c d e f Han Shu, juan 54; Han Shu, juan 94
  7. ^ Han Shu, juan 6; Han Shu, juan 94
  8. ^ a b c d Han Shu, juan 94; Han Shu, juan 6
  9. ^ Miller 2014, p. 17
  10. ^ a b c d Shiji, juan 110
  11. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 136

Sources

Literature

  • Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)
  • Bryan K. Miller, Xiongnu “Kings” and the Political Order of the Steppe Empire (2014)

Related

What links here7

Persons
Emperor Wu of Han · Hulugu Chanyu · Li Guangli · Su Wu · Wei Lü · Xulihu Chanyu
Institutions and Titles
Worthy Kings of the Left and Right

Cite this article

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

Last revised: 8 November 2026