Toquz Oghuz

Rouran epoch Göktürk epoch Uyghur epoch Kirghiz epoch

Rouran First Göktürk Tang rule Second Göktürk Uyghur Kirghiz Huns Western Göktürk Türgesh Karluk Khazar

Rouran 400–554
First Göktürk 552–630
Tang rule 630–682
Second Göktürk 682–744
Uyghur 744–840
Kirghiz 840–924
Huns 370–469
Western Göktürk 552–659
Türgesh 699–766
Karluk 766–800
Khazar 650–969

The Toquz Oghuz, the Nine Oguz, were a confederation of Tiele peoples living north and north-east of the Orkhon country. They were the largest body of subjects the Second Göktürk Khaganate had and the hardest to hold. In the end they were the power that replaced it.

The name

tokuz oguzOld TurkicKül Tegin inscription
九姓ChineseJiu Tangshu 194

Toquz oghuz is Turkic for “nine tribes”. The Chinese chapters render the same body as the Nine Surnames, jiuxing.

The same two Chinese characters name two unrelated peoples. Jiuxing hu, “barbarians of the nine surnames”, is the standard Tang term for the Sogdians. It has nothing to do with the Toquz Oghuz. A translator of the Tang histories renders it as “Sogdians” throughout for exactly that reason.^[1] A reader who meets “the Nine Surnames” in a Chinese source must first ask which of the two is meant.

The Arabic writers use the name too, as Tughuzghuz or Toghuz-Oghuz, and the same caution applies. Al-Tabari has an army of the Toghuz-Oghuz in Ustrushana, a few days from Samarkand, in 821.^[2] Some scholars take them for the Oghuz of the Aral Sea. Others hold that they were the Uyghurs, who were then expanding fast.^[2] Ibn al-Nadim calls the ruler who protected the Manichaeans of Samarkand the king of China. He supposes this king to be the lord of the Tughuzghuz.^[3]

The nine

Which nine were counted is the problem. The literature calls it the Toquzoghuz question. One source lists all nine. The Tang Huiyao, in its chapter on the Uyghurs, names them in order: the Uyghurs, the Pugu, the Hun, the Bayegu, the Tongluo, the Sijie, the Qibi, the Abusi and the Gulun Wugu.^[4] It adds that the first seven had stood in the histories since the beginning of the dynasty. The last two were ranked with them only after the Tianbao era, 742 to 756.^[4] The same chapter says that the Uyghur state had eleven governors-general: one for each of the nine tribes and one each for the conquered Basmïl and Karluks. In war, it says, the two guest tribes rode in front.^[4]

The list is therefore a list of a moment, not of the whole history of the confederation. Other sources name the members singly, and not always the same ones. The Uyghurs were the chief tribe of the nine.^[5] The Bugu, the Hun and the Sijie are each identified in the Tang record as one of the nine Tiele tribes of the confederation.^[6]^[7]^[8] The Bayirku and the Tongra are named as its peoples in the Göktürk inscriptions and in the Tang chapters.^[9] The Ediz are not on the list of the Tang Huiyao. They belonged to the confederation at least by 788, when a governor-general of the tribe came to China as an ambassador.^[10]

A second approach cuts the question differently. It holds that the division of the Uyghurs into nine had become political rather than ethnic. It was a count of the seats at the top of the confederation, not a list of peoples. This would explain why no two lists agree and why membership can be argued about at all.^[10]

The nine had an inner structure. The Uyghurs, the chief tribe, were themselves divided into ten sub-tribes. The Yaglakar were the first of these. Until 795 the khagans came from that sub-tribe, and after 795 from the Ediz.^[5]^[10] The confederation was also not the whole of the state. The Basmïl and the Karluk stood under Uyghur rule without being of the nine.^[5]

In the inscriptions

The Kül Tegin inscription puts them among the enemies that surrounded the restored khaganate: in front the Chinese, behind the Tibetans, to the north Baz Khan and the Nine Oguz.^[9] It has also been proposed that baz is a common word, “subject, vassal”, and not a name.^[11]

The inscription then says something it says of no other enemy: the Nine Oguz were my own people. Because Heaven and Earth fell into disorder, they became our enemies.^[9] The inscription does not explain a revolt of subjects who are also kin in political terms. It explains it as a disturbance in the world.^[9]

Five battles in a single year follow, and the inscription counts them out: at the town of Togu, at Košulgak against the Ediz, at Bo[lču], at the head of the Čuš and at Ezginti Kadız.^[9] In the fourth battle the line nearly gave way. The text says türk bodun adak kamşatdı, “the Turk people made their feet unsteady”. This is the only place where the monument admits that its own army came close to breaking.^[9] Ten champions of the Tongra clan were surrounded and killed at the funeral feast of Toŋa Tegin.^[9]

Afterwards the Nine Oguz left. They abandoned their land and their water and went off to China. The khan campaigned north after them, saying “let me nourish this people”. They came back and submitted again.^[9] The same movement, away to China and back to the steppe, is the pattern the inscription has argued against since its opening lines. Here the subjects follow it.^[9]

When Bilge Khan opens his testament, he addresses them by name, after his own kin, the Šadapıt lords and the tarkans and buyruk-lords: the Thirty Tatar, and the lords and people of the Nine Oguz.^[9] They are inside the state. They are addressed as a body that has to be persuaded.^[9]

In the Tang chapters

The Chinese account sees the same wars from outside. Kapgan Khan fought the Nine Surnames and their chief Abusi north of the desert. The Nine Surnames were routed. Men and cattle died in numbers. Abusi and his following came over to the Tang.^[12] Four years later Kapgan marched north again, against the Bayirku of the Nine Surnames, and beat them at the Dule river.^[12] Returning careless of his victory and without a guard, he met a stray Bayirku soldier in a wood. The man killed him.^[12]

So the khaganate’s most formidable khan died at the hands of a straggler of the people he had just defeated.^[12]

The nine as an institution

After 744 the number stopped being a description. It became a form of the state. In the Tang records the khagan’s style is Khagan of the Nine Surnames of the Uyghurs. The count therefore stands inside the title itself.^[13]

The number was also performed in ritual. At the reception of a Chinese princess as khatun, a minister of each of the nine clans carried her sedan-chair. They bore it nine times around the court, following the sun.^[14] No source can enumerate the confederation. Yet it could put exactly nine men under a chair and turn nine times in the open.

The succession to the khaganate

The Uyghurs were one of these peoples. In 744 their leader overthrew the last Göktürk khan together with the Basmïl and the Karluk, and took the Orkhon. Within two years the coalition had been reduced to the Uyghurs alone. The Uyghur Khaganate then ruled the eastern steppe for ninety-six years.

The Göktürk monuments could neither keep these subjects nor do without them. They became the state that succeeded the Göktürks.

References

^ Mackerras 1972, p. 151
^ a b de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 311
^ de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 314
^ a b c Tang Huiyao (Institutional History of the Tang), juan 98
^ a b c Mackerras 1972, p. 1
^ Mackerras 1972, p. 129
^ Mackerras 1972, p. 142
^ Mackerras 1972, p. 175
^ a b c d e f g h i j k Kül Tegin inscription
^ a b c Mackerras 1972, p. 158
^ Tekin 1968, p. 310
^ a b c d Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
^ Mackerras 1972, p. 68
^ Mackerras 1972, p. 120

Sources

Tang Huiyao (Institutional History of the Tang), juan 98
Kül Tegin inscription
Bilge Khan inscription
Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215 (after Jiu Tangshu)
Šine-Usu inscription
Tabari

Literature

Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Colin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories (1972)
Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
Talât Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (1968)