The Kirghiz of the upper Yenisei, between the Altai and Lake Baikal, were known for their iron and gold and were brought under the Göktürk by Mukan between 554 and 560; a Chinese source has them accept the flow of gold to Ötüken grudgingly.[1] The Kül Tegin inscription names the Kırgız among the mourners of the founders and among the enemies of the restored state, and records a campaign across the Kögmen into their country.[2] The Zhou Shu, in its account of Mukan, has him take the Qigu, 契骨, in the north, the name the Chinese gave the Kirghiz; and its second origin legend of the Göktürk settles one of the four sons of the wolf-born ancestor between the Afu and the Jian rivers under that same name, so that the Chinese of the seventh century thought of the Kirghiz as kin of the Göktürk.[3]

Early history in the Chinese record

The name goes back to the Han. In the Chinese sources of that period the Kirghiz appear as Jiankun or Gekun among the peoples subjected in the north by the Xiongnu ruler Modu at the end of the third century BC, and the Xiongnu are said to have set a captured Han general, Li Ling, over them; a later Chinese notice on the medieval Xiajiasi, the same people, puts their former country west of Hami and north of Karashar by the White Mountains — the eastern Tian Shan, not the Yenisei. On that reading their areas of residence changed more than once: the eastern Tian Shan in antiquity, then the Minusinsk basin and the wider Sayan-Altai, then, after the fall of the Uyghurs, a great part of the Central Asian steppe, and at the last the western Tian Shan. The Chinese passages are cited there from Bichurin’s Russian rendering; and the study’s closing pages pass into a national historiography of the modern Kyrgyz state, which is named here as such and not followed.

Destruction of the Uyghur Khaganate (840)

The overthrow of the Uyghurs is in both Tang histories. A Uyghur general who hated the minister then ruling at Karabalghasun fled to the Kirghiz and returned at the head of a hundred thousand Kirghiz cavalry, attacked the Uyghur fortresses, killed the khan, beheaded the minister, and burnt and all but destroyed the court; the Uyghurs scattered.[4] The newer history adds that the year before had brought famine, pestilence and heavy snow to the Uyghurs and killed many of their sheep and horses, and that the Kirghiz set fire to the royal camp.[5] The newer history devotes a section of its own to the Kirghiz after the Uyghur chapter, and that the Kirghiz had until then lived on the upper Yenisei and came south for this war.[6] Their hegemony after 840, which this work counts as the age of Kirghiz great power in the steppe, is part of the main subject of this work. This work has the Yenisei state split by the early thirteenth century into two principalities, Kirgiz in the Minusinsk basin and Kem-Kemjiut in Tuva, which submitted to Chinggis Khan’s son Jochi in 1207 with white gerfalcons, white horses and white sables.

References

  1. ^ Yavuz 2025
  2. ^ Kül Tegin inscription
  3. ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  4. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
  5. ^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
  6. ^ Mackerras 1972

Sources

Literature

  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
  • Yu. S. Khudyakov; A. Yu. Borisenko, Localization of the Kyrgyz Residence Areas in Southern Siberia and Central Asia within the Periods of late Antiquity, Early and High Middle Ages (2021)
  • Colin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories (1972)

Related

What links here4

Persons
Mukan Khan
Polities
Suo
Peoples
Xiongnu
Sources
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang)

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Yenisei Kirghiz.” Turkic Atlas, revised 13 September 2026. https://turkicatlas.business-5d4.workers.dev/ethnicities/yenisei-kirghiz/

Last revised: 13 September 2026