Yenisei Kirghiz

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 Kirghiz of the upper Yenisei, between the Altai and Lake Baikal, were known for their iron and gold. Mukan brought them under the Göktürks 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. It also records a campaign across the Kögmen into their country.^[2] In 731 the Kirghiz khan sent an envoy, Tarduş Inançu Çor, to the funeral of Kül Tegin.^[3] The Tibetans and Rome appear in the same lists of mourners. The presence of Kirghiz mourners therefore does not by itself show Göktürk rule over them.^[4] 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. Its second origin legend of the Göktürks also settles one of the four sons of the wolf-born ancestor between the Afu and the Jian rivers under that same name.^[5] The Chinese of the seventh century thought of the Kirghiz as kin of the Göktürks.

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 Bagatur at the end of the third century BC. The Xiongnu are said to have set a captured Han general, Li Ling, over them. The Chinese wrote the name in many forms. Jüwu, Jiegu, Hegu and Hegesi stand beside Jiankun and Xiajiasi in the Tang histories, and the Zhou Shu has Qigu.^[6] The Orkhon inscriptions write it kırkız.^[7] In 569 the Göktürk ruler Istemi gave the Byzantine envoy Zemarchos a slave woman, a captive of the people called Kherkhir. Scholars take Kherkhir for the Kirghiz. An eighth-century Tibetan text writes the name Khe-rged and in other forms.^[8] A later Chinese notice on the medieval Xiajiasi, the same people, puts their former country west of Hami and north of Karashahr by the White Mountains, the eastern Tian Shan, not the Yenisei. On this interpretation their areas of residence changed more than once. They were in the eastern Tian Shan in antiquity, then in the Minusinsk basin and the wider Sayan-Altai. After the fall of the Uyghurs they were in a great part of the Central Asian steppe, and at the last in the western Tian Shan. This interpretation rests on the Chinese passages in Bichurin’s Russian rendering. Its closing pages pass into a national historiography of the modern Kyrgyz state, which is a historiographical position and not a finding.

Language and descent

The Xin Tang Shu describes the Kirghiz of the ninth century as tall, red-haired, fair-faced and green-eyed. It says that their writing and language were exactly those of the Uyghurs.^[9] Descriptions of this kind and a few words preserved in Chinese texts have led scholars to see a non-Turkic people in the Kirghiz, Samoyedic or palaeo-Siberian, who were Turkicized later. The question is told in the Kirghiz origin debate.^[10] The Chinese texts preserve Kirghiz words that are identified as Turkic, among them ay, “month”, and kam, “shaman”. The Yenisei inscriptions are written in Old Turkic with a wholly Turkic vocabulary.^[11]^[8] Whatever the earlier ethnic mixture, the Kirghiz were a Turkic-speaking people by the middle of the ninth century.^[11]

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. He returned at the head of a hundred thousand Kirghiz cavalry and attacked the Uyghur fortresses. He killed the khan, beheaded the minister, and burnt and all but destroyed the court.^[12] The Uyghurs scattered.^[12] 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. It adds that the Kirghiz set fire to the royal camp.^[9] The newer history devotes a section of its own to the Kirghiz after the Uyghur chapter. The Kirghiz had until then lived on the upper Yenisei and came south for this war.^[13] After the victory the Kirghiz did not take the place of the Uyghurs on the Orkhon. They stayed centred on their homeland on the upper Yenisei, and their authority over the plateau was brief. The khaganate article tells it.^[14]^[15] According to some scholars, the Yenisei state had split by the early thirteenth century into two principalities, Kirgiz in the Minusinsk basin and Kem-Kemjiut in Tuva. They submitted to Chinggis Khan’s son Jochi in 1207 with white gerfalcons, white horses and white sables.

Trade with Transoxiana

Kirghiz musk is named among the goods that Transoxiana supplied in the geographers of the tenth century. Part of the musk traded there probably entered the country through Chach.^[16] Furs passed through the same region. They are often named among the products of the Turkic peoples north and east of Chach.^[16]

References

^ Yavuz 2025
^ Kül Tegin inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 344, 351
^ Kül Tegin inscription; Tekin 1968, p. 272, 335
^ Drompp 2002, p. 481
^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217; Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ Kül Tegin inscription
^ a b Drompp 2002, p. 480
^ a b Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
^ Drompp 1999, p. 398–399
^ a b Drompp 1999, p. 399
^ a b Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
^ Mackerras 1972
^ Drompp 2005, p. 38,200–203
^ Drompp 1999, p. 398,403
^ a b de la Vaissière 2005a, p. 301

Sources

Kül Tegin inscription
Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217 (after Jiu Tangshu)
Menander Protector

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)
Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
Michael R. Drompp, Breaking the Orkhon Tradition: Kirghiz Adherence to the Yenisei Region after A.D. 840 (1999)
Michael R. Drompp, The Yenisei Kyrgyz from Early Times to the Mongol Conquest (2002)
Michael R. Drompp, Tang China and the Collapse of the Uighur Empire: A Documentary History (2005)
Talât Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic (1968)