In 924 the Khitan ruler Abaoji led an army into Mongolia, to the old royal grounds of the Göktürks and Uyghurs on the Orkhon.[1] He visited the ruins of the Uyghur capital, looked at the inscribed stones of the earlier khans and set up a monument of his own.[2] By convention the year marks the end of Kirghiz power on the steppe, yet no report of the campaign puts the Kirghiz in it.[3]

The campaign

The Liao shi, as modern accounts report it, has the Khitan defeat the Tuhun, the Zubu and the Tanguts in 924. They then made their way to the old royal grounds of the Göktürks and Uyghurs.[1] There Abaoji ordered the inscriptions of Bilge Khan erased and replaced by his own in Khitan, Turkic and Chinese.[1] Another account says that the monument he set up has not survived.[2] The campaign into the Orkhon region falls in 924 and 925.[4] The Liao shi dates the Khitan small script, modelled on the Uyghur script, to the same year 924.[5] With the campaign the Mongolian plateau came under Khitan rule. The form of that rule is still poorly understood.[4]

The Chinese border reports of that year, preserved in the Cefu yuangui, look east. In the seventh month of 924 the governor of Youzhou reported that Abaoji was marching east against Bohai.[6] In the ninth month a man who had left the Khitan reported that the Jurchen, the Uyghurs and the Yellow-headed Shiwei had joined forces against the Khitan. Abaoji, he said, called the northern chiefs to defend themselves.[6] Neither entry names the Orkhon or the Kirghiz.[6]

The Kirghiz

The reports of the campaign do not name the Kirghiz as its enemy.[1] Michael R. Drompp treats that silence as a finding. In his account Abaoji met no Kirghiz empire and no organised state on the Orkhon in 924 and 925. He met only fragmented groups that could not resist him, and the Kirghiz remained beyond Khitan control.[4] Four other views have been put forward. The first holds that a victory over the Kirghiz must have gone before the campaign. It notes that no known source reports it.[2] The second has the Khitan founder push the Kirghiz back from the Orkhon in 924.[7] The third ends the Kirghiz empire about 917, when the Khitan are said to have united northern China and Mongolia.[8] The fourth, drawn from an archaeological study, allows that the Kirghiz left Mongolia under Khitan pressure in 916 and 924. Some of them, it adds, settled the Usa basin.[9]

A study of the areas where the Kirghiz lived reports a Khitan campaign into Mongolia in 916 as well. In it the Khitan no longer met the Kirghiz and entered the Uyghur lands.[10] The year 924 is therefore the date of a Khitan campaign and not of an event in Kirghiz history. Under the Uyghur–Kirghiz war, Turkic Atlas counts it as a convention.[4]

The offer to the Uyghurs of Ganzhou

After his conquest of Mongolia Abaoji is reported to have sent a message to the Uyghurs of Ganzhou. He invited them to return to their former land.[11] The Uyghurs declined. They are reported to have answered that ten generations had passed since they left Mongolia.[12] Modern accounts hold the answer to be an exaggeration, since only some eighty years lay between the Kirghiz victory over the Uyghurs and the Khitan campaign.[12] The Khitan wished to restore in Mongolia the order that had stood before the Kirghiz.[2]

After 924

The Kirghiz on the Yenisei did not vanish in 924.[13] The Liao annals record Kirghiz tribute missions in 952 and 977.[13] The Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam names a Kirghiz khān.[14]

Hu Jiao, a Chinese who lived among the Khitan from 947 to 953, ate watermelon there for the first time. He was told that the Khitan had obtained the crop after the destruction of the Uyghurs.[15] As reported, the account names neither a place nor a year. A link to the campaign of 924 can therefore only be guessed.

References

  1. ^ a b c d Golden 1992, p. 183
  2. ^ a b c d Barthold 1927, p. 24
  3. ^ Golden 1992, p. 183; 24; Barthold 1927, p. 183; 24
  4. ^ a b c d Drompp 2005, p. 203
  5. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 407
  6. ^ a b c Cefu yuangui, juan 995
  7. ^ Minorsky 1942, p. 78
  8. ^ Minorsky 1970, p. 282
  9. ^ Mitko 2025, p. 115
  10. ^ Khudyakov 2021, p. 116
  11. ^ Golden 1992, p. 166
  12. ^ a b Barthold 1927, p. 24–25
  13. ^ a b Golden 1992, p. 186
  14. ^ Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 96
  15. ^ Laufer 1919, p. 438–439

Sources

Literature

  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • V. V. Barthold, Kirgizy: istoričeskij očerk [Киргизы: исторический очерк] (1927)
  • Michael R. Drompp, Tang China and the Collapse of the Uighur Empire: A Documentary History (2005)
  • V. Minorsky, Sharaf al-Zamān Ṭāhir Marvazī on China, the Turks and India (1942)
  • V. Minorsky, Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam, "The Regions of the World": A Persian Geography 372 A.H. – 982 A.D., translated and explained, with the preface by V. V. Barthold, 2nd ed. (1970)
  • 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)
  • Oleg A. Mitko, «This Long Ninth Century»: Yenisei Kyrgyz in the Usinsk Basin (2025)
  • Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)
  • Berthold Laufer, Sino-Iranica. Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization in Ancient Iran (1919)

Related

What links here2

States
Ganzhou Uyghur Kingdom
Peoples
Shiwei

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Abaoji's campaign to the Orkhon (924).” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/events/abaoji-campaign-to-the-orkhon-924/

Last revised: 8 November 2026