In the tenth month of 762 the Tang prince Li Kuo, the Prince of Yong, crossed the Yellow River at Shanzhou to visit the camp of the Uyghur khan Bögü.[1] The prince commanded the Tang armies against the rebel Shi Chaoyi. The Uyghurs had come to fight on the Tang side.[2] The khan reproached him for not performing the dance of homage before his tent.[2] The prince’s officers refused it for him. The court was in mourning for two emperors, and the heir of the Tang would not dance before a foreign khan.[3] The Uyghurs had four of them beaten with a hundred strokes each.[3] Two died that night.[3] The prince went back to his own camp.[2] Twenty-five years later, as the emperor Dezong, he still bore the Uyghurs a grudge for that day.[4][5]

The Uyghurs on the march

Since the accession of the emperor Suzong in 756 the Uyghurs had helped the Tang against the rebellion of An Lushan.[3] In 762 the rebel Shi Chaoyi still held the country of the Yellow River and the Luo.[2] The new emperor Daizong sent the eunuch Liu Qingtan to the Uyghurs to renew the old friendship and to ask for troops.[2] Shi Chaoyi had reached the khan first.[2] The Tang, he said, had lost one emperor after another. The realm was in disorder and had no master. The Uyghurs should come and take its treasuries.[2] The khan, whom the Jiu Tang Shu calls Dengli Khan, led his people south in the eighth month.[2]

When Liu Qingtan reached the khan with the emperor’s letter, the khan asked why a house that had no master still sent letters.[2] Liu answered that the new emperor was the former Prince of Guangping. Together with the Uyghur Yabgu, he had retaken the two capitals.[2] That had been in 757.[2] Meanwhile the Uyghurs had passed the frontier forts and found the towns empty and unguarded. They came to despise the Tang.[3] Liu Qingtan reported that the khan was coming with his whole people, a hundred thousand men. The capital took fright.[2] The emperor sent Yao Ziang, the director of the palace administration, to meet them.[2] Yao counted in secret four thousand fighting men, more than ten thousand old people, children and women, and forty thousand war horses.[3][6] The khan’s wife, the katun, was a daughter of the Tang general Pugu Huai’en. She rode with him.[2] Yao persuaded the khan to march by Shanzhou and join the Tang armies there.[3]

Then the emperor made his eldest son, Li Kuo, the Prince of Yong, generalissimo of all the armies.[7] Yao Ziang and Wei Ju commanded the two wings. Wei Shaohua served the prince as his secretary, and Li Jin served as marshal of the army.[8] The prince was twenty years old.[9]

Before the khan’s tent

The khan camped on the north bank of the Yellow River at Shanzhou.[8] The prince rode there with his staff and a few dozen horsemen.[10] The khan reproached him for not dancing in homage before his tent. He also reproached him for his haughty manners.[2] Four years earlier, in 758, a Tang envoy had refused to bow to the Uyghur khan and had made him rise from his couch to receive the emperor’s edict.[2] At Shanzhou the question of rank was the other way round. The Uyghur khans held that their power came from Heaven, the Moon God or the Sun God, as seven of the thirteen full titles say. They expected subjects and foreigners alike to show respect by an act of ritual. Nobody was exempt.[11]

The dance was a salute. The histories call it 舞蹈 or 拜舞, bowing and dancing.[8] The Tiele chiefs had saluted Taizong that way when he gave them gifts in 647. In 725 a Göktürk minister had saluted Xuanzong so on the road to Mount Tai.[12]

Yao Ziang answered for the prince.[2] The generalissimo was a grandson of the late emperor in the direct line, he said. The two late emperors had not yet been buried, so it was not fitting for him to dance.[3] The emperors Xuanzong and Suzong had both died in May of that year.[13] The Uyghur ministers and a general called Chebi pressed him.[2] The Tang emperor and the khan had sworn to be brothers, they said. The khan therefore stood to the prince as an uncle, and a nephew owed his uncle the rite.[3] Yao refused again.[2] “The generalissimo is the crown prince of the Tang, and the crown prince is the heir to the throne,” he said. “How could the heir of the Middle Kingdom dance before the khan of a foreign country?”[2]

The quarrel went on for a long time.[2] Then Chebi had Yao Ziang, Li Jin, Wei Shaohua and Wei Ju led away and given a hundred strokes of the rod each.[2] Wei Shaohua and Wei Ju died of the beating within the night.[14] The Uyghurs let the prince go back to his camp, because he was young and did not understand such affairs.[8] The Xin Tang Shu adds that the Tang officers and soldiers felt the prince had been insulted. They wanted to fall on the Uyghurs together.[4] The prince stopped them, because the rebels were not yet destroyed.[4]

The campaign

Soon afterwards the armies marched from Shanzhou, with Pugu Huai’en and Uyghur horsemen in the vanguard.[7] They defeated Shi Chaoyi and retook Luoyang.[3] The Uyghurs plundered the city.[3] Its people fled into the towers of the Shengshan and Baima monasteries. The Uyghurs set the towers on fire.[2] The dead and wounded were counted in tens of thousands.[2] The prince withdrew to Lingbao.[2] The khan camped for months at Heyang. The people for a hundred li around were robbed and abused.[2]

The emperor did not forget the two dead men.[4] He gave Wei Shaohua and Wei Ju high offices after their death and gave a son an office of the sixth rank.[4]

The prince as emperor

The prince came to the throne as the emperor Dezong.[9] Bögü meant to use the mourning for the late emperor to invade China.[2] His chief minister Tun Bagha, who was his cousin, killed him. Tun Bagha made himself khan.[3] In 787 Uyghur envoys came to court with gifts and asked for a marriage.[3] The emperor still bore his old grudge.[4][15] He told his chief minister Li Pi that the marriage could wait for his sons and grandsons. He himself would not agree to it.[4] Li Pi asked whether he still resented the affair of Shanzhou.[4] The emperor said he did.[4] The empire had been in too much trouble for him to take revenge, he said. He could not betray Wei Shaohua and the others.[4]

Li Pi argued against him.[4] The man who had humiliated Wei Shaohua was Bögü, he said, and Bögü had been killed by the present khan.[4] It was Wei Shaohua and the others who had failed the emperor, not he them.[4] They had let a young prince cross the river into the camp of a foreign ruler without first agreeing on the rite of the meeting.[4] The Uyghurs had not dared to harm him. In Li Pi’s account the prince was given a sable robe, horsemen were called, and he was escorted out of the camp.[16] The emperor gave way. The princess of Xian’an was married to the Uyghur khan.[4]

The witnesses

The Jiu Tang Shu gives the fullest account and names the general Chebi as the man who ordered the beating.[2] The Xin Tang Shu shortens it. It lays the beating on the khan and his ministers together, and it adds the anger of the Tang army and the honours for the dead.[4] The Zizhi tongjian enters the meeting in the tenth month, between the days bingyin and wuchen.[10] That was about 12 November 762.[17] The Cefu yuangui gives the account of the Jiu Tang Shu almost word for word. It copies either that work or its source.[18]

A second version stood in the veritable records of Daizong’s reign.[9] In it the prince kept his composure and rebuked the Uyghurs. They were the ones who lost face.[9] Sima Guang quoted it in his notes on the sources of the Zizhi tongjian.[9] Li Pi’s speech of 787 comes from a memoir of his life that his son wrote in prison. It is a source of uncertain value.[19] Every account of the meeting is a Tang account. The accounts differ over who lost face at Shanzhou. They agree that the prince did not forget the day.

References

  1. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195; Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 222; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
  2. ^ 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 Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
  5. ^ Mackerras 1972, p. 24, 95
  6. ^ Mackerras 1972, p. 70–71
  7. ^ a b Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 222; Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
  8. ^ a b c d Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195; Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 222
  9. ^ a b c d e Mackerras 1972, p. 139
  10. ^ a b Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 222
  11. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 326
  12. ^ Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 198; Tongdian, juan 198
  13. ^ Mackerras 1972, p. 138
  14. ^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195; Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217; Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 222
  15. ^ Mackerras 1972, p. 95, 156
  16. ^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217; Mackerras 1972, p. 95
  17. ^ Mackerras 1972, p. 72
  18. ^ Mackerras 1972, p. 140
  19. ^ Mackerras 1972, p. 156

Sources

Literature

  • Colin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories (1972)
  • Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)

Related

What links here1

Customs & Pastimes
Seating at the Feast

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “The Uyghur Demand for the Prince's Dance (762).” Turkic Atlas, revised 28 October 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/events/uyghur-demand-for-the-princes-dance-762/

Last revised: 28 October 2026