Uyghur Farming

The Uyghurs came to power as herders. In the century of their khaganate they became in part a farming people.^[1] The change is recorded in Chinese chronicles, in the report of an Arab envoy and in the ground.

Before 744

The Jiu Tang Shu says that the Uyghurs followed water and grass. Its statement counts 50,000 men under arms and 100,000 people.^[2] The Xin Tang Shu adds that they had no chiefs at first, moved from pasture to pasture, rode and shot well and liked to raid. They were subject to the Göktürks.^[3] Their living came from herding and hunting, and farming was foreign to them.^[4]

Herds and army rations

The economy of the khaganate stayed on its herds. Sheep were the most valuable animal, followed by horses, oxen and camels, and the herders moved from pasture to pasture.^[4] The first record of grain among them comes from the war against the son of An Lushan in 757.^[4] The daily ration of an Uyghur army of about 4,000 men was twenty cattle, two hundred sheep and forty shi of grain.^[4] Modern accounts find the amount of meat unsurprising and the amount of grain striking. They add that the generous figure for grain may owe something to the enthusiasm of the Chinese who wrote it down.^[4]

Fields and towns

The khan Bayanchur had two towns raised from 757, Bay Balïq on the Selenga and Ordu-Balık on the Orkhon.^[5] Some scholars hold that agriculture cannot have been unknown to the Uyghurs even in 757.^[5] They hold that farming probably grew larger with the edict of 763, which told the Uyghurs to eat vegetables.^[5] The clergy ate onions and similar bulbs.^[5] The rules of this diet belong to the food rules of the Manichaean clergy.

The report of 821

The Arab envoy Tamim ibn Bahr travelled to the Uyghur capital, probably in 821.^[6] He rode twenty days through steppe with springs and grass but no villages or towns, where only the men of the relay service lived in tents. After that, he says, he travelled twenty days among villages lying close together and farmland. Then he reached the khan’s town, which he calls a great town rich in agriculture.^[5] The envoy’s report thus shows that the herding tradition was alive in 821 and that settled farmers held a growing place in Uyghur society.^[5]

Archaeological finds

Archaeologists have found signs that the Uyghurs used millstones and pestles. They found traces of irrigation canals. In some graves grain, among it millet, had been laid with the dead.^[5]

After the fall of the capital

When the Kirghiz took the Uyghur capital in 840, a part of the Uyghurs went south under Ögä Khan and camped at the Tang frontier.^[3] At the end of 841 the emperor sent an envoy to comfort them and to give them 20,000 hu of grain.^[7] In 842 Ögä Khan asked for grain, cattle and sheep.^[8] The edict of reply allowed him to buy 3,000 shi of grain at Zhenwu at the price of horses. It refused the cattle, because the ox was the means of sowing and reaping and slaughter was forbidden in China. Sheep, it said, were scarce in China and came from the tribes of the north, and the state had never levied them.^[8]