Abaoji is the Chinese name of the Khitan ruler who made the Khitan a power on the northern frontier of China.[1] He was born in 872 and died in 926.[2] In 924 he led an army into Mongolia, to the old royal grounds of the Göktürks and Uyghurs on the Orkhon.[3] The year 924 is the conventional end of Kirghiz power on the steppe. The reports of his campaign do not put the Kirghiz in it.[3]

Name and house

The Cefu Yuangui calls him Yelü Abaoji, the senior leader of a separate division of the Khitan.[1] The Yelü were the royal clan of the Khitan. They intermarried almost only with the Xiao, a clan of Uyghur origin.[4] The Yelü, also written Yila in another Chinese orthography, were of pure Khitan stock. The Xiao received that Chinese name only in 947. Its earlier forms were Shimo and Shenmi.[5] The Chinese texts give no Khitan form of the name.[1]

Rise

The Cefu Yuangui tells his rise in a few lines. The Khitan king Qin De grew weak, and Abaoji, the strongest, took his place. The Khitan had eight divisions, each with a great man. One of them was chosen head, with a standard and a drum, and was replaced in turn every two years. Abaoji trusted his strength and would not accept being replaced. He called himself king.[1] The Cefu Yuangui puts the term at two years. A modern account of the Khitan federation says that the ruler was chosen from the eight tribes every three years.[6] Liu Shouguang’s rule at Youzhou was harsh, and toward its end deserting soldiers went over to the Khitan. When Zhou Dewei besieged Youzhou, Khitan raiders carried off many soldiers and people of Yan. The Khitan gained all the educated men of Yan and had them teach law and letters. In this way they gradually grew stronger.[1] Later he usurped the imperial title and made his wife Shulü empress. He took the Yan man Han Yanhui as his chief minister, and the neighbouring lords feared him.[1]

A modern account has him come from the I-la tribe of the Yelü clan. He was supported by the Xiao clan, by control of metalworking and by a subject population of farmers. In 907 he turned the loose rule of the Khitan into a khaganate, taking advantage of the fall of the Uyghurs and the Tang.[7] Another account has him take the Chinese imperial title in 917 and found the Liao dynasty.[8] A third has him assume the title of emperor in 907 and begin to give his state a Chinese-style administration. It had a bureaucracy for the settled, chiefly Chinese population and a tribal administration for the Khitan and other peoples. The state was renamed Great Liao only in 947.[9] A fourth gives his years as 872 to 926. It sees in him the man with whom Khitan history passed from tribal society to a dynastic pattern of rule.[6]

The campaign of 924

According to the Liao shi, as the literature reports it, the Khitan defeated the Tuhun, the Zubu and the Tanguts in 924. They then came to the old Göktürk and Uyghur royal grounds in Mongolia.[3] There Abaoji ordered the inscriptions of Bilge Khan erased and replaced by his own in Khitan, Turkic and Chinese.[3] The Qidan guo zhi says that before the Mongolian campaign he made a punitive expedition against the Shiwei and the Jurchen and “seized the ancient lands of the Türks”. Then he fell on the Xi.[3] Another account says that he visited the ruins of the Uyghur capital on the Orkhon. He looked at the stones with the inscriptions of the former khans and put up a new monument of his own, which has not survived.[8] Turkic Atlas tells the story of the inscriptions of Bilge Khan under the inscription.

The Chinese border reports of that year, as the Cefu Yuangui keeps them, look east. In the seventh month of 924 the governor of Youzhou reported that Abaoji was marching east against Bohai.[10] In the ninth month a man who had left the Khitan said 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.[10] No entry names the Orkhon or the Kirghiz.[10]

Scripts

The Liao shi, as the literature reports it, dates the first Khitan script, the “large script”, to 920 under Abaoji. It dates a second, the “small script”, to 924 and says it was modelled on the Uyghur script.[11]

The Kirghiz and 924

Six views are on record.

The first finds that the Kirghiz do not appear to figure in these events at all.[3] A second thinks that a victory over the Kirghiz must have gone before the campaign. It notes that no source known to it reports one.[8] A third has the Khitan founder push the Kirghiz back from the Orkhon in 924.[12] A fourth appears in the commentary to a Persian geography. It ends the Kirghiz empire about 917, when the Khitan are said to have united northern China and Mongolia. The Kirghiz khan then went back to the Yenisei.[13] A fifth speaks of two Khitan campaigns, in 916 and 924. They ended the Kirghiz great power or drove the Kirghiz from Mongolia, and some of them settled in the Usinsk basin.[14]

A sixth is that of Michael R. Drompp. He finds no evidence that the Kirghiz held Mongolia in more than a passing way. Abaoji campaigned into the Orkhon region in 924 and 925. He met no Kirghiz empire and no organised state, only fragmented groups that could not resist him. The Kirghiz remained beyond Khitan control.[4] Turkic Atlas tells the story of the state on the Yenisei under the Kirghiz khaganate. Turkic Atlas takes up the whole question of what the Kirghiz held after 840 under the Uyghur–Kirghiz War.

The offer to the Uyghurs of Ganzhou

Abaoji is reported to have sent a message to the Uyghurs of Ganzhou after his conquest of Mongolia. He invited them to return to their former land. The Uyghurs declined.[15] Their reply is given as follows: ten generations had passed since they left Mongolia. This is held to be an exaggeration, since only some eighty years lay between the Uyghur defeat and the Khitan campaign.[16] The Ganzhou kingdom has its own article.

Death

In the first month of 926 a Xi chief reported that Abaoji was raiding Bohai. In the eleventh month Huo Yanwei at Qingzhou reported, on a notice from Dengzhou, that the Khitan had withdrawn “since Abaoji’s death”. They still kept troops in the Bohai city of Fuyu.[10] Abaoji died in 926, and the Khitan conquered Bohai in the same year.[4]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Cefu yuangui, juan 1000
  2. ^ Drompp 2005, p. 202
  3. ^ a b c d e f Golden 1992, p. 183
  4. ^ a b c Drompp 2005, p. 203
  5. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 404
  6. ^ a b Sinor 1990, p. 403
  7. ^ Golden 1992, p. 184
  8. ^ a b c Barthold 1927, p. 24
  9. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 408
  10. ^ a b c d Cefu yuangui, juan 995
  11. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 407
  12. ^ Minorsky 1942, p. 78
  13. ^ Minorsky 1970, p. 282
  14. ^ Khudyakov 2021, p. 116,mitko-2025 p=115
  15. ^ Golden 1992, p. 166
  16. ^ Barthold 1927, p. 24–25

Sources

  • Cefu yuangui, juan 995, 1000 (after Tongdian and Jiu Tangshu)

Literature

  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • V. V. Barthold, Kirgizy: istoričeskij očerk [Киргизы: исторический очерк] (1927)
  • 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)
  • Michael R. Drompp, Tang China and the Collapse of the Uighur Empire: A Documentary History (2005)
  • 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)

Related

What links here3

Battles & Events
Abaoji's campaign to the Orkhon (924)
Peoples
Khitan · Shiwei

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Abaoji.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/persons/abaoji/

Last revised: 8 November 2026