Anagui

For thirty years Anagui was the steppe. He had taken the Rouran throne out of a civil war and ruled with a hard hand. He had broken the Tiele when they rose. He had marched into China when his people were hungry, and he had marched in again when the Chinese emperor begged him to.^[1]^[2] By the 540s there was no one left between the Khingan mountains and the Seven Rivers who did not, in the end, answer to him. That included a family of smiths in the Altai whose name was Ashina.

He is remembered for one sentence. When the head of that family, Bumin, asked him for a daughter, Anagui sent back an answer. Bumin was his blacksmith slave, he said, and he asked how Bumin dared open his mouth.^[3]^[4] Six years later Bumin was at the gates of Anagui’s capital. Anagui’s army had been beaten twice. Anagui was dead by his own hand.^[3] The last khan of the Rouran is the man against whom the First Göktürk Khaganate was made. The sources allow him to be seen in that light. They are Chinese, and they look north with their own interests.

Background: the Rouran under the Yujiulü

The Rouran had ruled the eastern steppe since about 400. At that time a fugitive named Shelun gathered followers in the Gobi and beat the Tiele. In one account, he took a title that no steppe ruler had used before: khagan.^[1] His house, the Yujiulü, kept the title for a century and a half. In that time the Yujiulü lost most of their wars with the Northern Wei. They mostly kept their hold on the steppe. Theirs was the first steppe polity with a real hierarchy and something like a bureaucracy. Everything the Göktürks later built rested on it.

By the early sixth century the house was eating itself. The Tiele had beaten and killed a khan in 508 and gone free. The Yujiulü were at war among themselves.^[1] Anagui came out of that war as its winner. He took the throne, in 516 by one dating and in 520 by the more usual one. He ended the fighting and turned at once on the Tiele. They had had a decade of independence and were pushing into Rouran country. He mobilised and marched west. He beat them decisively in Dzungaria. The Wei Shu tells it otherwise.^[1] The decisive western campaign is his brother Chounu’s, in 516, when the Gaoche king Mietu was captured and killed.^[1] The text puts Anagui’s own accession in 520, ten days before his cousin Shifa drove him south to the Wei, in the year of four rulers.^[1] It records his victory over the Gaoche king Yifu without a date.^[1] The Tiele became subjects again. The khaganate was whole.

Three decades without another civil war followed. For a steppe empire that is a very long time. The literature on him credits this peace to a rule that was ambitious, energetic and visibly intelligent, and that was also an iron fist. The Ashina lived under his rule. Tuwu, Bumin’s father, had submitted to it. He had not moved when the Tiele rose. He sent no help to the rebels and no rebels of his own. The sources record nothing of what Tuwu thought of his overlord. They do record what his overlord did.

Map of East Asia in 520: the Rouran in civil war, Anagui's flight to the Northern Wei at Luoyang, the independent Gaoche, the Ashina in the Altai, the Northern Wei and the Liang, the Tuyuhun and the Tarim oasis states — 520: Chounu is killed, and civil war divides the Rouran. Anagui is driven out and flees to the Northern Wei at Luoyang. The Gaoche remain independent. Modern map; the road is drawn, and the borders in the steppe are approximate.

Luoyang (520–521)

Anagui had been khan for ten days when his cousin Shifa marched on him with tens of thousands of men.^[1] Anagui lost the battle. He rode south with his brother Yijufa and a handful of light horse.^[1] Behind him Shifa killed his mother and his two younger brothers. Anagui did not yet know it.^[1]

In the tenth month of 520 he stood in the court of the Wei at Luoyang. The emperor Suzong received him with the officials of the fifth rank and above drawn up in the courtyard.^[1] Anagui was placed below the feudal princes. His brother and his two uncles were placed below the court officials.^[1]^[5] He asked for troops to go home, put down the rebels and gather his scattered people.^[1] The emperor made him duke of the Shuofang commandery and king of the Rouran. His robes, carriage, salary, escort and guard were those of a prince of the imperial house.^[1]^[5] One modern account adds that a duke of a commandery ranked even below a feudal prince.^[6] The court debated whether to let him go. Yuan Cha, the chief minister, took a hundred jin of gold from Anagui, and Anagui went north.^[1]

In the first month of 521 he took his leave with a party of fifty-four. The court gave him two sets of fine armour for man and horse and six of iron, lances, bows and shields, twenty red-lacquered drums and horns, eighteen tents, a thousand bolts of silk of mixed colours, five hundred mares, a hundred and twenty camels, a hundred cattle and five thousand sheep, two female slaves, and two hundred thousand shi of grain, to be handed over at the garrison.^[1]^[7]

Six Garrisons (523–525)

In 522 Anagui had asked the court for grain to sow, and the court had given him ten thousand shi.^[1]^[8] In 523 the eastern steppe was hungry.^[1] Anagui took his people south to the Six Garrisons. They were the fortified line the Northern Wei kept along the great bend of the Yellow River. He tried to plunder them and failed to take or turn them.^[1] In the third month of 524 the garrisons themselves rose.^[9] Poliuhan Baling, a man of Woye, killed the garrison commander and proclaimed an era of his own. The other garrisons joined him.^[10] Within months the revolt had spread south to Gaoping and to Qin province.^[9]

The khan who had raided the garrisons a year before now marched for the Wei against their rebels. In the spring of 525 the court sent an envoy, Dieyun Juren, with gifts. Anagui accepted its commission. He led a hundred thousand men from Wuchuan west towards Woye and won battle after battle.^[1] In the sixth month he broke Poliuhan Baling. He beheaded Baling’s general Kongque.^[9] Baling withdrew south across the Yellow River, out of the Rouran’s reach. More than two hundred thousand of the rebels went over to the Wei commanders.^[11] Anagui’s people had recovered. That year he took a new title, Chilian Toubing Doufa Khan.^[1]

The court was grateful and wary. In 527 the emperor thanked him for his loyalty. He told him to hold his men back from plundering the lands of his neighbour Erzhu Rong. He declined his offer to campaign further east until a later order. The court, the chapter adds, feared that he might turn.^[1] After the accession of the emperor Xiaozhuang in 528, the court honoured him further. He no longer had to speak his own name when he paid his respects, and he no longer called himself a vassal in his memorials.^[1]^[12]

News of this kind travelled. The peoples of the central steppe were not isolated from one another, and the Ashina and the Tiele were neighbours. Whatever picture the subject tribes had of their lord by the 540s, it was a precise one.

The two Wei courts (534–546)

When the Wei broke in two in 534, both halves wanted him.^[13] The west moved first. It married a Wei princess to his younger brother Tahan. It took his eldest daughter as its empress.^[14] She went south in 538 with seven hundred carts, ten thousand horses and a thousand camels. Her tents faced east.^[15] Anagui kept the eastern envoy. He raided the east.^[13] At his court sat a Chinese secretary, Chunyu Tan. He kept Anagui’s correspondence and taught him to write to the emperors as an equal.^[13]

The empress died in childbirth in 540. Gao Huan of the Eastern Wei sent word that the west had killed her.^[13] Anagui turned east. A Wei princess went north to his son in 541. In 542 his granddaughter Linhe went south to a son of Gao Huan. In 546 Gao Huan himself took Anagui’s favourite daughter.^[13] The Zizhi tongjian tells how it came about, and enters it under 545.^[16] The Western Wei and Anagui were planning a joint war on the east, and Gao Huan sent Du Bi to ask for a bride for his heir Cheng. Anagui answered that Gao Huan could have her if he married her himself.^[16] Gao Huan hesitated. His consort Lou urged him to agree, and Cheng and Yu Jing agreed with her.^[16] In the eighth month he received the bride in person at the lower hall. When the princess arrived, Lou gave up the main hall to her, and Gao Huan knelt and thanked Lou.^[16]^[4] Anagui sent his brother Tutujia with the bride. He told him to return only when he had seen a grandson. The princess was stern, and to the end of her life refused to speak Chinese.^[16] By 546 the house of Anagui was married into both halves of China.

Map of Asia in 545: the embassy of the Western Wei under An Nuopantuo from Jiuquan to the Ashina in the Altai, subjects of the Rouran, who rule the eastern steppe with the Tiele as further subjects, beside the Western and Eastern Wei, the Liang, the Tuyuhun, the Hephthalites, Sasanian Persia and the Eastern Roman Empire — 545: Yuwen Tai, chancellor of the Western Wei, sends An Nuopantuo, a Sogdian of Jiuquan, to the Göktürks in the Altai, who are still subjects of the Rouran. It is the first embassy of a Chinese state to the Ashina. Modern map; the road is drawn, the source names no route.

Isolation of the khaganate

Anagui’s strength was inside his realm. Outside it he had, by the middle of the century, no friends. The Hephthalites had once been on cordial terms with the Rouran and had shared the Tarim trade with them. Western Wei agents, whose business was to weaken the Rouran from the flank, had worked the Hephthalites loose. The alliance was cold. If a rising came, no one would ride from far countries to help him put it down.

It came in 546. The Tiele prepared to march against the Rouran.^[3] On one count it was their third rising. Anagui was old, and the threat was real. The help, when it came, came from the last quarter he can have expected: from the smith in the Altai. Bumin probably sent word of the Tiele movement to the Rouran court. He probably marched while the envoy was still on the road. He led his people out, intercepted the Tiele and broke them. Their whole people, more than fifty thousand households, submitted to him.^[3]

Anagui had not sent a soldier. The revolt that should have cost him a war had cost him nothing. The man who had spared him the war now held, on the western edge of his realm, a following ten times what the Ashina had been a year before. Anagui was still the khan. Bumin was, by any reckoning of strength, now the second man in the khaganate.

Marriage request (546)

Bumin asked for a reward, and the reward he asked for was a wife. He sent to the Rouran court for a daughter of Anagui.^[3]

It was not a modest request, and it is unlikely that either man took it as one. A son-in-law of the Yujiulü stood inside the dynasty. Given how the Rouran succession worked, he stood within reach of the throne, and at the very least within reach of the nobility that decided it. For a Göktürk to hold that place was out of the question for Anagui. Equally out of the question was a half-Göktürk grandchild born into the ruling house. He did not take long over it. His envoy carried this to the Altai:

You are my blacksmith slave. How do you dare to say such a thing?^[3]

Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou)

Both halves of the insult were, in their way, accurate. The Ashina were smiths and had supplied the khan with weapons. The sources do not say whether they did so freely or on demand.^[3] The word “slave” was not a statement about ownership but about rank. The Ashina stood under the Rouran and owed the khan and his house obedience. Anagui meant them to go on standing there. The answer was a warning against ambition, and it was meant to close the matter.

It did close it. Bumin killed the envoy who brought it.^[3] Between the small family of smiths and the empire that had ruled the steppe for a hundred and fifty years there was now a front, and it could not be talked away. The War of Independence that the Göktürks would fight dates from this refusal. It dates from 546, not from the raid on the Chinese frontier four years earlier. That raid had been a young leader’s first probe and no more.

Mumocheng

Anagui had built himself a capital. Mumocheng lay somewhere in the eastern steppe, and archaeology has not found it. A few years before the end he had it fortified with a double line of walls. He kept an elite bodyguard there. His highest adviser was a Chinese man. The realm was administered in part from that court.

The detail matters because of what Bumin would do with it. A Rouran khan who walled himself in and governed through Chinese officials had, in the eyes of a steppe people, gone some way toward the thing the steppe most distrusted. When Bumin took the empire, he did not take the city. He went to Ötüken, the old sacred centre in the Orkhon valley that the Rouran had used as their real seat of power while Mumocheng stood empty of meaning. Anagui’s walls were the first thing the Göktürks left behind.

War with the Göktürk (546–552)

For six years the sources say nothing. In those years Bumin gathered strength: the Tiele, the other Turkic groups of the western steppe, and in 551 a Western Wei princess and the alliance that came with her. The Wei chancellor Yuwen Tai knew that Bumin had broken with his overlord. He knew which was the smaller party. He gave the princess anyway, because the Göktürks at the Rouran’s back were worth more to him than the Rouran at peace.

When the blow came, it came from the west. In January 552 a Rouran force met the Göktürks in Dzungaria. It was presumably sent to stop Bumin before he could reach the heartland, as Bumin had once stopped the Tiele. The Göktürks beat it without much trouble.^[17] They regrouped and turned east, toward Mumocheng. A second and larger Rouran army met them north of Huaihuang, near the Chinese frontier. The Göktürks destroyed it.^[3] The Chinese histories know only this second battle. They date it to the first month of the year, which ran from 11 February to 10 March 552.

That was the whole war. Two battles in the space of a season, and an army that had held the steppe for a century and a half no longer existed. The news reached the palace. The Göktürks were a march from the walls.

Death

Anagui killed himself.^[3]

That is what the Chinese account says, and it says nothing else. The Göktürks never recorded the event, and no Rouran voice survives at all. The literature has carried the suicide from one generation to the next without demur, and it may be right. The doubt raised against it is a fair one. No other ruler in old Turkic or old Mongol history is reported to have taken his own life, under any circumstances. A defeated khan was killed in battle, or killed by his court, or died in his bed. Those were the ways it was done. Anagui was proud and experienced, and by every account power-hungry. He came from a dynasty a hundred and fifty years old. Around him were sons and a nobility who had just watched him lose everything. Some of the people close at hand had reason to shorten his life. The sources are silent. The silence is the whole of the evidence.

Whether by his own hand or another’s, he died in the spring of 552. The Rouran ended as a power with him.^[3] In April Bumin entered Ötüken. He took the title of khan.^[3] One modern account has Bumin kill Anagui and have a drinking cup made from his skull.^[18] The Chinese chapters on the Göktürks record no such cup, and they report the suicide.

Succession and the end of the house

The house scattered. The greater part of the Yujiulü, tens of thousands, fled south to the Northern Qi. The Qi took them in. Within a short time the Qi made them their instrument.^[3] A second group rode west across the steppe. These were some twenty thousand people who were not of the dynasty but of the nobility that had run the state. From them most likely came the khagans and the ruling nobility of the Avars of Europe.^[19]^[20] Other views give the Rouran a smaller part in the Avars.

The sons did not last long. Dengzhu led the exiles under Qi protection. In 553 the Qi emperor forced him to march against the Göktürks, to keep Qi influence alive in the steppe. Issik Khan, Bumin’s son, caught him on the Ordos and broke him. Three thousand Rouran had fled to the Western Wei instead. On demand, the Western Wei handed them to Mukan. They were hanged along the Yellow River. Anluochen, the last surviving son, was set up as khan by the Qi emperor. He was the emperor’s son-in-law. He understood at length that he was being used. In the third month of 554 he rose against the Qi themselves and was beaten. In the fourth month his wife and children were taken, with more than thirty thousand of his people.^[21] The last Göktürk victory over the remnant is dated to January 554. Within two years of Anagui’s death the Rouran had been stripped of their empire. The Chinese had trained them, Bumin’s sons had humiliated them, and the Qi had assimilated them. The Yujiulü were finished.

Assessment

For the Ashina, Anagui was the overlord under whom they had lived for a century, the man whose contempt turned a request into a war, and the obstacle whose removal let everything else happen. That account is true, but it is not the whole account. He had also ended a civil war. He held a fractious empire together for thirty years. He kept the Tiele down when they were the strongest Turkic power in the steppe. The literature ranks him among the most important rulers his dynasty produced. The ranking is fair.

The two accounts are not in conflict. His fall meant what it did precisely because he was formidable. A weak khan overthrown by a strong subject is a coup. A strong khan overthrown by a subject he had called his slave is the beginning of a new order. The seven centuries of Turkic rule over the steppe that followed are conventionally dated from the spring in which Anagui died.

References

^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w Wei Shu, juan 103
^ Jagchid 1989, p. 37–38
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
^ a b Jagchid 1989, p. 146
^ a b Jagchid 1989, p. 67–68
^ Jagchid 1989, p. 68
^ Jagchid 1989, p. 170–171
^ Jagchid 1989, p. 38
^ a b c Wei Shu, juan 9
^ Wei Shu, juan 9; Wei Shu, juan 103
^ Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 150
^ Jagchid 1989, p. 145
^ a b c d e Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 98
^ Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 158
^ Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 13
^ a b c d e Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 159
^ Yavuz 2025, p. 225
^ Ögel 2015, p. 251
^ Golden 2013, p. 62–63
^ al. 2022, e6
^ Bei Qi Shu (Book of Northern Qi), juan 4

Sources

Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Wei Shu, juan 9, 103
Bei Qi Shu (Book of Northern Qi), juan 4 (after Bei Shi)
Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 150, 158, 159 (after Wei Shu, Zhou Shu, Sui Shu and Bei Shi)
Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 13, 98 (after Wei Shu, Zhou Shu and Sui Shu)

Literature

Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
Peter B. Golden, Some Notes on the Avars and Rouran (2013)
Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone et al., Ancient Genomes Reveal Origin and Rapid Trans-Eurasian Migration of 7th Century Avar Elites (2022)
Sechin Jagchid; Van Jay Symons, Peace, War, and Trade Along the Great Wall. Nomadic-Chinese Interaction through Two Millennia (1989)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Büyük Hun İmparatorluğu Tarihi I (2015)