For thirty years Anagui was the steppe. He had taken the Rouran throne out of a civil war and ruled with a hard hand, broken the Tiele when they rose, marched into China when his people were hungry and marched in again when the Chinese emperor begged him to, and 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 the answer that Bumin was his blacksmith slave and asked how he dared open his mouth.[1] Six years later Bumin was at the gates of his capital, his army had been beaten twice, and Anagui was dead by his own hand.[1] The last khan of the Rouran is the man against whom the First Göktürk Khaganate was made, and that is the light in which the sources — Chinese, and looking north with their own interests — allow him to be seen.
Background: the Rouran under the Yujiulü
The Rouran had ruled the eastern steppe since about 400, when a fugitive named Shelun gathered followers in the Gobi, beat the Tiele, and took a title no steppe ruler had used before: khagan.[2] His house, the Yujiulü, kept it for a century and a half, through wars with the Northern Wei that they mostly lost and a hold on the steppe that they mostly kept. It was the first steppe polity with a real hierarchy and something like a bureaucracy, and everything the Göktürk later built, they built 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.[2] Anagui came out of that war as its winner. He took the throne — 516 by one reckoning, 520 by the more usual one — ended the fighting, and turned at once on the Tiele, who had had a decade of independence and were pushing into Rouran country. He mobilised, marched west, and beat them decisively in Dzungaria. The Wei Shu tells it otherwise: the decisive western campaign is his brother Chounu‘s, in 516, when the Gaoche king Mietu was captured and killed; Anagui’s own accession it puts in 520, ten days before his cousin Shifa drove him south to the Wei, in the year of four rulers, and his victory over the Gaoche king Yifu it records without a date.[2] The Tiele became subjects again. The khaganate was whole.
What followed was three decades without another civil war, which for a steppe empire is a very long time, and the literature on him credits it to a rule that was ambitious, energetic, visibly intelligent, and an iron fist. The Ashina lived under it. Tuwu, Bumin’s father, had submitted to it and 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.
Six Garrisons (523–525)
In 523 the eastern steppe was hungry. Anagui took his people south to the Six Garrisons, the fortified line the Northern Wei kept along the great bend of the Yellow River, and tried to plunder them, and failed to take or turn them.[2] Two years later the garrisons themselves rose — drought, hunger, and a population of Xianbei frontiersmen who were tired of being used as the Wei’s shield against the Rouran — and the revolt spread into China proper.[3]
The Wei emperor then did an extraordinary thing. He asked the Rouran for help. Anagui came with a hundred thousand men, or so the record says, put the revolt down along the whole line of the garrisons, and was paid in the currency he had come for: leave to plunder the rebel districts and carry the proceeds home to feed his own.[3] The Six Garrisons were laid waste. Among the dead were Xianbei and Tiele, people of the steppe like his own, cut down by a khan who had made a bargain with their emperor.[3]
The judgement that the episode shows a ruler pragmatic to the point of indifference is a modern one, and it is this work’s. What can be said without judgement is that 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.
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, with whom the Rouran had once been on cordial terms and shared the Tarim trade, had been worked loose by Western Wei agents whose business was to weaken the Rouran from the flank; 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.[1] This work counts it their third rising and has Anagui old and the threat real. And the help came, when it came, from the last quarter he can have expected: from the smith in the Altai. Bumin sent an envoy to the Rouran capital with a report of suspicious movements among the Tiele — and while the envoy was still on the road, marched from the Altai into Dzungaria, fell on the Tiele before they had assembled, and broke them. Fifty thousand of them submitted, and they submitted to Bumin.[1]
Anagui had not sent a soldier. The revolt that should have cost him a war had cost him nothing, and 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. He 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.[1]
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, and for a half-Göktürk grandchild to be born into the ruling house, was out of the question for Anagui, and 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?[1]
Both halves of the insult were, in their way, accurate. The Ashina were smiths, and had supplied the khan with weapons — whether freely or on demand the sources do not say.[1] And “slave” was not a statement about ownership but about rank: the Ashina stood under the Rouran, owed the khan and his house obedience, and 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.[1] 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 the Göktürk would fight dates from this refusal — from 546, not from the raid on the Chinese frontier four years earlier, which 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 — archaeology has not found it — and a few years before the end he had it fortified with a double line of walls and kept an elite bodyguard there. His highest adviser was a Chinese, and 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; and 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 Göktürk left behind.
War with the Göktürk (546–552)
For six years the record is silent, and in the silence 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 and knew which was the smaller party; he gave the princess anyway, because a Göktürk at the Rouran’s back was worth more to him than a Rouran at peace.
When the blow came it came from the west. In the first weeks of 552 a Rouran force met the Göktürk in Dzungaria — sent, presumably, to stop Bumin before he could reach the heartland, as Bumin had once stopped the Tiele — and was beaten without much trouble.[1] The Göktürk regrouped and turned east, toward Mumocheng. A second and larger Rouran army met them north of Huaihuang, near the Chinese frontier, and was destroyed.[1] The months assigned to the two engagements differ between modern accounts; the sequence does not.
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 did not exist any more. The news reached the palace. The Göktürk were a march from the walls.
Death
Anagui killed himself.[1]
That is what the Chinese account says, and it says nothing else; the Göktürk 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. But the doubt raised against it is a fair one, and this work records it. 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, and those were the ways it was done. A proud, experienced, and by every account power-hungry man of a dynasty a hundred and fifty years old, with sons and a nobility around him who had just watched him lose everything, had people close at hand with reason to shorten his life. The sources are silent, and the silence is the whole of the evidence.
Whether by his own hand or another’s, he died in the spring of 552, and with him the Rouran as a power.[1] In April Bumin entered Ötüken and took the title of khan.[1]
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, who took them in and made them, in short order, their instrument.[1] A second group, some twenty thousand who were not of the dynasty but of the nobility that had run the state, rode west across the steppe and, by the reading this work gives, reached Europe to become the Avars — an identification that is argued, and argued against.
The sons did not last long. Dengzhu led the exiles under Qi protection and was forced by the Qi emperor in 553 to march against the Göktürk, to keep Qi influence alive in the steppe; Issik Khan, Bumin’s son, caught him on the Ordos and broke him. Three thousand Rouran who had fled to the Western Wei instead were handed to Mukan on demand and hanged along the Yellow River. Anlouchen, the last surviving son, was set up as khan by the Qi emperor whose son-in-law he was, understood at length that he was being used, rose against the Qi themselves with fifty thousand men in September 553, and was beaten twice; thirty thousand of his people were taken and the women and children sold. 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, drilled by the Chinese, humiliated by Bumin’s sons, and assimilated into the Qi. The Yujiulü were finished.
Assessment
For the Ashina, Anagui was the lid on the pot: the overlord under whom the Ashina 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 is a true account and not the whole of one. He had also ended a civil war, held a fractious empire together for thirty years, and 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, and the ranking is fair.
The two accounts are not in conflict. It was precisely because he was formidable that his fall meant what it did. 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 — and the seven centuries of Turkic rule over the steppe that followed are conventionally dated from the spring in which Anagui died.
References
Sources
- Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
- Wei Shu, juan 9, 103
Literature
- Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
What links here31
- Persons
- Anluochen · Bumin Khan · Chounu Khan · Dengzhu · Diwan · Futu Khan · Issik Khan · Mukan Khan · Poluomen Khan · Princess Changle · Tulun Khan · Tuwu · Yuwen Tai
- Polities
- Northern Qi · Northern Wei · Rouran Khaganate · Western Wei
- Battles & Events
- Battle of Dzungaria, 552 · Battle of Huaihuang, 552 · Defeat of the Tiele, 546
- Sources
- Wei Shu · Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou)
Cite this article
Yavuz, Emre-E. “Anagui.” Turkic Atlas, revised 13 September 2026. https://turkicatlas.business-5d4.workers.dev/persons/anagui/
Last revised: 13 September 2026