Ashina Helu was the last man to rule the western Göktürks as a khan of his own making. The Xin Tang Shu devotes a section of its chapter on the western Göktürks to him. It calls him a fifth-generation descendant of Istemi.[1] The chapter follows him through five stages: a yabgu’s command on the Duoluosi river, a Tang prefecture, a self-proclaimed khanate at the Thousand Springs, a winter flight across the Ili and the Chu, and a captive’s death at Chang’an.[1] After his capture in 657 or 658, the west was cut into prefectures. The Ten Arrows passed under Chinese protectorates.[1]
Descent and rise
The Xin Tang Shu calls him a fifth-generation descendant of Shidianmi Khan, that is Istemi. His father was the Yebuli Shad Shegui Tegin Jieyue.[1] Ashina Buzhen went over to China, and the Üç Tuğlu Khan made Helu yabgu in his place. Helu’s seat was on the Duoluosi river, fifteen hundred li due north of Xizhou.[1] Under him were the Chuyue, the Chumi, the Gusu, the Karluks and the Nushibi. These five surnames formed a command on the northern flank of the Turfan depression.[1] The Üç Tuğlu Khan fled to Tokharistan, and Irbis Shegui Khan pressed the pursuit. Helu lost his fixed seat, and most of his people scattered.[1] Three tribes, the Zhisheshi, the Chumukun and the Pobi, pleaded with the khan that Helu was blameless.[1] The khan wanted to execute them in his anger. The three tribes took their several thousand tents and submitted to the Tang together with Helu, and the Tang emperor treated him well.[1]
In Tang service (648–650)
His submission coincided with the campaign against Kucha, which the Tang annals date to 648. He asked to ride ahead as its guide.[1] The emperor made him commander of the Kunqiu road, feasted him in the Jiashou hall and rewarded him richly. He also clothed him in his own robe.[1] Helu rose to general of the left and commandant of Yaochi. His people were settled at Mohe city in Tingzhou, where he quietly gathered in the scattered, and the tents of his camp grew.[1] This is one case of a wider pattern. Ashina princes who had served the eastern khan were sent west at the head of Chinese armies. In the Tarim of the 640s, the war at officer level was therefore Göktürks against Göktürks.[2]
Shaboluo Khan (651–655)
Taizong died in 649, and Helu at once planned to take Xizhou and Tingzhou. The prefect Luo Hongyi reported the plan. Gaozong sent Qiao Baoming to soothe Helu and had him send his son Dieyun to the capital as a guard.[1] Dieyun repented on the way but could not get free. He was made a general of the guards, and the emperor sent him home.[1] Dieyun urged his father to go west, take the old lands of the Üç Tuğlu Khan and set up his standard at the Thousand Springs.[1] There Helu named himself Shaboluo Khan and ruled the ten surnames of the Üç Tuğlu and the Nushibi.[1] The chapter lists them. The five chuo of the Üç Tuğlu were Chumukun, Huluwu, Sheshiti, Türgesh Heluoshi and Shunishi. The five sijin of the Nushibi were Axijie Que, Geshu Que, Basaigan, Axijie Nishu and Geshu Chuban.[1] The Huluwu Que was Helu’s son-in-law. The Axijie Que sijin was the strongest and had several hundred thousand fighting men.[1] Helu made Dieyun Moheduo Yabgu. He then raided Tingzhou, took several counties, and killed or carried off several thousand people.[1] The Tang annals set the raid and the first campaign against him in 651. Other accounts date his khanate from 653.[3]
The first Tang answer was a force of thirty thousand garrison troops and fifty thousand Uyghur horse under Liang Jianfang and Qibi Heli.[1] The prefect Luo Hongyi advised striking in winter. Helu then held one city under deep snow and thought no Chinese army could come. Luo proposed to pardon the Chuyue and the Chumi and to punish Helu alone.[1] He advised sending the tribal cavalry ahead with a month’s rations and the main army behind it: “to drive the Rong and the Di against wolves and jackals”.[1] The campaign broke the Chuyue chief Zhuye Guzhu at Laoshan and took nine thousand heads and sixty chiefs. It fell short of Luo’s plan.[1] In 653 the Yaochi commandery was abolished and Jinman prefecture was set up among the Chuyue. Cheng Zhijie was sent against Helu.[1] The Üç Tuğlu Khan died that year. His son Zhenzhu Yabgu offered to fight Helu and was beaten back.[1] In the next year Cheng Zhijie struck the Karluks and the Chuyue, and his deputy took the Chumukun city. Su Dingfang led the vanguard and beat Helu’s detached camp of the Shunishi in the Yingsuo valley.[1] The deputy commander Wang Wendu refused to fight. He accepted the surrender of Dadu city, then plundered and massacred it, and Cheng could not control him.[1]
Su Dingfang’s campaign (657–658)
At the start of the Xianqing period, Su Dingfang was made grand commander of the Ili road. With him went the protector of Yanran Ren Yaxiang, the deputy protector Xiao Siye and the Uyghur Poyun.[1] The Ashina princes Mishe and Buzhen went out by the Altai road as pacifying commissioners. They received the surrender of the sijin Nendulu with more than ten thousand tents.[1] Su Dingfang crossed west of the Yedie river and broke the Chumukun.[1] Helu came against him with a hundred thousand horse of the ten surnames. Su met them with ten thousand. He put his infantry on a rise with their spears pointed outward and his cavalry to the north.[1] Helu charged the rise three times and could not move it.[1] Su then loosed his horse. The Göktürks broke and were pursued for tens of li. Thirty thousand were taken or killed, and two hundred chiefs fell, among them the Dudu Tarkan.[1] The next day the five Nushibi surrendered. The five Üç Tuğlu heard of the defeat and went south to surrender to Buzhen.[1] Then the snow came.[1] The army asked to wait for a clear sky. Su Dingfang answered that fog and cold made the enemy think no army could march. To strike him unprepared was the right course, and to delay was to lose him.[1] The army marched day and night and gathered up the people and herds on the way. It joined Mishe and Buzhen at Shuanghe and came in battle order to Jinya mountain, two hundred li from Helu’s camp, where Helu’s men were out hunting.[1] Su fell on the camp and took tens of thousands of prisoners, with the drums and standards. Helu leapt across the Ili.[1] Xiao Siye halted at the Thousand Springs, and Mishe reached the Ili. The Chuyue and Chumi submitted. Su followed Helu to the water of Suyab and took his whole following from him.[1]
Helu and Dieyun made for the Shunou Shad. Their horses were spent and their men starving when they reached the city of Sudu in the state of Shi, that is Chach. They entered it with their treasure to buy horses.[1] The city’s lord, the Yinie Tarkan, received them. Once they were inside, they were seized and delivered to Chach, where the son of Mishe and Xiao Siye’s troops took them.[1] Su Dingfang dispersed the tribal levies, opened roads and posts, and buried the exposed dead. He asked after the people’s hardships and returned what Helu had plundered, “and the western regions were at peace”.[1] Modern accounts set the capture in 657, and with it the end of the western khaganate.[2] The Tang annals put the campaign in 657 and the capture in 658. A second dating gives 659.[4]
Captivity and death
Helu said to Xiao Siye: “I am a fugitive captive. The former emperor treated me generously and I turned my back on him; now Heaven sends down its anger and punishes me, and what is there to say? I have heard that under Han law men are executed in the market; I wish to die at Zhaoling and confess my crime to the former emperor.”[1] Gaozong asked whether a captive might be presented at a tomb.[1] Xu Jingzong answered that armies of old held the victory feast in the ancestral temple, and that the emperor honoured the tomb as he did the temple. Helu was led to Zhaoling and presented there. A decree spared him.[1] In the fourth year of Xianqing, 659, he died at the capital. A decree had him buried beside the tomb of Ilig Khan, with a stone recording the outline of his life.[5] The last khans of the two Göktürk states therefore lie in one place, by the choice of the dynasty that had taken both.
After him
His lands were cut into prefectures and commanderies, one for each tribe. The two protectorates of Kunling and Mengchi were set over them. The states that had served him were all made prefectures, as far west as Persia, under the protectorate of Anxi.[1] Ashina Mishe was made Xingxiwang Khan, protector of Kunling and head of the five Üç Tuğlu. Ashina Buzhen became Jiwangjue Khan, protector of Mengchi and head of the five Nushibi. Each received a hundred thousand bolts of silk and a Tang envoy to carry the patent.[1] The western khaganate now formally came under Chinese protection and was divided into ten prefectures. Some of the Ten Arrows passed under Tibet in the late 660s, and the Tang regained pre-eminence by the 680s.[3] Turkic Atlas carries that sequel under the western khaganate and the Ten Arrows.[3]
Assessment
Helu is the one western khan whose whole career the Chinese wrote down, because he spent most of it inside their state. He was a Tang commandant who became a khan. As khan, he was hunted by the Tang with Ashina princes at the head of their columns. He ruled the Ten Arrows for six or seven years. He lost them in a single winter to a general who would not wait for the snow to stop. The west ended in a manhunt across the Ili, the Chu and the walls of a Sogdian town, not in a battle between nations. That shows what the west had become. It was a confederation whose khan could raise a hundred thousand horse and could not keep one of them once the standard fell.
References
Sources
- Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 215 (after Jiu Tangshu)
- Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
Literature
- Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
- Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
- Édouard Chavannes, Documents sur les Tou-Kiue (Turcs) occidentaux (1903)
What links here21
- Persons
- Irbis Shegui Khan · Ishbara Tolis Khan · Istemi · Su Dingfang · Üç Tuğlu Khan
- Places
- Anxi Protectorate · Dzungaria · Gaochang · Suyab · Tarim Basin · Thousand Springs · Yingsuo
- Institutions and Titles
- Drums and Banners for the Khans · Salt among the Turkic Peoples
- Customs & Pastimes
- Hunting among the Göktürks
Cite this article
Yavuz, Emre-E. “Ashina Helu.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/persons/ashina-helu/
Last revised: 8 November 2026
