Datan was the khan who made the Rouran a danger to China and the khan whom China first broke. His fifteen years are the best-recorded stretch of the khaganate‘s history in the Wei Shu, because the Wei fought him in person: two emperors marched against him, and one of them, Taiwu, nearly died doing it.[1]
Accession (414)
He was the son of Puhun, the youngest paternal uncle of Shelun, and before his accession commanded a separate division on the western frontier, where he had won the people’s hearts.[1] When Buluzhen moved against him on the report that the Gaoche chief Chiluohou meant to make him ruler, Datan raised his army, seized Buluzhen and Shelun’s son Shebo, strangled them, and set himself up; the people acclaimed him, and he took the title Mouhan Heshenggai Khan, which the Wei glossed as “victorious”.[1] He was one of the most powerful of the khans and the cousin of Hulü, and his alliance with Feng Ba of the Northern Yan, whose founder was of Koguryŏ descent and to whom Datan sent horses every year.[2]
War with Mingyuan
Datan led his people south and broke into the frontier; the emperor Mingyuan marched against him in person, Datan fled in fear, and the Wei column sent after him under Xi Jin met snow and cold in which two or three men in ten lost fingers to frostbite or died.[1] These campaigns belong to the Ordos country, the natural frontier between Chinese and steppe culture, and they are the start of a pattern of Rouran raids and Wei counter-strokes under Taiwu that brought the Wei no decisive victory.[2]
Siege of Taiwu at Yunzhong (424)
When Mingyuan died and Taiwu, his son, came to the throne, Datan heard it with joy and in the autumn of 424 raided Yunzhong.[1] Taiwu marched against him in person and reached Yunzhong in three days and two nights; Datan’s horsemen surrounded the emperor more than fifty ranks deep, riders pressing on the heads of the horses, close as a wall.[1] The Wei soldiers were terrified; the emperor’s face did not change, and the men steadied.[1] The invading army ran to sixty thousand men, sent in immediately after Taiwu’s accession in 423.[2] What ended the siege was a death in the khan’s family: Datan had made his nephew Yuzhijin, son of the brother Dana who had lost a contest for the state to Shelun and fled to the Wei, a tribal commander, and Wei archers shot Yuzhijin dead; Datan took fright and withdrew.[1]
Wei campaigns of 425 and 429
In 425 Taiwu went out against him in strength on five roads at once, east and west, the emperor on the middle one; at the edge of the desert the columns left their baggage, took fifteen days’ rations on light horse and crossed the sands, and Datan’s people fled north in alarm.[1] In the eighth month of 428 Datan sent a son with more than ten thousand horse into the frontier to kill and plunder; the Gaoche, now Wei subjects, pursued and beat them.[1]
The decisive campaign came in 429 and has its own article, Taiwu’s campaign of 429.[1] Taiwu crossed the desert in the fifth month against the advice of his ministers and his astrologers, reached the Li river, and Datan’s people fled west; his brother Pili, bringing the eastern camps to join him, ran into the Wei western column and lost several hundred chiefs; Datan, hearing it, burned his tents and fled west with his clan, no one knew where, and the tribes scattered into the mountain valleys with their herds loose on the plain and no one to gather them.[1] The Gaoche turned on Datan’s people and killed them, more than three hundred thousand surrendered, and the Wei took a million horses and captives.[1] The defeat of 429 and the Gaoche revolt that followed are the critical juncture at which “the hitherto largely successful Jou-jan qagan” died.[3] Even in this last great campaign Taiwu failed to capture Datan, hesitating for fear of a trap.[2]
Death
His people weakened and scattered, Datan fell ill and died, and his son Wuti succeeded him.[1]
Name and the Otuz Tatar
One suggestion about Datan reaches further: that historians have reconstructed his actual name as Tatar, that the loyal following he gathered in the war with the Wei may have become semi-autonomous within the khaganate after his death, and that their descendants were the Otuz Tatar, the “Thirty Tatars”, whom the Orkhon inscriptions name among the mourners at the funeral of the founders and who, after the fall of the Rouran, withdrew to the Khingan and dealt with the Göktürk in diplomacy and war; the name Tatar, borne by many peoples in the Middle Ages and after, would then go back to this khan.[2] This is a reconstruction and stands here as one; the Wei Shu knows him only as Datan.[1]
Assessment
Datan shows what the Rouran could do against a united northern China: bring an emperor to the edge of death, force three imperial campaigns into the steppe, and lose. The pattern the Wei Shu draws for him, the raid, the pursuit, the flight beyond the sands, is the pattern of every later khan’s dealings with the Wei, and it was the thing that wore the khaganate down from within.[2]
References
Sources
- Wei Shu, juan 103
Literature
- Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
- Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
What links here9
- Persons
- Buluzhen Khan · Wuti Khan
- Polities
- Northern Wei · Rouran Khaganate
- Lineages
- Yujiulü
- Sources
- Wei Shu
Cite this article
Yavuz, Emre-E. “Datan Khan.” Turkic Atlas, revised 13 September 2026. https://turkicatlas.business-5d4.workers.dev/persons/datan-khan/
Last revised: 13 September 2026