The fourth khan of the Uyghurs came to the throne by killing the third. The reason was a disagreement about policy towards China.[1]

The murder of 779

He was Bögü’s first cousin and his chief minister.[1] The Tang emperor Daizong died in the sixth month of 779. Bögü’s Sogdian advisers urged him to use the mourning as the opening for an invasion, and Tun Bagha Tarkan argued against it.[1] He lost the argument. He saw the court going the other way, killed Bögü and many of the Sogdian supporters and advisers with him, and set himself on the throne.[1]

The killing did more than settle a dispute about policy. It removed the Sogdian party along with the khan. That party had held a firm grip on several professions and had formed something like a state within the state since the conversion of 763. It was also the first time a Uyghur khan took the throne against the rule of succession from father to son.[2]

Sogdians were not wholly missing from his court. The Xin Tang Shu names under 782 a Uyghur envoy and general called Kang Chixin, whose surname suggests a Sogdian. Dun Mohe is likely to have valued the trading skill of the Sogdians.[2] In 780 a Chinese official, Zhang Guangsheng, killed about a thousand Uyghurs and Sogdians in north China in the hope of weakening Uyghur power.[3] All his ministers advised him to take revenge by killing the Chinese who came to Karabalghasun to apologise. He rejected the advice.[3] His principal wife was the princess of Xian’an, a daughter of the emperor Dezong. She outlived him by nineteen years and became the wife of three of his successors.[4]

Ten years of the other course

What followed was a decade of anti-Sogdian rule. It probably also brought a return from Manichaeism to the older cults of the Turkic peoples. The evidence for the religious turn is indirect. The Chinese histories say nothing of the conversion itself, and the Manichaean sources for the period are fragmentary. The Tang histories report that he led an expedition in China in 765 that helped repulse a Tibetan force. They add that the Uyghur army had brought magicians along and paid great attention to what they said.[5] A Latin record has a “Turkic king” ask the Nestorian patriarch Timothy I in the early 780s for an archbishop. It has been suggested that Dun Mohe leaned towards Nestorian Christianity. The see lay on the Syr Darya, however, a long way west of Karabalghasun, and the king cannot have been he.[5] The phrases “from the Moon God” and “from the Sun God” are understood as Manichaean. They are missing from the titles of the khans before 789.[5] Beiting stood outside his full control. He charged a toll on those who came from the city through his territory.[6]

After him

The decline dates from his death. After 789, and still more after his successor’s death the following year, Uyghur power and prestige fell away.[1] At court the authority of the ruling clan passed into the hands of the chief minister. In the west the same minister failed to hold the outpost of Beiting against the Tibetans.[1] In 795 the khanship passed out of the founding clan altogether.[1] His son came to the throne in 789 and was killed the following year by his younger brother.[2] The strength of feeling for succession from father to son probably explains the rebellion that at once put the murdered khan’s son, hardly more than a child, on the throne.[2] The chief minister who held the power in these years acted as regent for the young khan. In 790 he twice failed to relieve Beiting from the Tibetans.[7]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
  2. ^ a b c d Sinor 1990, p. 324
  3. ^ a b Sinor 1990, p. 327
  4. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 325
  5. ^ a b c Sinor 1990, p. 333
  6. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 328
  7. ^ Sinor 1990, p. 318

Sources

Literature

  • Colin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories (1972)
  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
  • Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)

Related

What links here6

Persons
Bögü Khan
Battles & Events
The Uyghur Demand for the Prince's Dance (762)
Institutions and Titles
Uyghur Horse-Silk Trade · Women among the Turkic Peoples
Religions
Ay Ata · Kün Tengri

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Tun Bagha Tarkan.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/persons/tun-bagha-tarkan/

Last revised: 8 November 2026