Princess Yicheng

Yicheng was sent north as a Sui bride for Yami Khan after the first princess died. She stayed at the Göktürk court for more than thirty years.^[1] By the custom of the steppe she passed, at each death, to the next khan: to Shibi, then to Chula, then to Ilig.^[2] Four khans, one katun.

The marriage policy from the other side

The Sui sent princesses north to bind khans to Chang’an. For a time it worked. Yami held the eastern steppe as a client, in a walled town the Sui gave him, on pasture inside a ditch their conscripts had dug.^[1]

The policy did not reckon with the fact that the princess outlived the arrangement. When the Sui fell, Yicheng did not become a Tang subject at the Göktürk court. She became the patron of the Sui survivors there. She used a katun’s influence to keep her house’s cause alive in the tent of the strongest army on the frontier.

Setting up khans

In 620 she set up Chula’s brother Duobi as Ilig Khan.^[2] A katun could do that. The succession of the Ashina was settled among the men of the house and the great officers. The woman who had been katun to three khans in turn had standing among both.

She used this standing against the Tang for ten years. She pressed the khan to support the Sui claimant at the Göktürk court and to raid the new dynasty’s frontier.

The end

When the Tang broke the khaganate in 630 and took Ilig’s court, the princess was killed. The Tang had reason. Of everyone in the tent she was the one who had spent a decade working for the dynasty they had replaced.

Place in the record

Yicheng appears in the record as a name at the edge of somebody else’s story. Set in order, the notices show a woman who was sent as an instrument of Chinese policy. She became an actor in steppe politics and made a khan. She was killed for what she had made of the position she was given. The Chinese histories record her because she mattered to them. What the Göktürks thought of her is not written anywhere.