Anxi Protectorate

The name Anxi means the Pacified West. The Anxi protectorate was the Tang office for the Western Regions. Its protector governed the oasis kingdoms of the Tarim and, on paper, the lands that had belonged to the western Göktürks.^[1]

Foundation at Xizhou

In the eighth month of 640 the general Hou Junji took Gaochang, and the Tang made its land the prefecture of Xizhou.^[2] In the ninth month the Anxi protectorate was set up in Xizhou.^[2] Each year a thousand soldiers were sent to hold it, and criminals were sent to serve with them.^[3]

Wei Zheng opposed the plan. He said that a garrison of a thousand men, changed every few years, would empty Longyou within ten years. The emperor would never get a handful of grain or a foot of cloth from Gaochang, he said.^[4] The emperor did not follow him.^[4]

A geography of the Western Regions, the Xiyu shuidao ji, as Chavannes quotes it, places the protector’s seat in the Zhenguan years at Yar-khoto, twenty li west of Turfan. The ruins there are those of old Jiaohe.^[5] One chapter of the Jiu Tang Shu dates a move of the seat to the old capital of Gaochang to 651, and another chapter dates it to 657.^[6]

Kucha and the Four Garrisons

In 648 Ashina She’er broke Kucha.^[7] Guo Xiaoke, the protector, held the captured city and died there when the Kucha minister Nali counter-attacked.^[4] The Jiu Tang Shu says that Taizong, after breaking Kucha, moved the Anxi protectorate into its capital. The protector there governed Khotan, Shule and Suiye, and the four were called the Four Garrisons.^[8] The Xin Tang Shu says the same.^[3] In the second month of 649 the court set up the Yaochi governor-generalcy under the protectorate.^[2]

Gaozong, on coming to the throne, did not wish to enlarge the empire’s territory and burden its people. He ordered the officials to give up Kucha and the other garrisons and to move Anxi back to Xizhou, where it had stood before.^[8] The Xin Tang Shu tells the move differently. It makes Kucha a governor-generalcy, and it says that in the same year the protectorate moved into the kingdom of Kucha while the old Anxi became the governor-generalcy of Xizhou. It names no year.^[3] A modern note dates the move to the fifth month of 658.^[9] From then the seat stayed at Kucha, with brief interruptions, until the Tibetans conquered the land in 787.^[5]

The towns of the Four Garrisons were not always the same. In 719 the khan of the Ten Surnames asked to settle at Suiye, and the military governor of Anxi, Tang Jiahui, proposed that Yanqi should make up the four in its place.^[3] A modern note names Kucha, Khotan, Kashgar and Karashahr as the Four Garrisons.^[10]

The western khaganate

When Ashina Helu fell, the Tang divided his land into prefectures. They set up two protectorates, Kunling and Mengchi, for the peoples of the Ten Surnames. The states that had served him were made prefectures too, as far west as Persia, and all of them were placed under Anxi.^[11] The Tongdian dates the campaign against Helu to 657.^[12] A modern note dates the two protectorates to the twelfth month of 657 and has them depend on the protectorate of Beiting.^[9]

Burden and loss

In the Yifeng years, 676 to 679, the Tibetans attacked west of Yanqi, and the Four Garrisons all fell.^[3] In 692 the generals Wang Xiaojie and Ashina Zhongjie defeated the Tibetans and recovered Kucha, Khotan and the other garrisons.^[8] The protectorate returned to Kucha with 30,000 Chinese troops.^[4] The troops had to cross the desert, and the people who supplied them suffered. Advisers asked to give the place up, and Empress Wu refused.^[4]

In 708 the Türgesh chief Suoge defeated the Tang commanders.^[13] Anxi fell and the road of the Four Garrisons was cut. The grand protector Guo Yuanzhen then reported that Suoge’s case was just, and the court pardoned him and made him khan.^[13]

Anxi and Beiting sent their reports to court by way of the Uyghurs.^[14] The Jiu Tang Shu says that Anxi was cut off after Beiting fell in 790, and that nobody knew whether it still stood.^[14] In 843 Li Deyu reckoned Anxi 7,100 li from the capital.^[15] The roads that the protectorate covered are told in Trade Routes of the Steppe.