Rouran epochGöktürk epochUyghur epochKirghiz epoch
RouranFirst GöktürkTang ruleSecond GöktürkUyghurKirghizHunsWestern GöktürkTürgeshKarlukKhazar
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For twenty-seven years the Northern Qi controlled the eastern half of a divided northern China. For most of that time it was the weaker of the two halves in the one respect that mattered to the steppe. It could not buy the Göktürks as reliably as its western rival could. The state was founded in 550 and destroyed in 577 by the Northern Zhou. In the years between, nearly every decision the Göktürk khans made about China came down on the Qi. The Qi court had its own reasons.

Origin of the state

The Qi were the eastern half of the Northern Wei under a new name. The Wei broke apart in 534. The general Gao Huan then ruled the east from Ye with a Tuoba emperor beside him, just as Yuwen Tai ruled the west from Chang’an. In 550 Gao Huan’s son dropped the pretence and took the throne. Both halves therefore rested on the same foundation, a Xianbei army over a Chinese population, and both claimed the whole.

The east began with the advantages. It had the plain, the people and the grain, and in the first years it had the better army. It did not have the frontier arrangement that the west had built, an alliance on the steppe that could be relied on. The whole of the Qi’s dealings with the Göktürks turns on this asymmetry.

The Qi court had a second capital at Jinyang in Shanxi, where the roads from the grassland come down into China. The ruler was as often there as at Ye.[1] A dynasty that keeps half its government on the northern road expects to be attacked from the north.

Refuge of the Rouran (552)

The first thing the new khaganate learned about the Qi was that they would take in its enemies. Anagui died in 552 as the Göktürk army closed on his capital. A large part of the Rouran nobility then fled south, and the Qi received them by the ten thousand at the frontier walls. The former masters of the steppe had become refugees who depended on Chinese favour. The Qi saw at once what they were worth: a claimant is cheaper than an army.

The emperor Wenxuan, who reigned from 550 to 559, made Anluochen, the last surviving son of Anagui, a khan under Qi protection and married him to a daughter of the house. In 553 Anluochen rose against his protectors, and the Qi destroyed him. In the same year Issik Khan broke a second group at Mount Mulai, north of Woye on the edge of the Ordos. It was led by Dengshuzi, Anagui’s uncle, whom the remnant had set up as ruler.[2] Both episodes look like a proxy war. The Qi kept Rouran claimants as instruments against the Göktürks, not as guests.

In the same years Wenxuan had a long wall built from Lüliang across Shanxi, to forestall an invasion he expected from the north. In the late summer or autumn of 552, only months after the khaganate was proclaimed, Qi troops attacked Göktürk territory. What that attack was meant to achieve is not settled. It may have been an attempt to strangle the new power at once, while the Rouran remnant still had a name to fight under. It may equally have been an ordinary frontier operation, with its coincidence with the founding of the khaganate an accident of a bad year.

Map of Asia in 552: the First Göktürk Khaganate across the eastern steppe from the Altai to the Khingan, south of Lake Baikal, the Tiele in the west as its subjects, the remnant of the Rouran in the east, beside the Western Wei, the Northern Qi, the Liang, the Tuyuhun, the Hephthalites and Persia
552: after the victory over the Rouran, Bumin takes the title of khan and founds the First Göktürk Khaganate in their lands. The Tiele are his subjects, and the remnant of the Rouran holds out in the east. Modern map.
© Emre-E Yavuz 2026

Rivalry with the Zhou for the Göktürks

From the reign of Mukan the pattern is the one that a Chinese division always produced on the steppe. Two courts could not finish each other off, and each needed the Göktürks not to side against it. Both offered gifts, tribute and marriages to the khan, and the khan took from both.

The Qi were structurally the weaker bidder, and they bid anyway. Under Taspar the Zhou sent a hundred thousand pieces of silk to a khan who was considering overrunning China. The Qi did not want to be outdone and ruined their treasury paying him off.[3] The Zhou Shu says it in six characters, 傾府藏以給之: they emptied the treasury to supply him, out of fear of his raids.[4] This sentence describes in the shortest form what the Göktürk khaganate meant to northern China in the sixth century. It was written from the Chinese side.

The Göktürks kept their alliance with the west, from Western Wei through the Zhou, for some thirty years. It produced a joint war against the Qi in 565, which brought little.

The war of 563 and 564

Twice the bidding turned into an invasion, and both times the target was Jinyang.

In 563 the Zhou emperor Wu bought Mukan’s cavalry with an offer the Qi could not match. Whatever the Göktürks carried out of Qi territory would be theirs, and a Zhou marriage would follow.[1] The Qi envoys who had come with richer gifts were sent away.[4] Yang Zhong crossed the Xing ridge with ten thousand men. Mukan met him with a hundred thousand horse, and the joint army came down on Jinyang.[4]

The Qi emperor Wucheng divided his forces and sent Hulü Guang south against the second Zhou column. He rode to Jinyang himself.[1] The city held through the winter. The assault of the first month of 564 failed, and in the spring the allies were forced back.[4] It was the Qi’s best military hour against the alliance, but the court could not count it as a victory. Mukan had let his men plunder the country at will and had gone home without loss. When the Zhou came again the year after, the Göktürks did not come with them.[1]

The Zhou Shu records the lesson the court drew in its sentence about the treasury. The Qi did not fear a khan who could take their cities. They feared a khan who could take everything outside the cities, as often as he pleased, at no cost to himself. The campaign and the war as a whole have their own articles.

Nirvāṇa Sūtra in Turkic

One consequence of the bidding outlasted the state that paid for it. During Taspar’s reign the Northern Qi emperor had Liu Shiqing translate the Nirvāṇa Sūtra into Turkic. Liu Shiqing was said to know the languages of the barbarians of the four directions. The translation was sent to the khan.

It is the first Buddhist text known to have been rendered into a Turkic language. It was a diplomatic gift from the weaker Chinese court to a ruler it could not defeat. Taspar became the first Göktürk khan known to have turned to Buddhism. The script is not recorded. It was presumably some form of the Sogdian alphabet.

Fall (577) and aftermath

In 577, after decades of tension, the Zhou emperor Wu invaded Qi territory and took nearly all of it without Göktürk help.[5] On paper the Northern Qi ceased to exist.

The story did not quite end there. Taspar had been the Zhou’s ally for thirty years. A single strong China on his southern frontier was worth less to him than two weak ones, so he now supported the losing side and allied with the weak against the strong. The Zhou general Shenju drove the Qi prince Gao Shaoyi out of Shuozhou and then out of Mayi. Gao Shaoyi fled to Taspar’s court, where he was received as the emperor of a state that no longer had territory. Taspar kept him for years and in the end handed him over to the Zhou court.

The episode shows Göktürk leverage, not Qi resilience. A Chinese dynasty could be extinguished on the ground and still be kept alive at Ötüken for as long as it was useful.

Göktürks in the Qi annals

Juan 8 of the Bei Qi Shu, the annals of the last reign, mentions the Göktürks six times. These notices give the Qi’s own view of the Göktürks.

Three of the six are the same formula. Under Tiantong 2 the annals record that the Göktürks and the Mohe both sent envoys bearing tribute, 突厥、靺鞨國並遣使朝貢.[5] Under Wuping 3 they record that Silla, Baekje, Wuji and the Göktürks all did so. A further notice puts the Göktürks at the head of a list with the Da-molou, the Shiwei, Baekje and the Mohe.[5] This is the same relationship seen from the other end.[3] One account has the Qi ruining their treasury to buy off a khan they could not fight. In the Qi annals, by contrast, the same khan sends tribute like any other client. 朝貢, “bringing tribute”, is what the Chinese annals call every embassy, and the Qi annals apply it to the power that the same court was paying. Neither account is a lie. They are two descriptions of one flow of goods, and the direction each assigns to it is a claim about who stood above whom.

The fourth notice is drier and harder to read as tribute. Under Wuping 4 the annals record that a Göktürk envoy came to ask for a marriage, 突厥使來求婚.[5] A request for a bride from the Qi ruling house is not the act of a client.

The last two notices come from the collapse. The Zhou armies closed on Jinyang. The annals say that if Jinyang could not be held, the emperor intended to flee to the Göktürks, 若晉陽不守，卽欲奔突厥, and that his ministers told him to a man that it could not be done.[5] A few days later he broke out of the city by night through the Five Dragon Gate, wanting to run to the Göktürks, 欲走突厥. Most of his officials scattered from him on the road.[5] He turned back to Ye instead.[5]

He never reached the steppe. The last emperor of the Northern Qi, in the hour his dynasty ended, thought of the Göktürk khan as the one power that might still shelter him. A few years later it was a Qi prince, Gao Shaoyi, who actually made that journey.

Sources

The tribute notices stand in the received text of juan 8. Most of the received Bei Qi Shu is not Li Baiyao’s text but a Song supplement drawn from the Bei Shi. Whether juan 8 belongs to the original stock is an open philological question. The notices therefore give what the received text says, which is not quite the same thing as what a seventh-century historian wrote. Beyond these notices, the history of the Qi rests on the modern accounts.[6]

Relations with other states

Red is war, blue alliance, gold trade. Where several held at once, the line shows what prevailed; alliance and trade can run side by side. Each line rests on an article. Point at a state to see its weightiest relation, select it to see its events. The slider shows what stood in a given year, and Play runs through the years.

  1. Rouran Khaganate550 to 554

  2. Western Wei550 to 557

  3. First Göktürk Khaganate552 to 577

  4. Northern Zhou557 to 577

References

  1. ^ a b c d Yavuz 2025
  2. ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance), juan 165
  3. ^ a b Golden 1992
  4. ^ a b c d Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  5. ^ a b c d e f g Bei Qi Shu (Book of Northern Qi), juan 8
  6. ^ Golden 1992; Yavuz 2025

Sources

Literature

  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)

Related

What links here37

Persons
Anagui · Anluochen · Bumin Khan · Daxi Wu · Dengzhu · Emperor Wu of Northern Zhou · Gao Huan · Issik Khan · Mukan Khan · Princess Linhe
States
Eastern Wei · First Göktürk Khaganate · Northern Wei · Northern Zhou · Rouran Khaganate · Western Wei
Conflicts
Hegemony Wars in Northern China · The Göktürk–Rouran Wars · The Göktürk–Sasanian Trade Conflict · The Zhou–Qi war, 557–577
Battles & Events
Battle of Huaihuang, 552 · Battle of Mount Mulai (553) · The Bargain with Mukan (562–563) · The Göktürk–Zhou alliance · The Qi Court in Exile (577–580) · The Qi March to Shuozhou (553) · The Woye and Luoyang Campaign (564)
Places
Jinyang · Xing Ridge
Peoples
Tuoba · Xianbei
Institutions and Titles
Border Markets · Sabao · Six Garrisons
Religions
Buddhism among the Göktürks
Sources
Bei Qi Shu (Book of Northern Qi) · Tomb of Yu Hong

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Northern Qi.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/polities/northern-qi/

Last revised: 8 November 2026