For twenty-seven years the Northern Qi held the eastern half of a divided northern China, and for most of them it was the weaker of the two halves in exactly one respect that mattered to the steppe: it could not buy the Göktürk as reliably as its western rival could. The state was founded in 550 and destroyed in 577 by the Northern Zhou, and in the years between it stood at the receiving end of nearly every decision the Göktürk khans made about China.

The Qi stood against the Göktürk. That governs the direction of view, not the treatment: the Qi court had its own reasons, and they are given here as its own.

Refuge of the Rouran (552)

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

The emperor Wenxuan, who reigned from 550 to 559, made Anlouchen, the last surviving son of Anagui, a khan under Qi protection and married him to a daughter of the house; when Anlouchen rose against his protectors in 553 the Qi destroyed him. A second group under Dengshuzi, Anagui’s uncle, whom the remnant had set up as ruler, was broken by Issik Khan at Mount Mulai north of Woye, on the Ordos edge, in the same year.[1] This work reads both as a proxy war: the Qi kept Rouran claimants as instruments against the Göktürk rather than 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. And 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. Read one way it was an attempt to strangle the new power at once, at the moment the Rouran remnant still had a name to fight under; read another it was a frontier operation of the ordinary kind, and its coincidence with the founding is the accident of a bad year.

Rivalry with the Zhou for the Göktürk

From the reign of Mukan the pattern settles into the one Chinese division always produced on the steppe. Two courts, each unable to finish the other, each needing the Göktürk not to side against it, 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 literature records that the Qi, not to be outdone, ruined their treasury paying him off; the Zhou Shu says it in five characters, 傾府藏以給之, they emptied the treasury to supply him, out of fear of his raids.[1] That sentence is the shortest description of what the Göktürk khaganate meant to sixth-century northern China, and it was written from the Chinese side.

The alliance the Göktürk actually kept was with the west, from Western Wei through the Zhou, and it held for some thirty years. It produced a joint war against the Qi in 565 which brought little.

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, a man said to know the languages of the barbarians of the four directions, translate the Nirvāṇa Sūtra into Turkic, and the translation was sent to the khan.

It is the first Buddhist text known to have been rendered into a Turkic language, and 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 and 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.[2] On paper the Northern Qi ceased to exist.

It did not quite stop there, and the reason is instructive. Taspar had been the Zhou’s ally for thirty years, but a single strong China on his southern frontier was worth less to him than two weak ones, and he now supported the losing side — the classic move of allying with the weak against the strong. The Qi prince Gao Shaoyi, driven out of Shuozhou and then Mayi by the Zhou general Shenju, fled to Taspar’s court and was received there 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.

What the episode shows is not Qi resilience but Göktürk leverage: a Chinese dynasty could be extinguished on the ground and still be kept alive at Ötüken for as long as it was useful.

Göktürk in the Qi annals

Juan 8 of the Bei Qi Shu, the annals of the last reign, has been read at the text for this article. The Göktürk appear in it six times, and the picture they give is worth having in the Qi’s own words.

Three of the six are the same formula. Under Tiantong 2 the annals record that the Göktürk and the Mohe both sent envoys bearing tribute, 突厥、靺鞨國並遣使朝貢; under Wuping 3 that Silla, Baekje, Wuji and the Göktürk all did so; and a further notice puts the Göktürk at the head of a list with the Da-molou, the Shiwei, Baekje and the Mohe.[2]

This is the same relationship seen from the other end.[3] Where the literature has the Qi ruining their treasury to buy off a khan they could not fight, the Qi annals have that khan sending tribute like any other client. 朝貢, “bringing tribute”, is what the Chinese annals call every embassy, and it is applied here 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.[2] A request for a bride from the Qi ruling house is not the act of a client.

The last two come from the collapse. As the Zhou armies closed on Jinyang, the annals say that if Jinyang could not be held the emperor intended to flee to the Göktürk, 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.[2] A few days later he broke out of the city by night through the Five Dragon Gate wanting to run to the Göktürk, 欲走突厥, and most of his officials scattered from him on the road.[2] He turned back to Ye instead.

He never reached the steppe. But the reflex is the point: 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 — and a few years later it was a Qi prince, Gao Shaoyi, who actually made that journey.

Sources

The reading above is this work’s own, from the text of juan 8 as it stands on Wikisource. Most of the received Bei Qi Shu is not Li Baiyao’s text but a Song supplement drawn from the Bei Shi, and whether juan 8 belongs to the original stock is an open philological question. What is quoted here is therefore what the received text says, which is not quite the same thing as what a seventh-century historian wrote.

The rest of the article rests on the notes; the statements marked[4] unverified are the ones no one here has yet checked against a source.

References

  1. ^ a b Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
  2. ^ a b c d e Bei Qi Shu (Book of Northern Qi), juan 8
  3. ^ Golden 1992
  4. ^ 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 here15

Persons
Anagui · Anluochen · Bumin Khan · Dengzhu · Issik Khan · Mukan Khan
Polities
First Göktürk Khaganate · Northern Wei · Rouran Khaganate · Western Wei
Conflicts
Hegemony Wars in Northern China
Battles & Events
Battle of Huaihuang, 552 · Western Wei embassy of 545
Peoples
Xianbei
Sources
Bei Qi Shu (Book of Northern Qi)

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Northern Qi.” Turkic Atlas, revised 11 September 2026. https://turkicatlas.business-5d4.workers.dev/polities/northern-qi/

Last revised: 11 September 2026