The Zhou Shu tells the origin of the Göktürk twice, and the two accounts do not agree. The first is the wolf legend of the boy in the marsh and the cave near Gaochang. The second begins somewhere else entirely: “According to another account the ancestors of the Türk came from the state of Suo, which lay north of the Xiongnu.”[1] It is the only place in the Chinese record where the Ashina are given a country of their own before the Altai, and the compilers who annotated it put that country in the north, on the upper Yenisei.
The story
The chief of the tribe was Apangbu, who had seventeen brothers; the Bei Shi writes seventy, which is almost certainly a slip.[2] One of the brothers, Ichinishidu, was born of a she-wolf. Apangbu and his brothers came into the world with limbs missing, and their state was attacked and destroyed. A spirit touched Ichinishidu and gave him the power to call down rain and raise the wind; he married two women who were said to be the daughters of the god of summer and the god of winter, and one of them bore him four sons.[1]
The four sons are the point of the story, because each is given a place. The first turned into a white swan. The second founded a state between the A-fu and the Kien river, and the state was called Qïrqïz. The third ruled on the Chuzhe river. The fourth, the eldest, lived on the slope of the mountain Jiansi Chuzheshi, where other branches of the Apangbu tribe lived on the heights; because the cold there was killing them, he made fire and kept the people alive, and for that they made him their chief and gave him the name Türk.[1]
Then the line runs on to names the rest of the record knows. Nadulu Shad had ten wives, and his sons took their mothers’ clan names; Ashina was the son of a concubine. When Nadulu died the mothers gathered under a tree and agreed that whichever son sprang highest in it should rule; Ashina’s son sprang highest though he was the youngest, and took the name Axian Shad.[1] From Axian Shad the chapter goes to Tuwu and to Bumin.
Where the commentary puts it
The Chinese commentators identified the four rivers and mountains, and the identifications are worth having, because they place the second origin story on the map where the first does not.[3]
| Name in the text | Identified as |
|---|---|
| Kien river | the Ulug-Khem on the southern edge of Tannu Tuva, the upper Yenisei |
| A-fu | Uvs Nuur; or the Abakan |
| Chuzhe river | the Yenisei |
| Jiansi Chuzheshi mountain | the Qing shan of the Kirghiz chapter of the Xin Tang Shu, taken for the western Sayan, west of the Ulug-Khem |
| Qïrqïz | one of the many Chinese spellings of the [[yenisei-kirghiz |
That is a coherent region and not a scattering: the upper Yenisei, the Sayan and the Minusinsk country, with the seat of the tribe on the mountain where the eldest son made fire. The story therefore does two things at once. It gives the Ashina a northern homeland in the Yenisei country, and it makes them and the Kirghiz brothers, sons of the same father, which is the only place in the Chinese material where the two houses are joined.[1]
Suo and the Xianbei
The commentary goes one step further. Suo, it says, is the old name of the homeland of the Xianbei, and the Tuoba, who counted as Xianbei, were called Suo lu, the Suo barbarians; from which it follows that the Göktürk must descend from the Xianbei.[3] The inference is set down with a warning attached to it in the same breath: genealogies of this kind are not to be believed at once, and what they yield is a line of descent claimed, not a descent established.[3]
That warning is the right one, and it is the rule this work follows for all such claims; the article on the ethnogenesis debate sets out why. The Zhou Shu’s first story makes the Göktürk a branch of the Xiongnu, its second makes them a remnant out of Suo, and its commentators make Suo the Xianbei. Three descents in one chapter, and the chapter is a Chinese compiler’s, written in 636 about a people who had come over the horizon a century before.
Why it matters anyway
A legend is not a record of where a people lived, but it is a record of where they said they came from, and that is worth having in its own right. The first story sends the Ashina to Turfan, a refuge on the edge of the oases; the second sends them to the Yenisei, a homeland in the northern forest. They are not the same kind of claim. The name Türk, moreover, does different work in each: in the first it is taken from the shape of the Altai, in the second it is the title given to a man who kept his people alive, which would make it a word of rule before it was a word of place.
The Ashina article carries the three descents together, and the cave of the ancestors the yearly rite that one of them explains.
References
- ^ a b c d e Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
- ^ Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50; Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99
- ^ a b c Mau-tsai 1958, Turkish edition
Sources
- Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
- Bei Shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), juan 99 (after Zhou Shu and Sui Shu)
Literature
- Liu Mau-tsai, Çin Kaynaklarına Göre Doğu Türkleri (1958, Turkish edition)
- Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
What links here2
- Places
- Cave of the ancestors
- Lineages
- Ashina
Cite this article
Yavuz, Emre-E. “Suo.” Turkic Atlas, revised 12 September 2026. https://turkicatlas.business-5d4.workers.dev/polities/suo-state/
Last revised: 12 September 2026