The Uyghurs were a people of the Tiele, the Nine Oguz of the inscriptions, and for a century they were the power of the eastern steppe. In 744 their leader Guli Peiluo, with the Basmïl and the Karluk, overthrew the last khan of the Second Göktürk Khaganate; the coalition did not outlast its victory, the Uyghurs and Karluk turned on the Basmïl and subjected them, and the Uyghurs then brought the eastern Karluk under their control and stood alone. From the Orkhon, from a walled capital on the site the later sources call Karabalghasun, they ruled until 840, when the Kirghiz came down from the Yenisei with a hundred thousand horse, killed the khan and burnt the court.[1]

This work notes that the inscription of their founder repeats the Göktürk creed of sky and earth and names Ötüken as the centre of his realm.

Sources

The connected accounts are Chinese. Chapter 195 of the Jiu Tang Shu is a chronological account of Uyghur political history under the Tang; chapter 217 of the Xin Tang Shu is in two parts, the first carrying the history to 814, the second completing it and adding notes on the tribes of the empire, on peoples related to the Uyghurs, and on the Kirghiz who drove them from Karabalghasun. The older history is much the more precisely dated, often to the month or day, where the newer rarely gives more than the year; the newer is briefer but has material the older lacks. Both rest almost entirely on the Veritable Records of four reigns — Suzong, Daizong, Dezong and Muzong — and the weight of the record falls accordingly: about ninety-five per cent of the older history’s account of the empire concerns the years 756 to 795 and 821 to 822, less than half the century the empire lasted. The Chinese wrote about the Uyghurs in China, not about the Uyghurs; the conversion of the khan to Manichaeism, the most consequential event in the empire’s inner history, is not mentioned in any Chinese source.

What the Chinese left out, two stones and a traveller supply. The Shine-usu inscription, found in northern Mongolia in 1909, gives in the first person the wars of the second khan; the trilingual inscription of Karabalghasun, found in 1889, of which the Chinese text is the best preserved, is the only early source for the introduction of Manichaeism and for the restoration of the empire under its second dynasty. Among the Muslims, everything known of the Uyghurs before 840 goes back to Tamim ibn Bahr, who saw Karabalghasun with his own eyes and whose lost account survives in quotation.

History (744–840)

Guli Peiluo founded the state; his son Moyanchuo, who reigned from 747 to 759, made it. The Shine-usu inscription has him tighten the Uyghur hold on the restive Basmïl and Karluk, and it was he who built the capital and the palace, and a second city on the Selenga. His second son Mouyu, from 759 to 779, brought the empire to the height of its power, and to its turning. In 762 and 763, at Luoyang, where he had come to help the Tang against the rebellion of An Lushan, he met followers of Mani, was converted, and shortly afterwards imposed the faith on his people; he met opposition at his own court, and found it necessary to organise his subjects in groups of ten, one man in each answerable for the souls of the other nine. Manichaeism was a Sogdian religion, and its adoption raised the Sogdians at the Uyghur court to something like a state within the state — merchants, builders, advisers, whose marks are on the ruins of Uyghur buildings.

The Sogdians undid him. In 779 they advised him to use the mourning for a dead Chinese emperor to invade China; his chief minister and first cousin Dun Mohe opposed the plan, and when he saw the tide against him murdered the khan together with many of his Sogdian advisers and took the throne. A period of rule against the Sogdians followed, and probably a turn away from Manichaeism to the old cults of the steppe. After Dun Mohe’s death in 789 and his successor’s in 790 the empire declined; at court the authority of the ruling Yaoluoge clan passed to a general, and in the west the same general failed to hold Beiting against the Tibetans.

In 795 the throne passed to another clan, the Xiedie, in the person of a khan the Chinese call Huaixin, who was probably the general who had lost Beiting. Under him the empire recovered: Beiting was retaken, the reach of the Uyghurs extended to Ferghana, and the Sogdians and the Manichaeans returned to influence. His successor, called Baoyi by the Chinese, reigned from 808 to 821 over a state still strong in the west — a Manichaean hymn-book of his time or later counts Beiting, Kocho, Kucha and Karashar as Uyghur dependencies — but already declining, its court given to luxury and its Tibetan neighbours growing confident.

After 821 the empire came apart. There was war with the Kirghiz to the north, intrigue at court, rebellion at home; and in 839 a bad season and a hard winter killed much of the livestock on which everything rested. The end is in both Chinese histories, and they do not agree on it. In the older, a minister who kept soldiers outside killed the khan in 839 out of resentment at the execution of two conspirators, and set up another; a general who hated the minister fled to the Kirghiz, and at the head of a hundred thousand Kirghiz cavalry attacked the Uyghur fortresses, killed the new khan, beheaded the minister, and burnt and all but destroyed the court; the Uyghurs scattered across the barbarian lands.[1] In the newer, the minister led some Shatuo against the khan, who took his own life; the people set up a prince in his place; that year there was famine, pestilence and heavy snow, and many of the sheep and horses died; the Tang envoy who came to announce the accession of a new emperor in 840 found the state in disorder; and then the general and the Kirghiz, a hundred thousand horse together, attacked the fortresses, killed the khan, executed the minister and set fire to the royal camp, and all the tribes were scattered.[2] The compiler of the newer history closes with a sentence that reads as satisfaction: their state in the long run did not rise again.[2]

Steppe and city

The older history says of the Uyghurs before 744 that they had no fixed dwellings, roamed in search of water and pasture, and were excellent riders and archers.[1] Within a few years of the empire’s founding they had a capital. Tamim ibn Bahr reports a royal castle and twelve iron gates of huge size, a populous town with markets and trades, villages lying close together and cultivated land around it; the archaeology finds irrigation, millstones and pestles, the traces of smiths, potters, weavers and jewellers, mining of iron, copper, gold and silver, and grain buried with the dead. The century was a partial passage from the wholly nomadic life of the Uyghurs’ ancestors to one in which cities, commerce and agriculture counted — partial, because stock-raising remained the base of the economy and far from the capital the old ways went on unchanged.[3]

The Sogdians are the other half of that story, and the literature on Sogdian trade reads the conversion from their side. The trilingual inscription of Karabalghasun relates the khan’s conversion to Manichaeism at Luoyang in 762 and 763; the Tang had just turned on the hu of northern China after the revolt of An Lushan, and Manichaean Sogdians won from the one military power the dynasty could not refuse the protection of their coreligionists and compatriots, so that the Uyghurs became the protectors of the hu in China until 840, when the persecutions resumed. Why the khan agreed, the same literature answers from what the Uyghurs needed: masters of the steppe only since 744, they had to find a model on which to organise a new power, and the only one besides the Chinese, which was too burdened with subservience, was the Sogdian, anchored at the old Göktürk court and along the whole frontier; they took the religion, the script, much of the vocabulary and the urban pattern, and the Sogdian influence on the Uyghurs was greater than it had been on the Göktürk. The Shine-usu inscription carries Bayan Chor’s order to the Sogdians and the Chinese to build Bay Balïq on the Selenga, and sees in it three things that run through Uyghur history, close relations with China and with the Sogdians and an interest in towns.[4] The coup of 779 is, in this reading, the reverse of the fusion: a party favourable to Göktürk tradition and hostile to foreign importations, like the one at the court of the second Göktürk khaganate, which killed with the khan the hu with nine names, two thousand people by the Jiu Tangshu’s count, after which the Sogdians and their religion recovered and shared in the horse-for-silk trade to the end.[1]

List of khans

The standard histories give the following sequence; the titles in inverted commas are those conferred by the Chinese court, and where a Turkic reading is given it is the literature’s.

  • 744 — Guli Peiluo, ‘Huairen’ Khaghan
  • 747 — Moyanchuo, Gele Khaghan
  • 759 — Idijian, Mouyu Khaghan, Tengli Khaghan
  • 779 — Dun Mohe, Alp Kutluk Bilge Khaghan, ‘Tianqin’ Khaghan
  • 789 — Duoluosi, ‘Zhongzhen’ Khaghan
  • 790 — an unnamed usurper, younger brother of the last
  • 790 — Achuo, ‘Fengcheng’ Khaghan
  • 795 — Gudulu, that is Kutluk, ‘Huaixin’ Khaghan, first of the Xiedie line
  • 808 — ‘Baoyi’ Khaghan
  • 821 — ‘Chongde’ Khaghan
  • 824 — Prince Hesa
  • 832 — Prince Hu, ‘Zhangxin’ Khaghan
  • 839 — Prince Hesa

A caution attaches to every date of death in this list. Where the Chinese give a khan’s death to the month or the day, the day is usually that of the court mourning at Chang’an, not of the death on the Orkhon; The records of the mourning show it, and the precise dates should be read as Chinese events.[3]

The weather of the empire’s last decades is measured as well as told. Di Cosmo and his colleagues found favourable humid conditions in the Orkhon country at the empire’s emergence and a persistent drought from 783 to 850, and rethought its history around them; a drought reconstruction over two thousand years marks a severe drought beginning in 804; and the famine, pestilence and snow of 839 in the Xin Tangshu are the written end of the same sequence. The article on climate and the steppe empires sets the drought beside the Kirghiz.

Assessment

The Uyghurs were the theoretical allies of the Tang through almost the whole of the century, and under Moyanchuo and still more under Mouyu they used the Chinese dependence on them without scruple; under Dun Mohe the tone from Karabalghasun grew friendlier, and after a tense period under Baoyi the relation warmed again from about 820. The Chinese attitude did not change: they used their neighbours when they needed them, extended diplomatic friendship, and feared and distrusted them as barbarians throughout. What outlasted the empire was cultural, and it grew from the two things the Chinese sources ignore — the adoption of Manichaeism and the absorption of the Sogdians — which are the roots of the later Uyghur script and art. The people of that name who settled the Tarim after 840 belong to another story; the empire period ended with the Kirghiz.

References

  1. ^ a b c d Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 195
  2. ^ a b Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217
  3. ^ a b Mackerras 1972
  4. ^ Golden 1992

Sources

Literature

  • Colin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories (1972)
  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)
  • Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History (2005)
  • Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
  • Nicola Di Cosmo; Amy Hessl; Caroline Leland; Oyunsanaa Byambasuren; Hanqin Tian; Baatarbileg Nachin; Neil Pederson; Laia Andreu-Hayles; Edward R. Cook, Environmental Stress and Steppe Nomads: Rethinking the History of the Uyghur Empire (744–840) with Paleoclimate Data (2018)
  • Amy E. Hessl; Kevin J. Anchukaitis; Casey Jelsee; Benjamin Cook; Oyunsanaa Byambasuren; Caroline Leland; Baatarbileg Nachin; Neil Pederson; Hanqin Tian; Laia Andreu Hayles, Past and future drought in Mongolia (2018)
  • Julian Struck; Marcel Bliedtner; Paul Strobel; William Taylor u. a., Central Mongolian lake sediments reveal new insights on climate change and equestrian empires in the Eastern Steppes (2022)

Related

What links here18

Persons
An Lushan · Ozmish Khan
Polities
Khazar Khaganate · Second Göktürk Khaganate
Conflicts
Fall of the Second Khaganate, 741–744 · Hegemony Wars in Northern China
Places
Gaochang · Ötüken · Tarim Basin
Peoples
Basmïl · Bayirku · Sogdians · Tiele · Yenisei Kirghiz
Religions
Manichaeism
Sources
Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang) · Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang)
Historiography
Climate and the steppe empires

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Uyghur Khaganate.” Turkic Atlas, revised 13 September 2026. https://turkicatlas.business-5d4.workers.dev/polities/uyghur-khaganate/

Last revised: 13 September 2026