BREAKING THE ORKHON TRADITION: KIRGHIZ ADHERENCE TO THE YENISEI REGION AFTER A.D. 840.

• Author: DROMPP, MICHAEL R.

Many scholars of Inner Asian history have long believed that after the destruction of the Uighur empire in A.D. 840, the victorious Kirghiz followed Inner Asian political tradition and established an empire that included the Mongolian plateau, particularly the Orkhon River valley--the traditional "heartland" of many earlier pastoral empires, including that of the defeated Uighurs. These scholars further held that the Kirghiz were expelled from Mongolia some eighty years later when Khitan forces marched into the region in 924. This line of reasoning, based largely on faulty assumptions and little evidence, is untenable. An examination of Western scholarship on the subject shows how this misconception came into being; further, a close look at the available evidence--documentary, archaeological, and geographical--reveals that after their defeat of the Uighurs the Kirghiz enjoyed at best brief and inconsequential control of the Orkhon valley. For a number of reasons, the Kirghiz remained in their homeland in the region of the upper Yenisei River of south Siberia. When the Khitans extended their power into the Orkhon region in the tenth century, they did not encounter the Kirghiz there.

RELYING AS HEAVILY AS IT DOES on records kept by outsiders, the history of Inner Asia often suffers from a lack of continuity, particularly in early periods. One of the many troubling gaps in our knowledge of the history of eastern Inner Asia, i.e., the geographical and cultural region north of modem China that centers on the Mongolian plateau, spans a relatively brief period from the middle of the ninth century to the early tenth century A.D.--The period immediately following the collapse of the Uighur (Ch. Hui-ho [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII TEXT] Hui-hu [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII TEXT], etc.) empire in A.D. 840 and preceding the expansion of Khitan (Ch'itan [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII TEXT]) power into the Mongolian steppe ca. 924. This gap has proved particularly distressing to historians because it is rather a late period to be so exceedingly arid, and because it follows a lengthy period about which far more is known--a period of a reasonably (for In ner Asia, at least) well-documented series of nomadic empires that followed one after the other, beginning in the late fourth century and ending in the mid-ninth: Jou-jan [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII TEXT] [1] Turk (T'u-chueh [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII TEXT]), and Uighur. These nomadic empires were essentially tribal confederations of pastoral nomadic peoples; each was multi-ethnic in nature but took its name from the dominant tribe. [2]

Several of the major confederated polities of eastern Inner Asia were centered around the same general area: the valley of the Orkhon River in what is now the north-central region of modem Mongolia. The Orkhon flows northward and joins the Selenga; the river then continues northward to flow into Lake Baikal in Siberia. The Turks in the period from the mid-sixth to the mid-eighth century, the Uighurs in the period from the mid-eighth to mid-ninth century, and the Mongols in the thirteenth century are all known to have made the Orkhon-Selenga region the political focus of their states. Ruins of cities such as the Uighur capital of Qarabalghasun and the Mongol capital of Qaraqorum, as well as important inscribed commemorative stelae from the Turk and Uighur periods, have been found there. It is also very likely that some earlier groups, such as the peoples known in Chinese sources as Hsiung-nu [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII TEXT] (fl. ca. 200 B.C. to ca. A.D. 155) and Jou-jan (fl. ca. A.D. 380 to A.D. 555), viewed the general region of the Orkhon valley as their political nucleus as well.

The Turks, and possibly other peoples, also regarded this region as a national center in a spiritual or religious sense, as can be seen from Old Turkic references to the Otuken yis. The meaning of Otuken is uncertain, but yis means a mountain forest--"the upper parts of a mountain covered with forest, but also containing treeless grassy valleys. [3] It seems that the Otuken Mountains correspond to some part of the modern Khangay Mountains, from which the Orkhon and Selenga flow; some sources indicate that the term referred to the eastern foothills of the Khangay, near the Orkhon, while others suggest that it could mean the entire Khangay range. [4] It is clear from the eighth-century Old Turkic inscriptions that the Otuken Mountains--sometimes referred to as Otuken yer/yir, "the land of Otuken"--had a particular, spiritual significance for the Turks. Indeed, the region is referred to in the inscriptions as "sacred" (iduq). [5] Note the following statements from those inscriptions:

If the Turk qaghan rules from the Otuken Mountains, there will be no trouble in the realm.... A land better than the Otuken Mountains does not exist at all! The place from which the tribes can be [best] controlled is the Otuken Mountains. [6]

If you stay in the land of Otuken, and send caravans from there, you Will have no trouble. If you stay at the Otuken Mountains, you will live forever dominating the tribes! [7]

It was I myself, Bilge Tonuquq, who [had led] the Turk qaghan and the Turk people to the Otuken land. Having heard the news that [the Turks] settled themselves in the Otuken land, there came all the peoples who were living in the south, in the West, in the north and in the east [and submitted to us]. [8] Clearly, the Otuken Mountains had symbolic and, one supposes, strategic importance as the national "refugium" of the Turks. [9] The significance of the Otuken Mountains is reinforced by Chinese sources, which name them as the residence of various Turk qaghans. [10] Furthermore, the Otuken region retained its significance after the collapse of the Turk empire in 744, as can be seen from the stone inscriptions created by their successors, the Uighurs. [11]

In 840, the continuity of the Orkhon tradition, which had been established at least by the middle of the sixth century with the founding of the Turk empire in A.D. 555 and which continued through the history of the succeeding Uighur steppe empire, was threatened. In that year the Turkic Kirghiz (Hsia-chia-ssu [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII TEXT], etc.), a people then living in the region of the upper (i.e., southern) Yenisei River, in the general area of present-day Minusinsk and Abakan in south Siberia, northwest of the Mongolian plateau, successfully attacked the capital of the Uighur steppe empire that had held sway over much of eastern Inner Asia for nearly a century. The Uighurs, already weakened by internal strife and court intrigue, as well as by epizootics and famine, could not withstand the Kirghiz onslaught, and were quickly routed. Groups of Uighurs fled in virtually every direction. [12]

What happened in the Orkhon valley after the Uighur collapse? Many modern scholars, particularly in the West, have assumed that the Kirghiz followed steppe tradition and established themselves for some eighty years as masters of the Mongolian plateau and inheritors of the Orkhon political tradition. This interpretation was based largely on an argument of silence. There are no native Inner Asian sources that provide any information on this matter. [13] Chinese sources, particularly the standard historical works, in fact reveal very little about the Orkhon region in the period immediately following the Uighur collapse. It was not long after this that China's T'ang dynasty (618-907) began its own final downward spiral; it is not surprising, therefore, that Chinese records were more concerned with problems within China itself than with what was happening in Inner Asia and elsewhere.

The same scholars who presumed Kirghiz domination of the Mongolian plateau after 840 also supposed that the Kirghiz were pushed out of the region by the expanding power of the Khitans when their dynamic ruler Yeh-lu A-pao-chi entered the Orkhon region with his troops in 924. This misconception seems to have originated, in part at least, in the works of the French scholar Edouard Chavannes and the Russian scholar V. V. Bartol'd (W. W. Barthold), both of whom were generally cautious in their analyses. Chavannes wrote in 1897:

Vers le milieu du [IX.sup.e] siecle cependant, les Ouigours furent rompus et disperses; les Kirghiz, qui les avaient defaits, furent incapables d'etablir un gouvernement stable. Les Khitan en profiterent; n'etant plus contenus par leurs redoutables antagonistes, ils ne tarderent pas Ii devenir conquerants a leur tour. Dans les premieres annees du [X.sup.e] siecle, leur chef Apaoki [i.e., A-pao-chi] triompha des Hi et se les assimila si bien, qu'a partir de cette epoque, les territoires des Hi et des Khitan ne sont plus distingues par les historiens chinois; poussant plus au Sud encore, il depassa la Grande-Muraille et ravagea le Tche-Ii. Au Nord-Quest, il alla jusqu'a l'ancicnne residence des Ouigours sur les bords de l'Orkhon et, en l'an 924, ii y erigea une stale pour commemorer ses exploits. [14]

Chavannes did not refer to a Kirghiz empire that was threatened or diminished by the Khitans; indeed, he indicated that the Kirghiz had been unable to establish a stable government in Mongolia. Writing of the Khitans as conquerors, he nevertheless did not state that they had conquered the Kirghiz; indeed, he simply skirted the issue of whom, if anyone, the Khitans encountered in the Orkhon valley in 924. Some years later, Barthold displayed a bit less caution when he wrote on the subject:

Das letzte turkische Volk, das in der Mongolei herrschte, waren, soweit man nach den chinesischen Quellen urteilen kann, die Kirgizen, die im Jahre 840 die Uighuren besiegt hatten. Ihre Verdriingung aus der Mongolei war anseheinend verbunden mit dem Erstarken des mongolischen Volkes der Qytal zu Beginn des 10 Jahrhunderts...