Dzungar Khanate

The right wing

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (1876)formation

The name is a direction. Züüngar — Sungar in the older books — means the left wing in modern usage and the right wing in the older Mongol military vocabulary Sanang Setsen uses, where it stands opposite baraghon gar. It was an administrative position in somebody else's army, and it became the name of an empire.

Who they were not

The Dzungars were Oirats: western Mongols, of the Choros clan, the people European writers call Kalmuks. They were not descendants of Chinggis Khan.

That single fact shaped everything. It was why Esen, the greatest Oirat of the fifteenth century, could hold a Chinese emperor prisoner and still be killed within three years of calling himself khan. It was why the Dzungar rulers who came after him had to find their legitimacy somewhere other than in a genealogy — and did, in Lhasa.

The Irtysh

Kharakhula led them north of the Altai, where the Chinese called them the northern Eleuths, and settled them on the Irtysh, subduing the petty princes he found there. He survived until 1635, when his son Erdeni Baatur Khungtaiji succeeded him.

The Black Irtysh valley put them straight up against two things at once. The Khalkha Mongols and their Altan Khans were to the east. To the north the Russians had just broken the khanate of Sibir and had not yet settled what they held.

The Dzungars claimed the Barabinsk Tatars and their neighbours around Tara as subjects from time immemorial, with a right to collect tribute from them, and went in to assert it in 1606; a force of Tatars and Cossacks from Tobolsk, Tyumen, Turinsk and Tara marched against them and failed to drive them off. The next year some of them rode with the sons of the dispossessed Kuchum on a raid into the Tobolsk and Tyumen districts. When Tara's deserters went over to them they came back two hundred strong and wasted the neighbourhood, and told the voivode's envoys that they knew nothing about any deserters.

The salt

The most revealing of these early quarrels was about salt.

The people of the Tara district had always taken their salt from the steppes of the Irtysh, and supplied the whole country from it as a monopoly. In 1610 and 1611 the Kalmuks claimed the salt lakes and refused the Cossacks permission to work them. There was a great scarcity; in 1611 a large body of armed Tatars assembled at Tara determined to march and enforce their right.

That is a state, not a horde: a power asserting exclusive title to a resource on a defined ground, against a rival state, and making the shortage bite three hundred miles away.

The shape of it

What Baatur Khungtaiji left his successors was a confederation of four divisions — Choros, Dörbet, Khoit and Khoshut — under one over-khan, with the Ili valley and Dzungaria at its centre, the Irtysh to the north, and the Torghuts who had gone west to the Volga as relatives who had chosen differently.

Its neighbours were the Russian empire, the Qing empire, the Kazakhs and Tibet. It is the last time a nomad power on the open steppe faced all of those at once and held its own for a century.

The lama who came back

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (1876)expansion

Galdan was born in 1645 and was put young into the service of the Grand Lama at Lhasa. He became a monk himself, and resigned all his rights in the succession to his elder brother Senge.

The dispensation

Senge was murdered. Galdan, who was always of a warlike and turbulent disposition — unlike what a Lama should be, the Chinese account observes — got a dispensation from the Grand Lama to resume his rights, attacked his remaining brothers, killed them, and had himself declared taiji.

It is worth pausing on the mechanism. A monk of the Gelugpa order applies to his own church for permission to leave it and take a throne by killing his family, and receives it. The church in question had been put in power in Tibet a generation earlier by a Khoshut Mongol prince. The Dzungars and Lhasa were not two institutions in a relationship; they were two arms of one arrangement.

The lake

His first war went badly — he was beaten by his uncle Shukur — and in 1673 he took refuge with his father-in-law Ochirtu Khan, and quarrelled with him too.

In 1676 he settled both at once. Ochirtu meant to cross the Talki mountains and fall on him unawares in the Ili valley; Galdan was told of the plan, forestalled it, attacked in the passes and broke him, then pursued him to the Zaisan lake and had him beheaded there. Fifteen thousand prisoners were taken.

The Kalmuks kept a legend about it: that the lake was tinged with blood for six days' journey and its water was unwholesome ever after. Müller sets against the legend the flat report of the Russian envoy Unkovsky, who had passed that way and had drunk the water and cooked with it.

What he was

The Russians' messenger who came back from his camp in 1679 described him as about thirty-six, with a severe countenance, and given to drink.

By then he was master of Dzungaria and had subdued not only his own Dzungars but the Dörbets and the others, and Howorth's explanation of the hold he had over them is worth keeping: his profession as a lama and his relations with the Dalai Lama made him a considerable person entirely apart from being khan, and that reputation survived misfortunes that would have finished anybody else.

He had conquered Turfan and Hami and killed a Torghut chief, and took the title Boshugtu Khan.

The invitation

Then the thing that turned a steppe confederation into an empire arrived by letter.

South of the Tian Shan the holy families of Kashgar were split into two factions, the Black Mountaineers and the White. The khan of Kashgar backed the Black and drove Afaq Khoja, head of the White, out of the country. Afaq went to Kashmir, then to Tibet, and ingratiated himself with the Dalai Lama so successfully that the Dalai Lama sent him on to Galdan with a letter asking him to restore Afaq's authority in Kashgar and Yarkand.

Galdan took the hint and the country. In 1678 he conquered the whole Tarim basin — Little Bukharia, as the older books call it — made Afaq his viceroy with Yarkand for a capital, and carried the deposed khan's family off to Kuldja in the Ili.

He did not try to administer it. The Dzungars left the internal government of the oasis towns alone and limited themselves to a tribute of four hundred thousand tangas a month.

It is the oldest bargain on that frontier, and the most durable: the steppe takes the revenue, the oases keep the administration, and a religious faction gets the ruler it wanted. The Qing would run the same arrangement in the same towns eighty years later, having killed everyone who set it up.

One year sufficed

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (1876)peak

The best short description of what Galdan had built was written by the man who destroyed him.

Kangxi's list

Galdan was a formidable enemy. Samarkand, Bokhara, Pulut, Urghendj, Kashgar, Suirmen, Turfan, Khamil, were taken from the Muhammedans, and the capture of more than 1,200 towns prove to what a length he had carried his arms. The Khalkhas in vain assembled their seven Banners, numbering 100,000 men, to oppose him. One year sufficed for their dispersion.

It is an enemy's tally in a private letter, which is the kind of evidence worth having; a Qing emperor had no reason to inflate the achievements of a rebel he had just scattered to the winds.

The Khalkha

The last sentence of it is the one that changed the map of Asia.

In 1688 Galdan crossed into eastern Mongolia — invited, as usual, by one faction of the people he was about to conquer — and broke the Khalkha. Their seven banners could not hold him. They abandoned the Orkhon and the Kerulen, the oldest political ground in the Mongol world, and fled south across the Gobi.

To survive they submitted to the Manchus. That is how the whole of what is now Mongolia came into the Qing empire: not by conquest, but as refugees asking for protection from another Mongol.

And it put the Qing frontier and the Dzungar frontier against each other with nothing in between.

The state at its height

At its widest the khanate ran from the Irtysh and the Kazakh steppe to the edge of the Gobi, and from the Siberian forest down over the Tian Shan into the Tarim. It held the Kokonor Khoshuts as kin, Tibet as a patron and client at once, and the oasis cities as tributaries.

It fought with firearms. Its ruler corresponded with Moscow and Beijing and Lhasa simultaneously, complained to Kangxi that only two hundred of his subjects were allowed to trade with the empire, and received Qing envoys sitting cross-legged on a mat in the Tatar fashion.

Every element of it was assembled by a man who was not descended from Chinggis Khan and could not have claimed a khanship on any traditional ground.

Why it could not last

Because of the two things that made it.

The first was Tibet: a source of legitimacy that belonged to somebody else and could be transferred. When the Qing eventually took Lhasa, the Dzungars lost the only title they had.

The second was the Qing themselves. Galdan's own triumph over the Khalkha delivered a hundred thousand Mongol horsemen to Beijing and abolished the buffer. Every campaign after 1688 was fought against an empire that could put a hundred and fifty thousand men across the Gobi, feed them by relay from north China, and do it again next year.

The Dzungars could beat any neighbour. They could not outlast an empire with a tax base.

A heap of stones

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (1876)contraction

The war between Galdan and Kangxi was decided by supply, and the record of it is mostly about food, camels and how far men could walk.

Jao Modo

In 1696 the Qing came out in three columns. The emperor marched west along the Kerulen with the main army; Gerbillon, who was with it, remembered the quilted silk doublets of the soldiers and the gold on their cuirasses and the standards making a magnificent spectacle. Then the provisions ran short and the emperor turned aside to better country and sent five or six thousand men on after Galdan, who did not catch him.

Feiyanggu did. Encamped at a place called Jao Modo, he sent a detachment forward to provoke an engagement; finding the Dzungars too strong it fired a volley and retired, drawing Galdan after it. Feiyanggu dismounted his troops, put them on a hill, and waited.

Neither side could retreat. Sustained artillery and musketry and repeated charges broke the Dzungar ranks; when they gave way Feiyanggu remounted his men, came down off the mountain and pursued for thirty li. Two thousand Dzungars were left on the field. The baggage, the arms, the herds and a large part of the women and children were taken. Galdan's wife was killed by a musket ball in the confusion.

The booty was six thousand oxen, seventy thousand sheep, five thousand horses and five thousand camels — the material basis of the army, gone in an afternoon.

The eighty days

What follows is the part worth reading twice.

Galdan fled west with his son, his daughter and a few retainers. Kangxi sent an envoy offering terms, and the envoy came back with a report.

Only one of the party, a man named Pochi, was allowed an audience, and he had to wait a long time for it. At length Galdan appeared. He was seated on a heap of stones in the open plain, and would not let Pochi approach him. He thanked the emperor for his benevolent intentions, and said that to prove his gratitude he would send one of his own officers to make his real sentiments known. Then he mounted his horse and rode away.

Howorth reads it as the guarded behaviour of a desert chief used to surprises and treacheries, who probably suspected the envoys were assassins. The emperor's offer was real enough: eighty days' grace, during which the imperial armies would halt and cease from pursuing him, and after which he would be hunted without ceasing.

Two Dzungars in Qing service were sent next. They were received, and reported to him on the strength of the empire and how comfortably the prisoners were being kept in China. He broke off the audience without saying a word to them.

What was left

An officer who surrendered around that time gave the arithmetic: about four thousand people still with him, most of them women and children, a thousand of them fighting men, and those in the greatest distress. A party intercepted on the road to Tibet — an envoy from the Dalai Lama going to Galdan, and messengers from the Kokonor princes — said he and his followers had suffered terribly since the defeat, had neither clothes nor cattle enough, and that he was much broken down by his misfortunes.

His son Sebten Baljur, a name given him by the Dalai Lama, was captured by the chief of Hami and sent to court. Gerbillon saw him at the audience: a good-looking boy of fourteen in a cloth coat and a fox-skin cap, with an unhappy embarrassed air, who fell on his knees and told the emperor how far away his father was.

The ashes

On the fifth of June 1697 Kangxi received word that Galdan had died six weeks earlier — taken ill at daybreak and dead the same night — and that his body had been burnt. The Qianlong emperor, writing later, says he poisoned himself.

Kangxi had a table dressed as an altar in the open plain with perfumes on it, and with his eldest son and the mandarins and the literati made the triple genuflexion and touched the ground with his forehead, giving thanks to heaven. Then he sent for the ashes, to be scattered to the winds as had been done with a rebel's before. He also ordered the boy Sebten Baljur beheaded and his head set on a stake, and afterwards revoked it.

The ashes were reduced to dust and scattered on the great parade ground outside the city walls, in the presence of Manchu, Mongol, Dzungar, Khalkha and Chinese soldiers.

The khanate went on for another sixty years under his nephew and his nephew's descendants. The ceremony on the parade ground was about something else: an emperor demonstrating to five armies at once what happened to a man who could not be made to kneel.

I uprooted his race

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (1876)end

The khanate survived Galdan comfortably. Tsewang Rabtan, the nephew who had fled from him with seven followers and come back to beat him, ruled for thirty years and sent an army into Tibet; Galdan Tseren after him held the Qing off for two decades more. What finished it was a succession quarrel and a man who went to Beijing for help.

Amursana

After Galdan Tseren's death the khanship was disputed. Dawachi took it with the help of Amursana, a Khoit prince; the two then fell out, Amursana was beaten, and he took refuge in China.

He expected to be executed. Instead the emperor used him: Qing armies went into Dzungaria in 1755, took the Ili without much fighting, captured Dawachi, and nominated Amursana chief of Dzungaria.

It did not hold, and Howorth explains why with more sympathy for the Dzungars than for either party. Amursana was a very secondary chief with no claim to the over-khanship of a confederation whose legitimate line he did not belong to; and the Qing had no intention of letting him have it anyway. They had decided to abolish the supreme authority altogether and put the four Oirat divisions back under four separate khans, breaking up the formidable power the Kalmuks wielded when united.

Amursana took up arms. He was driven out, sheltered for a while among the Kazakhs — whose chief Ablai was supposed to hand him over and instead furnished him with the means to get away — and finally crossed into Russia.

He died there of smallpox, in Siberia. The Qianlong emperor's memoir turns it into theology:

Insulted heaven had fixed the hour of vengeance. A dreadful disease was the instrument it used... Abandoned by his people, who feared to catch his disease, scarce could he in this strange land find any one to render the funeral honours to his body.

The emperor wrote repeatedly to the Russians demanding the corpse, so that he might make of the rebel's ashes an example of terror. They showed it to his commissioners and refused to give it up. Each nation has customs which it holds sacred, they answered. A custom deemed sacred with us is not to expose the cold fragments of an unfortunate who has sought refuge among us to ignominy. Your enemy is dead, we have shown you the body, that ought to suffice.

The four khans

Meanwhile the settlement was being carried out, and it destroyed the people it was imposed on.

Dawachi had been named khan of the Choros and died too soon. His successor was assassinated by a nephew, who was killed in turn by Galdan Torgui, whom the emperor then appointed himself and gave the title of Han and its prerogatives. Becoming a monster, I was constrained to purge the earth of him. He was captured by a Qing officer, beheaded, and his head sent to Beijing to be exposed as a warning.

I uprooted his race. I changed into a desert the unhappy country where the perfidious Choros formerly dwelt.

Bayar, made head of the Khoshuts, was the first to break away, and ended, the emperor writes, a life of which he had so often made himself unworthy, in the midst of tortures; his subjects were killed or enslaved and left nothing behind but the name. Chakturman of the Khoits was merely suspected of conspiracy; the general Yarhashan was so satisfied of his intentions that he did not wait for orders from Beijing, took him and executed him outside the gates, and gave up to his soldiers every Khoit who did not run. Howorth's comment is that this last massacre was made on very small excuse.

Of the four, only the Dörbet leader came through. Of the twenty-one chiefs of the lesser hordes nearly all perished, by the sword or the executioner; a few got north into Russia and the rest were enslaved.

The number

Valikhanov, whom Howorth quotes, puts it at half a million Oirats.

Howorth does not soften it. The Manchu soldiers destroyed the Kalmuks mercilessly and their provocation was very slight; the campaign was a chapter in the annals of human butchery of the same kind as those against the Miao of Sichuan and the Muslims of Yunnan; and a tolerably populous and thriving empire was converted into almost a desert. He is writing in 1876, about an empire he was generally inclined to admire, and this is what he says about it.

That is the end of the Dzungars and the end of something larger. No independent nomad state was ever again assembled on the Eurasian steppe.

A place of exile

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (1876)afterlife

What was done with the country afterwards is the clearest statement of what had been destroyed, because it had to be replaced from scratch.

Repopulation

Dzungaria, Valikhanov writes, having been depopulated by the massacre of half a million Oirats, was settled by China from the province of Gansu — and, to increase the population, was converted into a place of exile for criminals.

Manchu soldiers of the green banner were transferred there for protection. Colonies of Sibe, Solon and Daur were established in the Ili district. Seven thousand Muslim families were forcibly converted into agriculturists. The remnant of the exterminated Dzungars were allotted a certain extent of country to roam in.

The beautiful valley of the Ili, which had been the busy centre of a steppe empire, became a Chinese penal settlement.

The other half

The Tarim went with it. Within a very short time the oasis towns south of the Tian Shan that had paid Galdan four hundred thousand tangas a month were incorporated into the Qing empire — and governed on precisely the terms the Dzungars had used.

A general at Ili with lieutenants at Tarbagatai and in Little Bukharia; garrisons only in the important towns; pickets on the frontier and post stations for speed; the internal government left on the same footing as before. The Chinese showed great caution, Valikhanov notes, because the population had fought with great determination to assert their independence.

This is the origin of Xinjiang — the New Dominion — and of the frontier question that has run through Central Asia ever since. A Qing province two thousand miles from Beijing, created by exterminating the people who had held it, populated with exiles and garrison colonists, and administered through the same religious families the Dzungars had installed.

The scattered relatives

The Oirats did not all die. The Torghuts had gone west to the Volga in Baatur Khungtaiji's own lifetime and become the Kalmyk Khanate under Russian overlordship — the same people who broke the Nogai Horde on the Yaik, and who in 1771 attempted the return march east across the Kazakh steppe and lost most of their number doing it. The Kokonor Khoshuts remained under Qing supervision. The Dörbet chief who survived the purge kept his people.

The Torghut march is worth one more sentence, because it is the last act of the Oirat world and it happened in the country the Qing had just emptied. Eight months on the road east; two brushes with the Kazakhs on the Ishim; three days crossing the hundred-and-fifty-verst steppe of Kangarbein Shara Usun, where the only water is yellow and unwholesome and thirst made them drink it and hundreds died; a two-day battle with Nurali's Little Horde and Ablai's Middle Horde as they came out of the yellow waste; another on the shore of Lake Balkhash; then the Kara Kirghiz. They reached the Qing frontier near the Ili in the middle of 1771. Behind them, wrote one observer, the Caspian steppes where many thousand families had fed innumerable flocks for a long series of years were left desolate and unpeopled.

But the confederation was gone, and with it the thing it had been: the last state raised on the open steppe by people who lived on it, and the last one to make the empires on either side of it negotiate.

The last word

It belongs to the man who ordered it, because he wrote it down himself and expected to be praised for it.

I uprooted his race. I changed into a desert the unhappy country where the perfidious Choros formerly dwelt.

A century and a half later that desert was being resettled again, and it is still being argued about. The Dzungars left no dynasty and no successor claiming their name. What they left is a hole in the map that every power since has had to do something about.