The Uyghur Khaganate: Cities, Scripts and Printing

What was the Uyghur Khaganate?

The Uyghur Khaganate was a Turkic state on the Mongolian steppe. It was founded in 744 under Kutluğ Bilge Kül Kağan. Its first rulers came out of a revolt. In 742 the Uyghurs, Karluks and Basmıls rose against the Second Turkic Khaganate. Two years later the Uyghurs had a state of their own.

The core was in today’s Mongolia, in the Orkhon region. At its strongest the khaganate controlled parts of Tuva, Buryatia, the northern Tarim Basin and eastern Inner Mongolia. That is a large stretch of Inner Asia. The people at its center lived in the Selenga and Orkhon valleys. They spoke a Turkic language, and nomadic herding stayed important to their living.

The popular idea of Turks who settled in cities holds in part. These Turks did settle cities. They did not print books during the khaganate, and that point matters. We come back to it below.

Uyghur Khaganate history: from revolt to collapse

The story is short and fast. It runs less than a century.

• The first khagan, Kutluğ Bilge Kül, ruled from 744 to 747.
• Bayan Çor followed and ruled from 747 to 759.
• Around 762, Bögü Kağan adopted Manichaeism, and it became the state religion.
• In 840 the Yenisei Kyrgyz took Ordu-Balık and destroyed it.

The fall in 840 ended the khaganate’s central rule in Mongolia. It did not end the Uyghurs as a people. Groups moved to Gansu and to the areas around Turfan, Kucha, Karashahr and Beshbalik. Remember those names. The later chapters of Uyghur culture were written there.

Uyghur Khaganate map: where was it?

Picture the Orkhon Valley in central Mongolia. That is the heartland. From there, the khaganate’s influence reached north toward Tuva and Buryatia. It reached south and west toward the northern Tarim Basin. It reached east toward parts of Inner Mongolia.

If you search for a map, expect the outer edges to look soft. The sources describe the lands the khaganate controlled at its peak. They describe those lands in broad regional terms, not as a fixed border line. A map that shows a sharp outline is an illustration, not a surveyed frontier.

Uyghur Khaganate capital: Ordu-Balık

The capital was Ordu-Balık. The name tells you what it was. In Old Turkic, ordu means the ruler’s camp, and balık means city. So the name means roughly “the ruler’s camp-city.”

Today the ruins are called Karabalgasun. They lie in the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia, about 30 kilometers north of Karakorum. If you ever plan a trip to Mongolia, that is the area to look up.

The ruins sit inside the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape. UNESCO placed that landscape on the World Heritage List in 2004.

Who lived in the city? The sources name several groups:

• the Uyghur ruling family;
• aristocrats;
• guards;
• Chinese residents;
• Sogdians.

So this was not a camp of one people. It was a mixed town with a royal household at its center.

A city that also farmed

Think about the flour in your kitchen. Someone had to grow the grain and grind it. At Karabalgasun, archaeologists found millstones. They also identified cultivated fields around the site. Together these show that farming took place at the khaganate’s capital.

This is the point of the “settled cities” idea. A state that began with herding built a town life with grain and mills. Herding did not vanish, though. The sources describe nomadic stock-raising as an important part of Uyghur life.

A second city on the Selenga

Bayan Çor built another city. According to the Shine-Usu inscription, he had Bay-Balık built in 757–758 on the Selenga River. The inscription links the city with Sogdians and Chinese.

Uyghur Khaganate people and language

The Uyghurs of the Selenga and Orkhon valleys spoke a Turkic language. The sources describe them as a Turkic-speaking community with a strong herding tradition.

Writing tells us more. Several monuments from the khaganate period are in Turkic runic script. The Shine-Usu and Taryat inscriptions, erected in 759 in the name of Moyen Çor, are among them.

The Karabalgasun inscription is different. It was set up in three languages: Old Turkic, Sogdian and Chinese. It recorded the military successes of the khagans and their support for Manichaeism. Three languages on one monument fit a capital where Uyghurs, Sogdians and Chinese lived side by side.

A later script grew out of this contact. The Uyghur alphabet formed when late Sogdian writing changed over time. Uyghurs used it in Buddhist, Manichaean and Christian literature. That list of three religions shows how varied that literature was.

Uyghur Khaganate religion: Manichaeism

Around 762, Bögü Kağan adopted Manichaeism. It then became the state religion of the khaganate. The Karabalgasun inscription, mentioned above, also records the khagans’ support for the faith.

But be careful with the phrase “the Uyghurs were Manichaeans.” Hayrettin İhsan Erkoç’s 2023 research argues against it. He argues that Manichaeism stayed a minority belief, especially among the ruling elite and townspeople. So the state religion and the religion of every Uyghur were not the same thing.

Uyghur Khaganate flag and flag meaning

Many readers search for the khaganate’s flag. Here is what the sources support.

The infobox of the Turkish Wikipedia article on the khaganate shows a sign. That page does not call it a flag. It describes it as the tamga of the Yaglakar clan. A tamga is a clan mark. It is not a state banner.

There is also a Wikimedia image uploaded on 2 October 2023 under a title that calls it the khaganate’s flag. Its file page marks the design with a warning. The warning says the design is fictional, proposed or unofficial. So that image should not be treated as a historical flag.

The honest answer to “what does the flag mean” is this. The sign that appears in the infobox is the Yaglakar clan’s tamga. It tells you about a clan. A flag image made in 2023 tells you nothing about the eighth century.

Did the Uyghurs print books?

This is where many pages go wrong. The printing culture is real, but it belongs to a later time.

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science studies Old Uyghur printing. Its corpus dates to the 13th and 14th centuries. The institute states that it must be kept apart from the Orkhon Khaganate of 744–840. So the khaganate and the printed books are separated by several centuries.

The numbers are large. The Max Planck corpus consists of 1,535 prints. They are kept in collections in Berlin, Kyoto, Paris and St. Petersburg.

How were the books made? The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities says most 13th–14th century prints in the Turfan collection were not made from single letters. They were made from wooden blocks on which a whole page was carved.

Movable type also appears in the record. The Bibliothèque nationale de France dates Uyghur movable-type characters found at Dunhuang to about 1300.

And the earlier part of the story? After 840, Uyghur literature began its brightest period in settlements at Turfan and Gansu. So the road from the Orkhon steppe to printed books runs through the towns where the Uyghurs settled after the fall.

Timeline

• 742: The Uyghur, Karluk and Basmıl alliance rose against the Second Turkic Khaganate.
• 744: The Uyghur Khaganate was founded under Kutluğ Bilge Kül Kağan.
• 747–759: Bayan Çor ruled.
• 757–758: The city of Bay-Balık, reported in the Shine-Usu inscription, was built.
• 759: The Shine-Usu inscription was erected in the name of Moyen Çor.
• About 762: Bögü Kağan adopted Manichaeism.
• 840: The Kyrgyz destroyed the capital, and Uyghur groups began to migrate.
• 13th–14th centuries: The period of the Old Uyghur printed corpus that researchers study.
• About 1300: The date of the Uyghur movable-type characters found at Dunhuang.
• 2004: The Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape, which includes Ordu-Balık, joined the UNESCO list.

Details you won’t find in guidebooks

• A deep well. A German-Mongolian excavation team found a preserved well in the courtyard of the inner fortress at Karabalgasun. It is more than 10 meters deep.
• Jade book fragments. The same excavations in the inner fortress turned up jade book fragments.
• Carved granite. The team also found worked granite column capitals.
• Gilded metal and a bronze bell. Gilded metal objects and a bronze bell came out of the same dig.
• A second city. Bay-Balık, built in 757–758 on the Selenga, is known from the Shine-Usu inscription.
• A name that explains itself. Ordu is the ruler’s camp and balık is the city. The capital’s name is a short description.

FAQ

Sources

1. Wikipedia — Uyghur Khaganate en.wikipedia.org
2. Vikipedi — Uygur Kağanlığı tr.wikipedia.org
3. Michael R. Drompp — The Uyghur Empire (744–840), Oxford Research Encyclopedia academic.oup.com
4. Encyclopaedia Iranica — Karabalgasun i. The Site iranicaonline.org
5. Encyclopaedia Iranica — Karabalgasun ii. The Inscription iranicaonline.org
6. Encyclopaedia Iranica — Manicheism i. General Survey iranicaonline.org
7. Hayrettin İhsan Erkoç — Pre-Manichaean Beliefs of the Uyghurs II onlinelibrary.wiley.com
8. TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi — Uygurlar islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
9. Max Planck Institute for the History of Science — The Prints and Printing Culture of the Old Uyghurs mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
10. Bibliothèque nationale de France — L’imprimerie chinoise traditionnelle heritage.bnf.fr
11. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities — Turfan Studies turfan.bbaw.de
12. Deutsches Archäologisches Institut — Karabalgasun excavations, 2015–2017 publications.dainst.org
13. Wikimedia Commons — Flag of Uyghur Khaganate (16 Great Turkic Empires) 1.svg commons.wikimedia.org
14. Wikipedia — Ordu-Baliq en.wikipedia.org

Image: Map of the Uyghur Khaganate.png — Ktrinko, CC BY-SA 4.0