Breaking the Orkhon Tradition: Kirghiz Adherence to the Yenisei Region after A. D. 840

Abstract

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.