page_title: History of Xinjiang
section_title: Gokturk Khaganate and Tuyuhun (5th–7th c.)
hierarchical_section_title: History of Xinjiang / Buddhist Kingdoms and Turkic expansion / Gokturk Khaganate and Tuyuhun (5th–7th c.)
caption_attribution_description: Map of the First Turkic Khaganate.
context_page_description: Xinjiang historically consisted of two main geographically, historically, and ethnically distinct regions with different historical names: Dzungaria north of the Tianshan Mountains; and the Tarim Basin south of the Tianshan Mountains, currently mainly inhabited by the Uyghurs. They were renamed Xinjiang in 1884, meaning "new frontier," when both regions were reconquered by the Chinese Qing dynasty after the Dungan revolt.
  The first inhabitants came from the west. The oldest Tarim mummies, found in the Tarim Basin, are dated to the 2nd millennium BCE, when the Indo-European Tocharians inhabited the Tarim Basin. In the first millennium BCE the Tarim Basin was inhabited by the Indo-European Yuezhi nomads. In the second century BCE the region became part of the Xiongnu empire, a confederation of nomads centered on present-day Mongolia.
  The Tarim Basin was first referred to as "Xiyu" under the Han dynasty, which drove the Xiongnu out of the Tarim Basin in 60 BCE in an effort to build and secure the profitable Silk Road, maintaining a variable military presence until the early 3rd century CE. From the 2nd to the 5th century local rulers controlled the region.
context_section_description: In the 5th century the Turks began to emerge in the Altay region, subservient to the Rouran. Within a century they had defeated the Rouran and established a vast Turkic Khaganate (552–581), stretching over most of Central Asia past both the Aral Sea in the west and Lake Baikal in the east. In 581 the Gokturks split into the Western Turkic Khaganate (581–657) and Eastern Turkic Khaganate (581–630), with Xinjiang coming under the western half.
  Parts of southern Xinjiang were controlled by the Tuyuhun Kingdom (284–670), who established a vast empire that encompassed Qinghai, Gansu, Ningxia, northern Sichuan, eastern Shaanxi, southern Xinjiang, and most of Tibet, stretching 1,500 kilometers from east to west and 1,000 kilometers from north to south. They unified parts of Inner Asia for the first time in history, developed the southern route of the Silk Road, and promoted cultural exchange between the eastern and western territories, dominating the northwest for more than three and half centuries until it was destroyed by the Tibetan Empire. The Tuyuhun Empire existed as an independent kingdom outside China and was not included as part of Chinese historiography.
caption: The Göktürk Khaganate at its greatest extent, in 576
exif: {}