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East Asia · Sui, Tang and the khaganates

Uyghur Khaganate

744–840

The Uyghur Khaganate (744–840) replaced the Second Turkic Khaganate as master of the Mongolian steppe, capital Ordu-Baliq on the Orkhon. A crucial Tang ally—it helped suppress the An Lushan Rebellion—it extracted lucrative horse-for-silk trade.

Existed
744–840
Shown on the map
AD 750–849
Peak area
3.9M km²
Region
East Asia

Overview

The Uyghur Khaganate (744–840) replaced the Second Turkic Khaganate as master of the Mongolian steppe, capital Ordu-Baliq on the Orkhon. A crucial Tang ally—it helped suppress the An Lushan Rebellion—it extracted lucrative horse-for-silk trade. It adopted Manichaeism as a state religion (c. 762). Weakened by factionalism and famine, it was destroyed in 840 by the Yenisei Kyrgyz; the Uyghurs migrated south and west, founding the Ganzhou and Qocho kingdoms.

Common questions

What was Uyghur Khaganate?
The Uyghur Khaganate (744–840) replaced the Second Turkic Khaganate as master of the Mongolian steppe, capital Ordu-Baliq on the Orkhon. A crucial Tang ally—it helped suppress the An Lushan Rebellion—it extracted lucrative horse-for-silk trade.
When did Uyghur Khaganate exist?
Uyghur Khaganate existed 744–840. On this map it is drawn AD 750–849.
How large was Uyghur Khaganate?
At its greatest extent drawn on this map, Uyghur Khaganate covered about 3.9 million km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.

Sources

This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia article for each polity as the basis of these profiles, supplemented by Encyclopaedia Britannica, chinaknowledge.de, the World History Encyclopedia, museum and university sources, and the academic works it lists. The article this entry is anchored on:

This entry was last updated .

This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made

Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.

Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).

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