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> Instead of clashing with the Chinese Empire to their south, the Uighurs forged a durable but uneasy alliance with the Tang dynasty in China, a rare feat for a
by megaman22 8y ago
> Instead of clashing with the Chinese Empire to their south, the Uighurs forged a durable but uneasy alliance with the Tang dynasty in China, a rare feat for a steppe empire. The Uighurs traded their surplus horses with the Chinese in exchange for silk. They then traded that silk with merchant allies in the fertile lands to their west.
This paragraph seems to betray a deep misunderstanding of historical Chinese relations with steppe peoples to the north. This was the status quo. The Chinese empires more often than not tried to buy off the nomads with markets and the nominal tributary system. It was more often than not ruinously expensive and fraught with failure for the non-foreign Chinese empires to attempt to subjugate the steppes in the pre-gunpowder era; far cheaper to play them off against one another and create a buffer zone. This goes back more than 2000 years, to the Han dynasty and the Xiongnu, if not earlier.
- derefr 8y ago> It was more often than not ruinously expensive and fraught with failure for the non-foreign Chinese empires to attempt to subjugate the steppes in the pre-gunpowder era That isn't incompatible with what the article says, though. Just because China wasn't actively going out and attacking the steppe peoples, doesn't mean that the steppe peoples weren't actively going out and raiding Chinese villages, souring China's relations with individual steppe tribes (even if China never mounted any punitive expeditions in response.) The difference being proposed here, I think, is that the Uighurs actively sought to pacify and build trade relations with the Chinese Empire, and actively prevented their citizens from engaging in raiding across the Chinese border.