TURKS

The Turkish website said proudly that their ancestors comprised of Huns and the White Huns, and the Uygur nationalists had further provided two lineages of eastern and western Hunnic kings to support their claim of Hunnic heritage, in direct competition with the Mongols who celebrated the 2000th anniversary of first Hunnic empire in 1991. The Turks are a group of group no secondary to the Huns, and their influence would be felt in Ottoman Empire's conquest of the Byzantium and the Balkans as well as waves of raids into the Indus Valley.  Their history had been full of extraordinary events like slaves turning into rulers. Their linguistic flavor found entries in Finno-Ugric language. They pushed Islam to its apex. It is too broad a topic for me to cover them all in here.
 
In this section, I will concentrate on the Turkic origin and influence in China and Mongolia during their early developments. Turks had impacted the Chinese more than the Huns.(
There had been reports that Chinese visitors and delegations were very well received by the Turkish people in today's Turkey. The Turkish people treated the contemporary Chinese like brothers. In this perspective, the Turkish people identified more with the Chinese than the Chinese did to the Turkish people of Turkey. The reason the Turkish people in Turkey feel affiliated with the Chinese is that their ancestors had originally lived in northern China and today's Mongolia.

In China, Turkic influences could be said to be more profound than the Huns. By Sui Dynasty (AD 581-618), a Turkic man, Yang Su, would be the prime minister. )
During the Tang Dynasty, Pogu Huai'eng, an Uygur, had obtained a post as a general in the court. After the fall of Tang Dynasty (AD 619-907), three dynasties among the Five Dynasties of northern China, i.e., Posterior Tang 923-936, Posterior Jin 936-946, Posterior Han 947-950, were ruled by the Shatuo (Sha'to) Turks. (Sha'to Turks were a group of Western Turks who were first employed by the Tibetans as their herald armies, but they later defected to the Tang Chinese and were assigned the border posts in northern China to guard against other nomads and Khitans.) One more interesting thing would be the fact that the Uygur Turks had a long history of co-living with the Chinese. There is on record a big Uygur community around Yuan-shui River in today's Hunan Province, Central China. The famous writer, Jian Bozan, who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution, happened to be an ethnic Uygur from Hunan Province.  
 
Who are those people called Turks then? They did not disappear as the Huns did. Today's Turkish people in Turkey are direct descendants of Osmanli Turks who belonged to the Oghuz confederations which have the origin in today's Mongolia. We had traced the original Huns to a group of people driven out of Hetao area, south of the Yellow River, by Qin (BC 221-206)  emperor Shi Huangdi (Shihuangdi).   Chinese history books invariably claimed that the Gaoche people, the Tiele Tribe (ancestors of Uygurs), Ruruans (Rou Ran or Ru Ru), and Turks were alternative races of the Huns. We would sort out their relationship below. There is one common feature among those ancient tribes, namely, they loved the nomadic way of life, they never settled down, and they preyed upon Chinese Turkistan and Northern China as an outsider force. In contrast, tribal states of Chinese Turkistan, i.e., Loulan (Rongjiang), Cheshi (Gaochang), Qiuci (Guqa or Kuqa), Yanqi, Yutian (Hotan or Khoten), Shule (Kashi), are recorded to have city-walls and cultivation.
 
Unlike the Huns, the Chinese of Former Han Dynasty did initiate quite some colonization efforts in Chinese Turkistan. The Uygur claim, at http://www.uygur.org/enorg/history/uygurlar_kim.htm, was not that correct in one of the assertions, namely, the Chinese never colonized Xinjiang or Chinese Turkistan. The Chinese, like the Huns and Turks, had been outside contenders. The Huns, after driving out the Yuezhi, did station some official in Chinese Turkistan. The Huns, according to Ban Gu, devised an official entitled 'Tongpu Duwei', similar to governor, and sent this person to the post in charge of ancient tribal states of Yanqi, Weixu and Weili, located to the southwest of today's Urumqi. Hunnic 'Rizhuowang' (king of sun chasing) was usually stationed in the 'west court', a place to the north of Altai, while Hunnic 'central court' was always in today's Outer Mongolia. In 121 BC, Han Emperor Wudi ordered a campaign against the Huns, with Huo Qubing and Gongsun Ao departing from northern border, while Li Guang and Zhang Qian from the Beijing area in the east. Huo attacked the Huns in and around Qilian Mountains, the ice and glacier of which fed the farming of the so-called Hexi Corridor (i.e., corridor to the west of the West Yellow River Bend). Hunnic King Hunye, for fear of punishment by Hunnic Chanyu, killed King Xiutu and surrendered his 40,000 people to Huo Qubing. Wudi relocated the Huns to five prefectures, Longxi (today's Weisui and Tiaohe Rivers, Gansu Prov), Beidi (today's northeastern Gansu Prov), Shangjun (today's northeastern Shenxi Prov), Shuofang (somewhere on north bank of the Northern Yellow River Bend), and Yunzhong (today's Tuoketuo County, Inner Mongolia). Wudi further set up Wuwei and Qiuquan Commandaries in the old territories of King Hunye. In 102 BC, Zhangye and Dunhuang Commandaries were set up along the corridor. Civilians were relocated to guard the posts along with the army. After General Li Guangli campaigned against the ancient state of Dawan (Fergana) in Central Asia, more posts were set up on the Silk Road. From Dunhuang to the Qinhaihu Lake, hundreds of 'farming soldiers' were stationed. By the time of Emperor Xuandi (reign 73-48 BC), south of Tianshan Mountains was firmly under Han Chinese control. Hunnic 'Rizhuowang' (king of sun chasing) offended Hunnic Chanyu, and he defected to Han China, yielding to Chinese the Hunnic control of the northern part of Chinese Turkistan. By 62 BC, north of Tianshan Mountains was controlled by Chinese as well. Colonization went as far as the ancient state of Sha'che. This post was responsible for reporting on the situations in such states as Kangju (Kang-chu) and Wu'sun (Ili). During the reign of Emperor Yuandi, 48-32 BC, another group of Huns surrendered to Chinese, and colonization reached Che'shi.  
 
The Uygurs and the Mongols, however, could be both right or both wrong in their assertion in regards to the Hunnic ancestry.  The Uygur claim could be built on basis of their ancestor Huihe's membership in the Tiele Tribes, a group of people sanwiched between the Huns/Turks and the original dwellers of Xinjiang or Chinese Turkistan. (Uygurs claimed they descended from 'Chunwei', the son of Jie, last Xia Dynasty lord.) The Mongolian claim could be built on basis of the nomadic tribal groups which never left the Mongolian plateau. Western history books tried in vain to make a distinction, and they said that the Genghis Mongols were descendants of the Ruruans. The Ruruans, however, were more Hunnic than Mongol as we would explore in this section and had explored in the section on the Huns. The 'Mongol' claim for Ruruans could be built on basis of one comment in History Of Toba Wei Dynasty, namely, the founder of Ruruan people might have origin in Eastern Hu nomads, a group more associated with the Tungusic people of Manchuria and eastern Mongolia. My research into various records, however, shows that the Ruruans were more Hunnic than anything else after relocating to the west. After the Ruruan founder fled to the Altai Mountains, he conquered and absorbed remnant Hunnic and Gaoche tribes there. To provide as detailed descriptions as possible, I had traced the Huns and Turks according to the specific naming as recorded in history, rather than generic naming. I traced the ending of the Eastern Huns to their relocation to Hebei Province by the Tuoba in AD 523 and that of the western Huns to Attila and his warfare in Europe in AD 433-453. The third group of Huns, Ruruan, and their relationship with Nie-ban (Nirvana) Huns, would be touched upon below and in Huns section. (blue turk ? I doubt this terminology ever existed in Chinese chronicles. blue means 'east')
 
The Turks did not come about till they, employed as a group of iron miners in the Altai Mountains, rebelled against the Ruruans in AD 546-553.  We need to make a distinction here between the words of 'Turk', 'Turkic' and 'Turkish'. The word 'Turk' would denote the group of people as recorded in the middle 6th century. The word 'Turkic' means more a language that was spoken by the Euroasian nomads, and the earlier Huns were said to be Turkic as well. The word 'Turkish', however, would denote specifically the people and the language in today's Turkey, i.e., Anatolia. Western history books classify the Ruruans as 'Mongolian', but the term 'Mongolian' was a much later concept. The term 'Mongolian' did not appear till Khubilai endorced it in the 14th century, supposedly on basis of the word 'Mengwu Shiwei'.  Conventional history would make such a distinction between the Turkic and Mongolian ethnicity. Here, I will refer to the Ruruans as 'Hunnic' versus their Turkic adversaries for clarification's sake.  The Ruruans are said to be the successors to the Huns, and this group of people had also been responsible for pressuring the so-called 'Huns' into migrations towards Europe as well as cracking down on the eastern Huns in collaboration with the Tuoba. The Ruruans, as we detailed in the Hun section, were more Hunnic than those they chased away towards Europe. The two groups, Ruruans and Turks, were hostile towards each other. Numerous records point to the Turks' chasing the Ruruan khan to the Western Wei Dynasty (AD 535-557)  as well as chased other Ruruan royal family members to the Hephthalite Empire of the White Huns (Ye-tai). Ruruans had inter-marriage with both Western Wei and the Ye-tai.  In AD 553-68, the Turks and Sassanians in today's Iran allied in destroying the Hephthalite Empire of White Huns [Ye-tai]. 

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