Tatars are a mysterious and ancient people that has appeared in both Chinese and Western history. However, the Tatars in the History Books of Westerners are not exactly the same as the Tatars in Chinese history. The word "Tatar" appeared very early in China, and it first appeared in a Turkic inscription. After the Tang Dynasty, chinese historical texts have different transliterations of the word Tatar, such as: Dada, Daqi, Dada, etc., all of which speak of Tatar.
However, there is no unified statement among scholars of the tatar history.
Usually, historians believe that the Tatars were a branch of the Murwei, and the Murwei were the Mongols who would later become famous. During the Song Dynasty, some people thought that tatars were a branch of the Tatars, but there was some difference between the Tatars and the Murwei, which belonged to the Tunguska people and were the ancestors of the Manchus.
According to Sima Guang's Zizhi Tongjian, tatars originally belonged to the barbarians of northeastern China and were part of the Tatars. After the Zhenyuan, Yuan, and Yuan dynasties, the Xi and Khitan gradually flourished, causing the Tatars to plunder everywhere. Their people were scattered and not concentrated, some of them defected to the Khitans, some were attached to the Bohai state, and later, they gradually migrated to the Yinshan region.
Murong Wei originated from Xianbei, and Xianbei is derived from Donghu, and Donghu and Jingyi are both ethnic groups active in the northeast region of China. Therefore, there is no doubt that Tatars first came from the northeast. By the end of the Tang Dynasty, the Uighurs, who were active in the Mongolian plateau, gradually declined, so they began to migrate westward, while the Tatars, who wandered in the northeast, took advantage of the situation to enter the Mongolian plateau.
By the Time of the Fifth Dynasty, the famous general Li Keyong had tens of thousands of Tatar soldiers under his command. Li Keyong led these barbarians throughout the Central Plains, during which they experienced many major historical events, including quelling the Huangchao army uprising. Later, after several generations of life and reproduction, the Tatars gradually became the masters of the Mongolian plateau.
At this time, the Han people in the Central Plains also began to refer to all ethnic minorities living in Mongolia as "Tatars".
In 916, the Khitans established a powerful "Liao" regime in northern China.
At that time, the Liao Emperor Yelü Abaoji was a man of great talent, who personally led the fierce Liao army to conquer the northern desert region, subdued the Tatar tribes living there one by one, and learned the deeds of the famous Han Dynasty general Dou Xian, where he "recorded the merits of Le Shi". Later, with the continuous expansion of the Liao state, the whole of northern China was included in the territory of the Liao state, and the Tatars naturally became the subjects of the Liao state.
Later, in order to further control the northern desert area, the Liao authorities also established the Desert Province, which was specifically used to deal with various affairs in this area. In addition, the Liao state also sent a large number of cavalry troops to garrison the local tatars to deter the local Tatars. However, the Liao regime was ultimately unable to unify southern China and realize its dream of becoming the Central Plains, and after many years, it was gradually replaced by the rising Jin State.
In the end, under the joint efforts of the Jin and Song dynasties, the Liao state was scattered like a cloud of smoke in the dust of history, so that the remnants of the Liao state moved to a more western position and re-established a regime called "Western Liao", and along with it, there was a part of the Tatar tribe. With the change of world events, the Mongolian plateau has become the world of the Jin people.
However, at this time, the main direction of the Jurchens' attack was the Song Dynasty in the south, and the mobei region was immaculate and had no intention of effectively managing it. As a result, the various ethnic minorities here have the opportunity to flourish.
It was at this time that the Mongol tribes gradually rose. In the later period, after years of contention, the Mongolian plateau formed two more powerful tribes, namely: the Mongols and the Tatars. Tatar, on the other hand, is another name for Tatar. Later, Tatar was subjugated by the Mongol tribes led by Genghis Khan, making the Mongolian steppe a Mongol sphere of influence.
After the unification, Mongolia broke out of its extremely strong combat effectiveness, went south to destroy the Jin Dynasty and the Song Dynasty, and finally established the Yuan Dynasty. A hundred years later, the Yuan Dynasty was weakened, and Zhu Yuanzhang's famous generals Xu Da and Lan Yu rode the Ming Iron Horse and sent the Mongols back to their original homeland, the Mongolian Plateau. Later, the remnants of the Mongols established the "Northern Yuan" regime in the northern part of the desert, which the Ming Dynasty also called "Tatar".
At this time, although the Tatars had long lost the prestige of their ancestor Genghis Khan, they also roamed back and forth in the northern desert region, harassing the border areas of the Ming Dynasty from time to time. In the battle against the Tatars, the Ming Dynasty repeatedly annihilated its living forces, but in the end, it could not completely eliminate this impermanent tribe. As a result, they survived until the end of the Ming Dynasty, before they were defeated by emperor Taiji of the Qing Dynasty.
From that time on, the Emperor of the Qing Dynasty also served as the Great Khan of the Mongols.
Next, let's talk about the situation in Europe.
In the history of Europeans, the Tatars mainly refer to turkic peoples with partial Mongol ancestry, most of whom believe in Islam. At first, Genghis Khan's descendants went on a western expedition to establish the Chincha Khanate in the Russian region, which ruled the Russian region for more than two hundred years, and finally, in the late fifteenth century, it was destroyed by rising Russia.
Since then, most of the Tatars have merged with the Russian natives, and some Tatars have established the Kazan Khanate somewhere in the Volga, but this part of the Tatars is not particularly related to the Mongols. By the mid-16th century, Russia had sent troops to the Kazan Khanate in the name of religion. Under the strong blows of the Russian army, the Kazan Khanate collapsed, most of the men in the khanate were killed, and women and children became slaves of the Russians.
Eventually, after the fall of the Kazan Khanate, the Tatars no longer had a unified regime, and they were reduced to a wandering nation again. By the 19th century, a part of the Tatars had entered the Xinjiang region of China, and they still exist today, known as the "Tatars". In China, the Tatars are mainly scattered in the northern Tianshan Mountains of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, with a large number of people in Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, Changji Hui Autonomous Prefecture, Urumqi City and other areas, and are more concentrated in Urumqi, Yining, Tacheng, Qitai, Jimsar, Altay, Changji and other places.
According to the sixth census in 2010, the Tatars have a total of 3,556 people in China, making them the least populous ethnic group in China.
Resources:
["Mongolian Nomads", "Miscellaneous Records of The Dynasty and the Wild Since Jianyan", "Biography of Ming Shi Tatars", "Research on the History of Southern Mongolia in the Ming Dynasty"]