Historically, many peoples have played the role of "human conquerors", and persians, Romans, Arabs, and Turks have all established vast empires. But there is a nation that has stepped on the heads of these "conquerors" and become the "nightmare of the conquerors", and its terrible combat power is even regarded as a "natural disaster" by mankind.
They were the most powerful fighting people of the Cold Weapon Age, the Mongols. The Mongol Empire, founded by Genghis Khan and his four sons, rose from East Asia in the 13th century and slain all the way from the Mongolian plateau to Europe and North Africa, conquering almost all the regimes of the civilized world.
On the eve of the advent of modern times, the Mongols finally established the last empire in northwest China, the "Dzungar Khanate", which was one of the most powerful military empires in Asia in the 17th century and the last "nomadic empire" in human history.
The Dzungar Khanate was the last generation of the Central Plains Dynasty," and the three emperors of the Qing Dynasty, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, fought in succession to completely eliminate it. After the demise of the "Dzungar Khanate", the Mongols completely withdrew from the Asian stage and achieved nothing in later history.
How did the Dzungar Khanate, the last rise of the Mongols, come about? How powerful was it at its peak? Why can you break the wrist with the three generations of Emperor Kang Yongqian?
I. The Northwest Enemy of the Central Plains: From "Walla" to "Weyrat"
The name "Dzungar" is both familiar and unfamiliar to the vast number of Chinese.
People familiar with geography may know that there is a small "Dzungar Basin" in the north of Xinjiang, which is located between the Tianshan Mountains and the Altai Mountains in Xinjiang, and its name comes from the Mongolian Dzungar Department. And due to the popularity of the TV series "Kangxi Emperor", some Chinese people also know that there was a "Kaldan" in the early years of the Qing Dynasty, who was the leader of the Dzungar Department, a generation of tyrants, and finally was defeated by the kangxi emperor who was brilliant and rough, and died with hatred.
In the TV series, Gardan was very incompetent, and actually dared to challenge the Kangxi Emperor, and was defeated by the Eight Banners. However, in real history, the Dzungar Khanate established by Kaldan was a major enemy in the early Qing Dynasty, and its peak spanned Xinjiang, Qinghai, Tibet, Mongolia, and Siberia, and was the largest steppe empire in Central and East Asia. The Qing army in "The Kangxi Emperor" only defeated the founding khan of Dzungar, Kaldan, and later the Dzungar Khanate continued to fight the Qing for 70 years, and finally the Qianlong Emperor took advantage of its civil unrest to pacify it.
The predecessor of the Dzungar Khanate was the Dzungar Department, which belonged to the Mongolian "Weyrat League", which was the famous "Wallachian" during the Ming Dynasty.
Since the Tang Dynasty, Wala has been entrenched in the northern part of Xinjiang to Siberia in China, known as "Varlaga", and has fought many wars with the Tang Dynasty. After the Yuan Dynasty, this tribe marched eastward into the Mongolian plateau, approaching the area around the Great Wall, and in the early Ming Dynasty, it fought with the old Zhu family back and forth, and its taishi "also first" also captured Ming Yingzong as a prisoner at "Tumu Fort".
In the Qing Dynasty, the Wala retreated to the Northwest Xinjiang region, when the Qing Dynasty people were relatively close to the "Khalkha Mongols" on the Mongolian plateau, and the distance from the Wala was relatively far, and there was not much contact. Qing dynasty literature refers to "Wallachia" as "Weyrat", and its banner has four parts: Turbat, Durbert, Dzungar, and Heshuot.
Dzungar was only a part of the Weyrat Mongols, and had long been ruled by the Great Khan of the Verat League, with the leader of the alliance being the "Great Khan" and the tribal chief being only "Taiji".
In the early years of the Qing Dynasty, the Weilat Mongols took the initiative to get close to the Central Plains, repeatedly sent emissaries to communicate with the Qing court, and from the Shunzhi period to the Kangxi dynasty, the Dzungars were always very obedient, paying tribute and trading, and the Qing Dynasty was also very satisfied. But there was a new player in Central Asia at the time, Tsarist Russia, which added a great deal of instability to East Asian politics. With the "help" of Tsarist Russia, a strongman from the Dzungar Ministry came to power as "Taiji", and his name was Kaldan.
2. Kaldan: Those who read the Buddha, fight more fiercely
From the 16th century onwards, the Russians began to open up land to the east, crossing the Urals into Siberia.
During the Shunzhi period, the Russian expedition had reached the Heilongjiang region of China and occupied the city of Yaksa. At the same time, the Russian army in Central Asia also began to invade the south, fighting back and forth with the Mongols on the steppes. In Central Asia, the "Veyrat Mongols" were a formidable enemy of Tsarist Russia.
In the 10th year of the Kangxi Dynasty, the Dzungars of Weilat were fighting with Tsarist Russia, and as a result, the "Taiji" Sangha was attacked and assassinated by the rebels colluding with Tsarist Russia. Sangha had a younger brother named Kaldan, who was already a monk in Tibet at the time. Sangha's wife traveled thousands of miles to Tibet to find Kaldan, who had to come from the plateau to take over the position of Dzungar leader.
Although Kaldan was a monk, he was a natural general. The Dzungar nobles thought that Kaldan could only recite the Buddha, and as a result, as soon as he got on his horse, he would fight a war, not only successfully quelling the rebellion, but also withstood the attack of Tsarist Russia.
By the 17th century, the strength of the Dzungars was already the first of the Veyrat League, but the position of the alliance leader was occupied by the Heshuo Khanate, which ruled the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. As a nomadic alliance, the Weyrat Mongols were very loose, with Turgut running all the way to russia's Volga River to graze, Heshuote going south to the Tibetan Plateau and occupying Tibet, while Dzungar held out in the northern Part of the Tianshan Mountains in Xinjiang and the Muslim-founded Yarkand Khanate in the south.
Kaldan gained self-confidence in the war, and although he had been practicing Buddhism, he was still a Mongol at his roots and had ambitions to unify the steppes. At that time, Tsarist Russia above the Dzungars was expanding to the east, and the Qing Dynasty had just put down the San Francisco Rebellion, and the country was also thriving. Kaldan knew that no one could afford to provoke him, so he sent emissaries to Moscow and Beijing, hoping to be recognized by the two countries and to be kind to each other.
After stabilizing the external environment, the Dzungar Khanate began to pack up its Mongol relatives. It took Kaldan less than 10 years to defeat the remnants of the Weyrat Mongols, destroy the Yarkand Khanate, and establish the Dzungar Khanate.
The territory of the Dzungar Khanate was almost the entire territory of today's Xinjiang, and although it looked very large, the core area was still in the Dzungar Basin. Southern Xinjiang is almost entirely desert, and only the northern part of the Tianshan Mountains is suitable for grazing. The Junggar Basin covers an area of only 130,000 square kilometers, less than one-tenth of Xinjiang's, and only half of the area suitable for grazing. Therefore, during the Kaldan period, the Dzungar Khanate had only 700,000 people in full count, and the number of troops was maintained at around 40,000, and at most it was close to 50,000, which was already the limit of a nomadic tribe.
As for the two rivals of the Dzungars, Tsarist Russia and the Qing Dynasty, with populations of 22 million and 150 million respectively, they are among the largest empires in the world, and the economic level is far superior to that of the nomadic regimes such as the Dzungars.
Supposedly, the Dzungar Khanate should live in peace of mind, but as a descendant of the fighting people, Kaldan did not believe in evil, he believed that the Mongols could conquer all enemies with force and wisdom. The change of dynasties in China's Ming and Qing dynasties was a huge shock to the surrounding peoples, and it was tantamount to declaring that small nations could also conquer large empires by force, but they needed strong force and an accurate timing.
Before the Qing Dynasty entered the customs, the Manchu population totaled 200,000, and the Eight Banners were only more than 60,000, but they destroyed daming with a population of hundreds of millions and millions of soldiers. Compared with this, the 700,000 people of the Dzungars are indeed not small.
3. Dzungar firearms - teachers of the Qing Army
After the unification of Xinjiang, the Dzungar Khanate began to expand outwards, not only establishing its rule around Qinghai and Gansu, but also crossing the border to the east to attack the Khalkha Mongols. The route taken by Kaldan was the route of the rise of the Mongol Empire, first controlling the Mongolian plateau, then encroaching on the Hetao, and moving east into the Central Plains, if the Qing Dynasty was as indisputable as the Song Dynasty, then the great cause could be accomplished.
In the early days, Kaldan had been eye-catching with Tsarist Russia, and the two sides sent emissaries to each other, and the fight was fierce. Kaldan turned a blind eye to the Tsarist invasion of the south, and even helped the Russians fight the Khalkha Mongols in exchange for Russian muskets and artillery.
In the 27th year of the Kangxi Dynasty, the Dzungar army was invincible all the way, and with the Russian army to kill the "Tushetu Khanate" in eastern Mongolia, only a few hundred kilometers from Beijing.
The enemy was killed under the nose, and the Kangxi Emperor was furious and resolutely decided to march in person. In the 29th year of the Kangxi Dynasty, the Qing army dispatched 100,000 people to engage 30,000 troops of the Dzungars on the Mongolian plateau.
After the battle with the Dzungar Khanate, the Qing army found that the opponent was not ordinary Mongol cavalry, but lancers equipped with artillery and advanced muskets, far better than the Ming army and San Francisco. In the end, relying on the martial courage of the Eight Banners and the home field advantage, Kangxi defeated Kaldan, and the first invasion of Dzungar failed.
After this war, Gardan did not die, but recuperated and waited for the opportunity. In the 35th year of the Kangxi Dynasty, the Kangxi Emperor again personally conquered Kaldan, and at this time, a rebellion broke out in the Dzungar Khanate, and the Kaldan people rebelled and left, and finally fell ill and died in despair (some say suicide).
Although the Battle of the Kangxi Emperor was won, the combat effectiveness of the Dzungar Khanate army really surprised the Qing army. After the war, the Qing generals gave a high evaluation of the "Dzungar Musket", allowing the army to imitate the weapons of the Dzungar Khanate, and throughout the Qing Dynasty, the Dzungar firearms affected the army of the Qing Dynasty.
Historians refer to the Dzungar Khanate as a "military empire" is not a casual remark, although the Dzungar army is small, but the armed forces equipped with firearms account for more than half of the total number, and the quality of its firearms is far more advanced than that of the Qing army.
Kaldan's army already had Russian smoothbore guns, Zambara muskets, and new artillery. It was the 17th century, and although these things were not as good as European goods, they were much better than the shotguns of the Qing Dynasty.
There were almost no Mongol craftsmen in the arsenals of the Dzungar Khanate, but Turks, most of whom had been captured from West Asia through war, as well as craftsmen who had smuggled in Central Asia for their rewards.
European firearms technology led East Asia after the Ming Dynasty, while the Ottoman Empire in West Asia communicated more with Europe and absorbed European gun-making technology. The musket technology of Western Europe was passed all the way along the order of "Ottoman-Persian-Kazakh-Dzungar", and the "Zambala musket" in Central Asia was represented.
The Dzungar Khanate established military factories with Ottoman technology, and guns and artillery were already more advanced than the "Portuguese firearms" used by the Qing Dynasty, and they were not inferior to Tsarist Russia.
4. The Last Prairie Eagle
After Kaldan's death, the Dzungar Khanate, far from declining, became stronger.
Kaldan was replaced by his nephew, the son of the former Taiji Sangha, Tsewang Alabutan. Relying on the prestige left by his father, the Great Khan confronted Kaldan and finally stabbed Kaldan in the back and became the Great Khan himself.
During the reign of Tsewang Alabutan, the pinnacle of the Dzungar Empire, he became the Great Khan in 1698 and soon went south to destroy the Heshuo Mongols, which occupied the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, covering half of China.
The reason why Tsewang Alabutan went so well was because he had an army armed with European muskets and an artillery corps trained by Europeans with European artillery.
The Dzungar Khanate built all this by a European prisoner-of-war unit serving in the Mongol army. For example, Swedish artillery lieutenant Reinate, the unfortunate Swedish artillery lieutenant, was first captured by the Russian army in the war between Tsarist Russia and Sweden, and then transferred to Central Asia; as a result, he was captured by the Dzungars in the war between Tsarist Russia and Dzungars, and became prisoners of war in the Dzungar Khanate.
As a European, Reinat was familiar with the most advanced artillery manufacturing technology in Europe at that time, as well as the training methods of artillery, which made Tsewang Alabutan attach great importance to it.
The Great Khan made a "gentleman's pact" with Rayna, and Raynat served him for 10 years, after which Reinat would be freed, and the Great Khan would send him out of the country and return him to gold.
In addition to Reinat, a large number of Russian prisoners of war were the main force in the armaments factories, digging iron sand, making muskets, and dispensing gunpowder, all of which were used to arm the Dzungar army. The Dzungar Khan was very good to the prisoners of war, eating and giving back money, and even had a certain position in the army, and these prisoners of war followed the Khan with all their hearts.
With such an army in his hands, Tsewang Alabutan first expelled the Russian army on the Yenisei River to the north, and then fought with the Qing in Tibet. He also supported Lobzang Tenjin in Qinghai and launched a rebellion that swept through Ganqing, which was later pacified by the famous general Nian Qianyao, and those who have seen the Yongzheng Dynasty must be familiar with this history.
After the death of Tsewang Alabutan, he was succeeded by his son Kaldan Tse Zero, the Great Khan who claimed to have an army of 80,000 and vowed to fight the Qing Dynasty to the death. At this time, during the Yongzheng Emperor's period, the Qing and Dzungar fought again, and Gar Dance used a pocket trick to lure the Qing army to go deep alone, and annihilated more than 10,000 Qing troops in the Battle of Hetongpo, so that the eight banners of the capital were "family and family wear filial piety". In view of the huge cost of long-term military use, the Qing Dynasty finally negotiated peace with the Dzungars, and the two countries maintained peace for ten years.
Kaldanze was a promising monarch, but after his death, the Dzungar Khanate began the classic section of the Mongol regime - civil unrest, and his son-in-law, sons, nephews, and nephews were in a mess, and the country was scattered. Then smallpox broke out in Dzungar, and the Dzungar Khanate ran away and died a third, and the rest struggled.
In the 19th year of Qianlong, Gardan Ce zero's nephew Amir Sana failed in the struggle and led 20,000 people to the Qing Dynasty. He told the Qianlong Emperor that the Dzungar Khanate had one breath left and that the opportunity for the Qing dynasty to annex the Dzungars was ripe.
In the 20th year of Qianlong, 50,000 Qing troops entered Xinjiang, and almost without much effort, they eliminated the remnants of the Dzungar forces, and the Qing army slaughtered some die-hard elements and included the remaining people in the Eight Banners, and the Dzungar Khanate was destroyed.
Text/Shogakuno
Resources:
1. "Re-exploration of the Relationship between the Qing Dynasty and the Dzungar Khanate", Feng Hui
2. "The Qianlong Emperor Pacified Dzungar", Zhou Xuan
3. "Kaldan's Analysis of Russia's Diplomatic Relations", Wang Li