Qing Conquest of the Dzungar Khanate (1755-1758): War in Xinjiang

The Qing conquest of the Dzungar Khanate was a series of campaigns between 1755 and 1758 in which the armies of the Qianlong Emperor destroyed the last great nomadic empire of the Eurasian steppe. Fought in Dzungaria and the Ili valley of what is now northern Xinjiang, the war ended a rivalry of nearly 70 years. It was followed by the near-total disappearance of the Dzungar people and the creation of a new Qing frontier region, Xinjiang.

Background: a long rivalry

The Dzungars were a confederation of Oirat, or western Mongol, tribes. In the 17th century they built a powerful state that taxed the oasis cities of the Tarim Basin, traded with Russia and competed with the Qing for influence over the eastern Mongols and Tibet.

Their ruler Galdan fought the Kangxi Emperor in the 1690s and was defeated at Jao Modo in 1696. His successors Tsewang Rabtan and Galdan Tseren kept up the struggle, and in 1717 Dzungar troops occupied Lhasa until the Qing expedition to Tibet of 1720 drove them out. A Qing army was badly defeated by the Dzungars in 1731, and a truce in 1739 left the khanate intact.

When Galdan Tseren died in 1745, his sons and nobles fought over the succession. By 1753 Dawachi had taken power with the help of Amursana, a noble of the Khoit tribe. The two soon fell out, and in 1754 Amursana fled with thousands of followers to the Qing, offering to guide an army into Dzungaria.

The 1755 campaign

The Qianlong Emperor saw a chance to end the Dzungar threat. Over the objections of many officials, he sent two armies, one along a northern route and one from the west, totalling around 50,000 men. They included large numbers of Mongol troops, and Amursana served as a deputy commander.

The Dzungar state, divided by civil war, collapsed with little resistance. Qing forces reached Ili in the summer of 1755. At Gadan-Ola a small detachment of cavalry made a night attack on Dawachi’s camp and scattered his much larger force. Dawachi fled south, was seized by a local ruler at Uch Turpan and handed over to the Qing. He was taken to Beijing, pardoned and given a title.

Amursana’s revolt and the second campaign

Qianlong planned to divide Dzungaria into four khanates, each under a separate ruler loyal to Beijing. Amursana wanted to be khan of all the Oirats, and in the autumn of 1755 he rebelled. Most Qing troops had already withdrawn, and the commander left at Ili, Ban Di, was surrounded and took his own life.

Unrest also spread among the Khalkha Mongols, where the prince Chingünjav rose against the Qing in 1756. Qianlong responded with new armies under Zhaohui and other generals, and with orders of exceptional harshness. In 1756–57 Qing forces pursued Amursana and his allies across Dzungaria. Amursana fled to Russian Siberia, where he died of smallpox at Tobolsk in September 1757. The Russians showed his body to Qing envoys but refused to hand it over.

Mass death in Dzungaria

Qianlong ordered that Dzungar men who resisted be killed and that women and children be distributed as slaves to Qing soldiers and allies. At the same time, a smallpox epidemic swept through the region. The combination of massacre, disease and flight emptied the land.

The 19th-century Qing scholar Wei Yuan estimated that there had been about 600,000 Dzungars, and that roughly 40 per cent died of smallpox, 20 per cent fled to Russia or the Kazakh steppe, and 30 per cent were killed by Qing troops. These figures are estimates, but historians agree that the Dzungars were all but destroyed as a people. Peter Perdue and others describe the events as a genocide.

Key people

• Qianlong Emperor (1711–1799): drove the war forward against cautious advisers and later counted it among his “Ten Great Campaigns”.
• Amursana (1723–1757): an Oirat noble who allied with the Qing, then led the main revolt against them.
• Dawachi (died 1759): the last effective Dzungar khan, defeated in 1755 and taken to Beijing.
• Ban Di (died 1755): Qing commander who died when Amursana’s rebellion overran Ili.
• Zhaohui (1708–1764): Manchu general who led the later campaigns in Dzungaria and the Tarim Basin.

Consequences

With the Dzungars gone, Qing armies turned south. In 1758–59 Zhaohui defeated the Khoja brothers, Muslim leaders who had taken power in Kashgar and Yarkand, and brought the Tarim Basin under Qing rule. The combined territory was later called Xinjiang, “the New Frontier”, and in 1762 a military governor, the General of Ili, was installed to rule it.

The Qing then resettled the depopulated north with soldiers, Han Chinese farmers, Muslim cultivators from the south, and other groups, including Kazakhs and Mongols. In 1771 thousands of Torghut Mongols, distant relatives of the Dzungars, migrated from the Volga back to Qing territory and were settled there.

How the Qing won

The Dzungars had defeated Qing armies before, so the collapse of their state in the 1750s needs explanation. Historians such as Peter Perdue point to three main factors.

First, the Dzungars were divided. The succession struggle after 1745 split the nobility, and many leaders, like Amursana, were ready to change sides. Second, the Qing had solved much of the problem of supply. Under Kangxi and Yongzheng, armies crossing the steppe had often run short of food and horses. By the 1750s the court had built up a network of granaries, military farms and supply routes in Gansu and Mongolia, and could buy grain and livestock on a large scale.

Third, the Qing could draw on the manpower and horses of the eastern Mongols, who had long been absorbed into the empire’s banner system. Mongol troops formed a large part of the armies that entered Dzungaria. Disease also weakened the Dzungars, as smallpox spread through their camps during the fighting.

Legacy

The conquest fixed the western border of the Qing, and of modern China, deep in Central Asia. Qianlong celebrated it with stone inscriptions, poems and a set of 16 copperplate engravings, the “Conquests of the Western Regions”, designed by Jesuit court artists including Giuseppe Castiglione and engraved in Paris between 1767 and the mid-1770s.

Historians today stress the war’s terrible human cost and the way it ended the age of independent steppe empires, squeezed between an expanding Qing China and an expanding Russia.

Timeline

• 1696: The Kangxi Emperor defeats Galdan at Jao Modo.
• 1745: Galdan Tseren dies; a succession struggle begins.
• 1754: Amursana defects to the Qing.
• 1755, spring and summer: Qing armies advance and take Ili; Dawachi is defeated at Gadan-Ola.
• 1755, autumn: Amursana rebels; Ban Di dies at Ili.
• 1756–1757: Renewed Qing campaigns, massacres and a smallpox epidemic devastate Dzungaria.
• 1757, September: Amursana dies of smallpox in Tobolsk, Siberia.
• 1758–1759: Qing forces conquer the Tarim Basin.
• 1762: The post of General of Ili is created to govern Xinjiang.

Why it matters

The destruction of the Dzungar Khanate ended centuries of rivalry between Chinese states and steppe nomads and gave the Qing their largest territorial gain. It shaped the borders and population of present-day Xinjiang, and it remains one of the most lethal episodes of the 18th century.