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Chapter 6
Buddhism in the West Uyghur Kingdom
and Beyond
Jens Wilkens
Preamble 1
During the workshop, on which some of the papers contained in this volume
are based, we dealt with the spread of Buddhism in various empires in Inner
Asian History, among others the so-called steppe empires. Before dealing with
the topic of my paper, I would like to draw the attention to the fact that there
is a certain amount of disagreement in scholarly literature regarding the rela-
tionship of these steppe empires to powerful Chinese dynasties. Barfield desig-
nated the former as “shadow empires” that “arose as secondary phenomena”2
only because of military expansion of the latter to which they attached as it
were “parasitically”.3 Michael R. Drompp, however, has convincingly shown
that this model cannot be applied indiscriminately. He brought forward sev-
eral arguments the most important of which is that the rise to power of the
First Türk Empire (551/552) predates the unification of China under the Sui
Dynasty (589–618, 隋) in 589 by several decades.4 It is also true that the East
Uyghur Empire in Mongolia (745–840), also known as the Uyghur Steppe
Empire or Uyghur Kaganate, arose while China was still strong and united,5 but
achieved its height of political influence when the Tang Dynasty (618–907, 唐)
1 Conventions used in this article when citing Old Uyghur (OU) sources are as follows: square
brackets [ ]: restored text; parentheses ( ): defective spellings. In my translation, the parts
of them that correspond to restored text are put in square brackets [ ] whereas explanatory
additions are given in parentheses ( ). A subscribed 2 denotes a synonym compound. Partly
preserved words, which could not be restored are given in transliteration in small capitals.
2 Barfield, Thomas J., “The Shadow Empires: Imperial State Formation along the Chinese-
Nomad Frontier,” in Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History, ed. Susan E. Alcock
et al. (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 10–41.
3 Barfield, “Shadow Empires,” 34.
4 Drompp, Michael, “Imperial State Formation in Inner Asia: The Early Turkic Empires (6th to
9th Centuries),” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 58.1 (2005): 101–111.
5 Drompp, “Imperial State Formation,” 105.