Dzungar genocide

In the late 1750s the armies of the Qing dynasty conquered the Dzungars, a confederation of Oirat Mongol tribes in Central Asia, and destroyed them as a people. Acting on orders from the Qianlong Emperor after a Dzungar rebellion in 1755, Qing troops and their allies killed, enslaved or scattered most of the population, while smallpox killed many more. Historians commonly refer to these events as the Dzungar genocide, and modern estimates of the dead run to hundreds of thousands. The emptied land was resettled and became the northern part of Xinjiang.

The Dzungar Khanate, founded by Tibetan Buddhist Oirat tribes in the early seventeenth century, has been called the last great nomadic empire of Asia. At its height it stretched from the western end of the Great Wall to what is now eastern Kazakhstan, and from northern Kyrgyzstan to southern Siberia. The Dzungars made their own gunpowder weapons, combined herding with farming, mining and manufacturing, and from the 1680s fought a long series of indecisive wars with the Qing. They also ruled the Turkic Muslim oases of the Tarim Basin, whose inhabitants, ancestors of today's Uyghurs, came to resent their heavy taxes.

The Qianlong Emperor's armies defeated the Dzungars in 1755 with the support of the Dzungar noble Amursana. Qianlong planned to divide the khanate among four khans, one of them Amursana, but Amursana wanted to rule a united Dzungar nation and rose in revolt. A Khalkha Mongol prince, Chingünjav, joined the conspiracy and rebelled in Outer Mongolia in 1756; he was defeated the next year and executed with his family.

Angered by the revolt, the emperor ordered that the Dzungars be wiped out. In orders translated by the historian Peter Perdue, he told his commanders to show no mercy and to spare only the old and weak. Women and children were to be handed to Manchu and Mongol bannermen as slaves. Commanders who let Dzungars escape or showed too little zeal were punished, and others were rewarded. Khalkha Mongols were told to kill the young and strong men. Allied forces took part: Kazakh raiders enslaved many Oirats, and Turkic Muslims of the Turfan and Hami oases, who had sought Qing help against Dzungar rule, supplied the Qing armies and received captives as slaves.

How many died is uncertain. The Qing-era scholar Wei Yuan put the Dzungar population before the conquest at about 600,000 people in 200,000 households, and wrote that some 40 per cent of households died of smallpox, 20 per cent fled to Russia or to the Kazakhs, and 30 per cent were killed by Manchu troops. Modern estimates cited in the scholarship put the dead at 70 to 80 per cent of the population, between roughly 420,000 and 480,000 people by one reckoning, with other estimates as high as 600,000 or 800,000. The historian Michael Clarke described the campaign of 1757–1758 as the complete destruction of the Dzungars both as a state and as a people. The Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity classifies Qianlong's actions as genocide under the United Nations definition, and the genocide historian Mark Levene has called them arguably the eighteenth century's foremost example of genocide.

Qianlong presented the campaign in Confucian terms, describing the Dzungars as barbarians who had turned their backs on civilisation and whose removal would bring stability. He declared the conquered land part of China and rejected the view that only Han territory and Han people could belong to it, citing the Han and Tang dynasties' ventures into Central Asia as precedent.

With northern Xinjiang depopulated, the Qing brought in Han Chinese, Hui, Uyghur, Xibe and Manchu settlers and founded cities such as Ürümqi. Some 155,000 Han Chinese were placed on state farms there between 1760 and 1830. The Qing called the conquered lands Xinjiang, a name that was formally adopted only in 1884. Small communities descended from the Dzungar Oirats survive today.

Our 1700 and 1715 maps show the Dzungar Khanate between the Qing and the Kazakh Khanate, and the 1783 map shows the region absorbed into the Qing empire, within modern China.