Asia's last great nomadic empire was destroyed by imperial order
For over a century the Dzungars, a confederation of Oirat Mongol tribes, were the last nomadic power able to threaten China. After their leader Amursana rebelled in 1755, the Qianlong Emperor ordered the eradication of the whole people and even their name. Estimates suggest 70 to 80 percent died through war and disease.
The Dzungar Khanate emerged in the early 17th century, a Tibetan Buddhist realm stretching from the western end of the Great Wall to what is now eastern Kazakhstan and south Siberia, mostly inside present-day Xinjiang. It was more than a horse-riding confederacy. The Dzungars manufactured their own gunpowder weapons, bringing Central Eurasia its version of the military revolution, ran a mixed farming and herding economy with mines and workshops, and promoted the Oirat language through empire-wide laws.
Conflict with the Manchu-led Qing dynasty dragged on inconclusively from the 1680s. In 1755 Qing armies, aided by Amursana himself, conquered the khanate, and Qianlong planned to divide it into four tribes under separate khans. Amursana wanted to rule a united Dzungar nation and revolted. The enraged emperor responded with orders to destroy the Dzungars as a people, repeatedly using the word jiao, extermination; commanders judged insufficiently zealous were punished, and survivors lost their names and titles.
The Qing scholar Wei Yuan put the pre-conquest population at about 600,000 in 200,000 households. By his account roughly 40 percent of households died of smallpox, 20 percent fled to Russia or the Kazakhs, and 30 percent were killed by Manchu bannermen. Uyghur oasis rebels who resented Dzungar taxation sided with the Qing, and their leader Emin Khoja received Qing noble rank. Dzungaria took generations to recover its population.
Afterwards the Qing resettled the emptied land with Han, Hui, Uyghur and Sibe farmers alongside Manchu Bannermen. The emperor justified the campaign by casting the Dzungars as barbarians who had rejected civilisation. The Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity classifies it as genocide under the UN convention, and the historian Mark Levene has called it arguably the defining genocide of the eighteenth century.
Source: Dzungar genocide
