Dzungars were the last great Oirat steppe empire
The Dzungar Khanate, last nomadic empire of Oirat Mongols, once reached from southern Siberia to Tibet and from western Mongolia to the Great Wall's approaches. Around 1620 Oirats united in the Junggar Basin; in 1678 the Dalai Lama titled Galdan Boshogtu Khan.
The name joins Mongolian words for left, or east, and hand, or wing; the Dzungars were Western Mongols facing the Northern Yuan in the east. French missionaries garbled Oirat into Eleuth, so European maps showed a Kingdom of the Eleuths. The Secret History of the Mongols calls the Oirats a forest people of the northwest, distinct from the Mongols proper. Their chief Qutuqa Beki bowed to Genghis in 1208, and his descendants wed into every one of the four Chinggisid branches, yet the Four Oirat backed Ariq Böke in the Toluid civil war and never accepted Kublai's line.
After dominating Northern Yuan khans until Esen Taishi died in 1455, the Oirats were pushed west by the Khalkha and fought Kazakhs and Kyrgyz for decades, raiding deep into Sighnaq in 1604. The Torghuts drifted all the way to the Volga, destroyed the Nogai Horde and founded the Kalmyk Khanate. In 1636 the Khoshut chief Güshi Khan led 10,000 Oirats into Qinghai to protect the Gelug sect, routed a force three times larger and took Tibet, becoming the first non-Chinggisid Mongol to call himself khan.
Güshi sent Erdeni Batur, married to his daughter, back to found the Dzungar state on the upper Emil River. Batur captured the Kazakh sultan Jangir in 1635, made Ghulja his capital with monasteries, and let Russians trade and mine salt. By his death in 1653 the western border ran from the Talas to the Ayagöz river.
The rulers styled themselves Khong Tayiji, crown prince. Between 1680 and 1688 they seized the Tarim Basin and beat the Khalkha, but the Qing defeated Galdan in 1696. The Dzungars took Tibet in 1717 and lost it in 1720. Exploiting a civil war, the Qing conquered Dzungaria from 1755 to 1758 and destroyed its people, then absorbed Mongolia and Tibet and created Xinjiang.
Source: Dzungar Khanate
