Dzungar Khanate

The last great steppe empire, and the only one destroyed by deliberate extermination. The Dzungars were an Oirat Mongol confederation who built a state in the basin between the Altai and the Tianshan, and unlike earlier nomad powers they added agriculture, mining and cannon - they cast their own artillery with the help of a captured Swedish prisoner-of-war, and settled Muslim farmers from the Tarim oases to feed the army. Under Galdan Boshugtu Khan, a prince who had been trained as a Buddhist monk in Tibet before returning to claim the succession, they took the Tarim basin, intervened in Tibetan affairs and pushed east into Khalkha Mongolia. That brought them against the Qing, and the Kangxi emperor came out from Beijing in person and beat Galdan at Jao Modo in 1696 with artillery brought across the desert. The war ran for another sixty years under both dynasties. The Dzungars were the last power capable of contesting inner Asia with China. Their existence is the reason the Qing and the Russians negotiated a fixed northern border at Nerchinsk and Kyakhta rather than leaving the steppe open. It is also why Tibet acquired a Qing garrison: a Dzungar army seized Lhasa in 1717 and held it for three years, and the Qing expedition that expelled them stayed. When a succession dispute broke the khanate in the 1750s the Qianlong emperor invaded and ordered the population destroyed. Between war, massacre and the smallpox that followed, most of the Dzungars - estimates run to several hundred thousand - were killed within a few years, and the land was resettled with Han, Hui, Uyghur and Manchu colonists. The territory became Xinjiang, meaning the new frontier, and the emptiness left behind is the reason its demography looks as it does.

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