Ban Yong restores Han authority in the Western Regions

In 119 a Chinese outpost was set up at Yiwu (Hami), but within months the Northern Xiongnu destroyed it. Then — in 120, according to the Zizhi tongjian — Empress Dowager Deng summoned Ban Yong to a court debate. Many ministers wanted to close the Yumen Pass and give up the west; Ban Yong opposed that as well as a large punitive expedition, proposing instead a garrison at Dunhuang and a Chief Clerk with 500 men at Loulan. In 123, after the governor of Dunhuang, Zhang Dang, had put forward three plans and the official Chen Zhong had warned that abandoning Shanshan would endanger the Hexi commanderies, Emperor An appointed Ban Yong Chief Clerk (zhangshi) of the Western Regions and sent him with 500 men — freed convicts, according to the chapter on the Western Regions — to garrison Liuzhong (modern Lükchün).

In the first month of 124 Ban Yong reached Loulan, where the king of Shanshan was rewarded for his submission, and King Bai Ying of Kucha came with the rulers of Gumo and Wensu to surrender. With more than 10,000 of their troops he drove the Xiongnu Yili king from the Yihe valley, won back Nearer Jushi (Turpan) and set up military farms at Liuzhong. In the autumn of 125 he crushed Further Jushi and beheaded its king, Jun Jiu, together with a Xiongnu envoy, at the place where Suo Ban, commander of the lost Yiwu garrison, had been killed. In the winter of 126 he defeated the Huyan king of the Xiongnu, after which Xiongnu raiders no longer appeared in Jushi. In 127 he and the governor of Dunhuang, Zhang Lang, marched on Karasahr by two routes; Zhang Lang arrived first and took the surrender, and the Book of the Later Han records that seventeen states, among them Kucha, Kashgar, Khotan and Yarkand, then submitted. Ban Yong, blamed for arriving late, was recalled, imprisoned and dismissed, and later died at home.

Ban Yong’s report on the western lands, presented at the end of Emperor An’s reign, became the main source for the chapter on the Western Regions in the Book of the Later Han, including its account of the rise of the Kushans. After him Han authority slowly declined: from the 130s the oasis states fought one another, and in 152 the Chief Clerk Wang Jing, who had had the king of Khotan killed, was himself killed by the Khotanese.