Battle of Talas

By the 740s the Tang Protectorate of Anxi held the oasis states of the Tarim Basin, and in 747 its general Gao Xianzhi, a Tang officer of Goguryeo descent, crossed the Pamirs and took Little Balur, an ally of Tibet. In 750 he feigned peace with the king of Shash (Tashkent), then fell on the city, captured the king, killed the old and weak and carried off great booty; the king was taken to Chang’an and, according to the New Book of Tang, beheaded there. The king’s son fled to the neighbouring peoples, who, the Chinese histories say, resolved to bring in the Arabs against the Four Garrisons of Anxi. In the caliphate the Abbasids had just overthrown the Umayyads, and Abu Muslim, the new governor of Khurasan, sent reinforcements to his commander in Samarkand, Ziyad ibn Salih.

By the account of the Zizhi tongjian, Gao struck first with 30,000 Chinese and foreign troops (20,000 according to the biography of Li Siye in the Old Book of Tang), advanced more than 700 li and met the Arabs at the city of Talas. For five days neither side gave way; then the Karluks in Gao’s army went over to the enemy and attacked the Tang from one side while the Arabs attacked from the other, and of his army only a few thousand men survived. At night Li Siye persuaded Gao to escape; in a narrow pass the allied troops of Ferghana, who had fled ahead, blocked the road with their men and pack animals until Li Siye cleared it by clubbing down men and horses, and Duan Xiushi shamed him into staying behind to gather the stragglers. Arab historians of later centuries speak of tens of thousands of Chinese killed and captured, and al-Dhahabi held that the Karluks had been allied with the Abbasids from the start. The Chinese histories place the battle only in the summer of 751 — the Zizhi tongjian tells of it between entries for late May and late August; the month of July comes from Christopher Beckwith and other modern historians.

Among the captives was Du Huan, who travelled through the caliphate, returned by sea to Guangzhou in 762 and wrote an account of the western lands, passages of which his kinsman, the historian Du You, quoted in the Tongdian; in Kufa he saw Chinese craftsmen — silk weavers and painters, whom he names — at work. The story that prisoners taken at Talas brought papermaking to Samarkand goes back to al-Thaʿalibi, an 11th-century writer; no contemporary Arabic or Chinese source mentions it, and historians such as Jonathan Bloom regard it as a legend, since paper was used in Samarkand decades before the battle and had been known in Central Asia for centuries. Nor did Chinese influence end at once: Arab embassies came to the Tang court in 752–753, and in 753 Tang troops recovered Balur. But the An Lushan rebellion of 755 soon forced the Tang to pull its troops back from the west, and Vasily Bartold saw in Talas the battle that decided whether Chinese or Muslim civilisation would prevail in Turkestan.