The Eastern Migration of Sauromatians

From the time of the "Chaos of the Eight Princes" (291 IV. Modern Western Literatures) in the Western Jin Dynasty, China suffered from civil strife and foreign aggression. After nearly three hundred years the people lived in extreme poverty until Emperor Wen of the Sui Dynasty unified China in 589 CE. The continual strife had created a melting pot and laid the foundation for the subsequent Sui and Tang Dynasties.

Among the many ranks of barbarians that migrated into China, one nomadic tribe - the Sau-ro - has been ignored by classical historians. The correct pronunciation of "敕勒" is "Sau-ro," which is a shortened form of the translated word Sauromatae. Sauromatae is the name of their western homeland, probably modern-day Ukraine. During the mid-4th century, the Sau-ro nomads fled because of a great famine that had overtaken their homeland. They nomadized this great distance to Siberia and Mongolia searching for water and fodder for their flocks. Over time their migration continued, this time toward the south in quest of a more hospitable climate. As to be expected, local nomads with superior mobility and combat effectiveness attacked them along the way. The Sau-ro thus suffered defeat in 399 CE and again in 429 CE. Following these vanquishments the Northern Wei took approximately half-a-million Sau-ros, who had settled in central Mongolia and Trans-Baikal, prisoner. They were then again re-settled on the steppes of Inner Mongolia.

Around 430 CE, approximately another half-a-million Sau-ro, who had now occupid southern and western Siberia, were placed into servitude by the Rou-ran. In 487 CE, the Sau-ro migrated to northern Xinjiang where they established an empire that the Chinese designated Ko-ch. Bad luck was again to strike the Ko-ch people of the Sau-ro Empire for in 551 CE the Tu-jue ambushed and conquered them in Xinjiang Province. The Sau-ro Empire was now decimated. In 630 CE the remaining Ko-ch were re-settled in the Ordos. This filled a void as the Tang Dynasty had annihilated the former inhabitants, the Eastern Tu-jue. Because of heavy taxation and hard labor, the Ko-ch rebelled twice, once in 721 CE and again in 722 CE. Following the suppression of the 722 CE insurrections, the remaining slightly more than 50,000 Sau-ros were then re-settled as farmers in southern Henan Province.

Previously, in 429 CE many Sau-ro had been relocated to the "Six Garrisons" in Inner Mongolia. By 525 CE bureaucratic corruptions had become so oppressive that riots broke out and many Sau-ro were included among the rioters. Because of their loyalty, bravery, wild disposition, and skilled martial arts, a number of Sau-ro emerged, as founding fathers while other became high-ranking officers of the Eastern Wei and Western Wei Dynasties. When they entered China the necessity to comply with the compulsory Chinese Han culture forced the Sau-ro to conceal their identities. They integrated into the Chinese Han culture, took Chinese surnames, and intermarried with the Chinese.

Today, fourteen hundred years later, after erroneous and incomplete historical records since the Sui Dynasty (581-618 CE), the descendants of the Sau-ro know little of their ancestry. They do not know the correct pronunciation of their tribal name, or even less of the contributions their progenitors had infused into Chinese culture. The historical documents of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE), which may have been manipulated by political forces, considered the Sau-ro to be the Ding-ling or Tie-le people. Historical researchers, studying the documents compiled between 429 CE and 551 CE, have been unable determine the real identies of the many tribal groups. As this confusion occurred more than a millennia ago, we must now augment the ancient texts with data from archaeological excavations and western research in hopes of finding the missing links in the Chinese historical records.