Dingling Erotic

The Dingling were a historical people of southern Siberia, recorded by Chinese chroniclers from the 2nd century BCE to the 5th century CE, who lived north of the Xiongnu around Lake Baikal and the upper Yenisei and were eventually absorbed into the Gaoche and Tiele confederations, the ancestors of the Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking peoples. What made them a group, at least to the officials who wrote them down, was where they stood: at the far northern edge of the known world, where grassland gave way to taiga, a people the Xiongnu had to go and subdue rather than a people who came to them. Modu Chanyu conquered them early in the 2nd century BCE, and for the next three centuries the Dingling show up mainly as the northern flank of every Xiongnu crisis. When a hard winter and a Wusun invasion crippled the nomad empire in 71 BCE, the Dingling struck from the north. When the Northern Xiongnu were breaking apart in 85 CE, the Dingling joined the Xianbei and the Southern Xiongnu in finishing them off.

Their country was forest-steppe rather than open plain: the Minusinsk basin, the Sayan foothills, the lake country around Baikal. Chinese sources also place a western branch far off near the Irtysh, north of Kangju, and note the fine furs that came out of Dingling country, which points to a people who hunted the taiga as much as they herded the steppe. Their language went unrecorded. The prevailing view, built on what their descendants spoke, is that it was Turkic or something ancestral to it, though proposals for Yeniseian or Samoyedic connections exist, and the plain answer is that nobody knows. Their religion is equally undocumented. One old Chinese text gives them a scrap of folklore instead: hair below the knee, hooves like a horse, and the speed to match, a story that says more about how remote they seemed than about anyone who actually lived there.

The last chapter played out inside China. Dingling groups drifted south through the 3rd and 4th centuries, and during the chaos of the Sixteen Kingdoms the Zhai clan carved out a short-lived state, Zhai Wei, in Henan from 388 to 392 before the Later Yan crushed it. By then the name was already giving way to Gaoche, high carts, after the tall-wheeled wagons of the northern tribes, and then to Tiele. The Dingling survive today as a lineage claim: Chinese historiography treats them as ancestors of the Uyghurs, and Turkic historiography more broadly counts them among the earliest names in its story.