Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that can help answer the question.
Query: Where did the Xiongnu live?
Sinologist Edwin Pulleyblank argued that the Xiongnu were part of a Xirong group called Yiqu, who had lived in Shaanbei and had been influenced by China for centuries, before they were driven out by the Qin dynasty. Qin's campaign against the Xiongnu expanded Qin's territory at the expense of the Xiongnu. In 215 BC, Qin Shi Huang sent General Meng Tian to conquer the Xiongnu and drive them from the Ordos Loop, which he did later that year. After the catastrophic defeat at the hands of Meng Tian, the Xiongnu leader Touman was forced to flee far into the Mongolian Plateau. The Qin empire became a threat to the Xiongnu, which ultimately led to the reorganization of the many tribes into a confederacy.In 209 BC, three years before the founding of Han China, the Xiongnu were brought together in a powerful confederation under a new chanyu, Modu Chanyu. This new political unity transformed them into a more formidable state by enabling formation of larger armies and the ability to exercise better strategic coordination. The Xiongnu adopted many of the Chinese agriculture techniques such as slave labor for heavy labor, wore silk like the Chinese, and lived in Chinese-style homes. The reason for creating the confederation remains unclear. Suggestions include the need for a stronger state to deal with the Qin unification of China that resulted in a loss of the Ordos region at the hands of Meng Tian or the political crisis that overtook the Xiongnu in 215 BC when Qin armies evicted them from their pastures on the Yellow River.
The history of the Uyghur people, as with the ethnic origin of the people, is an issue of contention between Uyghur nationalists and the Chinese authority. Uyghur historians viewed the Uyghurs as the original inhabitants of Xinjiang with a long history. Uyghur politician and historian Muhemmed Imin Bughra wrote in his book "A history of East Turkestan", stressing the Turkic aspects of his people, that the Turks have a 9000-year history, while historian Turgun Almas incorporated discoveries of Tarim mummies to conclude that Uyghurs have over 6400 years of history, and the World Uyghur Congress claimed a 4,000-year history. Chinese historians however generally traced the origin of the Uyghurs to the Tiele, some to the Dingling as well as other people mentioned in ancient Chinese texts such as the Guifang. Official Chinese view asserts the Uyghurs to be of Tiele origin, and only became the main social and political force in Xinjiang during the ninth century when they migrated to Xinjiang from Mongolia after the collapse of the Uyghur Khaganate, replacing the Han Chinese that they claimed were there since the Han Dynasty. Many modern Western scholars however do not consider the modern Uyghurs to be of direct linear descent from the old Uyghur Khaganate of Mongolia, rather they are descendants of a number of people, of which the ancient Uyghurs are but one.
The history of the Uyghur people, as with the ethnic origin of the people, is a matter of contention between Uyghur nationalists and the Chinese authority. Uyghur historians viewed the Uyghurs as the original inhabitants of Xinjiang with a long history. Uyghur politician and historian Muhemmed Imin Bughra wrote in his book "A History of East Turkestan", stressing the Turkic aspects of his people, that the Turks have a 9000-year history, while historian Turghun Almas incorporated discoveries of Tarim mummies to conclude that Uyghurs have over 6400 years of history, and the World Uyghur Congress claimed a 4,000-year history in East Turkestan. However, the official Chinese view asserts that the Uyghurs in Xinjiang originated from the Tiele tribes and only became the main social and political force in Xinjiang during the ninth century when they migrated to Xinjiang from Mongolia after the collapse of the Uyghur Khaganate, replacing the Han Chinese they claimed were there since the Han Dynasty. Many contemporary Western scholars, however, do not consider the modern Uyghurs to be of direct linear descent from the old Uyghur Khaganate of Mongolia. Rather, they consider them to be descendants of a number of peoples, one of them the ancient Uyghurs.
Tibet, the homeland of 7 million Tibetans, about half of whom live in the Tibetan Autonomous Region ("Tibet") and slightly more in the neighboring provinces of Qinghai, Yunnan, Gansu and Sichuan, lies for the most part within the People's Republic of China. For centuries Tibet resisted Chinese influence and control, with varying effectiveness. During periods when China was dominant, little more was involved than a Chinese governor and a garrison in Lhasa and Chinese administration in border areas such as Amdo and Kham with mixed populations of Tibetans and Chinese; no attempt was made by the Chinese to displace the Tibetan aristocracy or political and religious institutions of Tibet. From 1912 until 1950, Tibet experienced a period of "de facto" independence from Chinese rule, following the fall of the Qing dynasty. However, in 1950 the Chinese successfully incorporated Tibet and its outlying areas, occupied it, displaced Tibetan political and religious institutions, and assumed governance of the nation. Tibetan resistance since 1950 has taken a variety of forms, including instances of armed resistance that has been described as terrorism by Chinese authorities.
Faxian (or Fa Hsien etc.), a Chinese Buddhist, was one of the pilgrims who visited India during the reign of the Gupta emperor Chandragupta II. He started his journey from China in 399 and reached India in 405. During his stay in India up to 411, he went on a pilgrimage to Mathura, Kannauj, Kapilavastu, Kushinagar, Vaishali, Pataliputra, Kashi, and Rajagriha, and made careful observations about the empire's conditions. Faxian was pleased with the mildness of administration. The Penal Code was mild and offenses were punished by fines only. From his accounts, the Gupta Empire was a prosperous period. And until the Rome–China trade axis was broken with the fall of the Han dynasty, the Guptas did indeed prosper. His writings form one of the most important sources for the history of this period.
The Tibetan people () are an ethnic group native to Tibet. Their current population is estimated to be around 6 million. In addition to living in Tibet, significant numbers of Tibetans live in other parts of China, as well as India, Nepal, and Bhutan.
Yugur, the easternmost state formed by the Yugur people, was the Ganzhou Kingdom (AD 870–1036), with its capital near present-day Zhangye in the Gansu province of China. There, the Uyghur converted from Manichaeism to Lamaism, Tibetan and Mongol Buddhism. Unlike Turkic peoples further west, they did not later convert to Islam. Their descendants are now known as Yugurs (or "Yogir", "Yugur", and "Sary Uyghurs", literally meaning "yellow Uyghurs") and are distinct from modern Uyghurs. In AD 1028–1036, the Yugurs were defeated in a bloody war and forcibly absorbed into the Tangut kingdom. These Yugurs stayed Lamaist and did not convert to Islam.
The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms was a period of warfare and disruption. After 907, the Tang government effectively disintegrated into several small states in the south, while the north saw a series of short-lived dynasties and barbarian invasions. A key event of the era was the conquest of North China by the Shatuo Turks. During their rule, the Shatuo gave the vital Sixteen Prefectures area, containing the natural geographical defences of North China and the eastern section of the Great Wall, to the Khitan, another barbarian people. This effectively left Northern China defenceless against incursions from the north, a major factor in the later fall of the Song dynasty. The Shatuo and Khitan invasions severely disrupted economic activity in the north and displaced economic activity southwards, and native Chinese rule was not restored until the Later Zhou dynasty, the Song's precursor.
"Sinosauropteryx" lived in what is now northeastern China during the early Cretaceous period. It was among the first dinosaurs discovered from the Yixian Formation in Liaoning Province, and was a member of the Jehol Biota. Well-preserved fossils of this species illustrate many aspects of its biology, such as its diet and reproduction.
Duke Zhuang succeeded his father Duke Cheng of Qi, who died in 795 BC, as ruler of Qi. He had a long reign during an era of upheaval in China. In 771 BC, the Quanrong tribes from the west attacked Haojing, capital of the Zhou Dynasty, and killed King You of Zhou. Duke Xiang of the state of Qin sent his army to escort King You's son King Ping of Zhou to the new capital Luoyi, marking the beginning of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty. As a reward for Qin's protection King Ping formally granted Duke Xiang of Qin a nobility rank and elevated Qin to the status of a vassal state on par with other major states such as Qi and Jin. Although Qi was little affected by the turmoil as it was located east of the Zhou territory, the state of Qin would from then on grow stronger and eventually conquer Qi in 221 BC and unite China under the Qin Dynasty.
In 221 BC, the Qin state unified China by conquering the other six major states and established the Qin dynasty. However, the oppressive and extremely unpopular dynasty lasted only 14 years. In 209 BC, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang started the Dazexiang Uprising to overthrow the Qin dynasty.
The White Huns, who initially were part of the predominantly Buddhist Hephthalite group, established themselves in Afghanistan by the first half of the 5th century, with their capital at Bamiyan. The Huns invaded the Gupta Empire under Kumara Gupta (r.415-455). Kumara Gupta had just earlier defeated several revolts from the Pushyamitras, a tribe of central India. After the death of Kumaragupta in 467, the Huns renewed their attacks and managed to invade border provinces around this time. Kumara Gupta's son Skanda Gupta had managed to defeat further Hun invasions. Skanda Gupta managed to defeat the Huns in such a manner that they were fully routed; the consequences of the Gupta victory over the Huns were far-reaching, leading a historian to believe that this was likely the reason for the Hun invasions further West.
In the Early 13th century Genghis Khan united warring Mongolian tribes into the united Mongol Empire in 1206. The Mongols would proceed to conquer the majority of modern East Asia. Meanwhile, the Chinese were divided into five competing states. From 1211, Mongolia's forces invaded North China. In 1227 the Mongolian Empire destroyed Xixia and its Tangut people entirely. In 1234 Mongolian Ogedei Khan extinguished the Jin Chao.
As of the 2014 Census, there are about 6 million Tibetans living in the Tibet Autonomous Region and the 10 Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures in Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan, China. The SIL Ethnologue in 2009 documents an additional 189,000 Tibetic speakers living in India, 5,280 in Nepal, and 4,800 in Bhutan. The Central Tibetan Administration's (CTA) Green Book (of the Tibetan Government in Exile) counts 145,150 Tibetans outside Tibet: a little over 100,000 in India; over 16,000 in Nepal; over 1,800 in Bhutan, and over 25,000 in other parts of the world. There are Tibetan communities in the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, France, Mexico, Norway, Mongolia, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. In the Baltistan region of northern Pakistan, the Balti people are a Muslim ethnicity of Tibetan descent numbering around 300,000.
In China, the Jin dynasty, which had united the nation prior in 280, began to quickly face troubles by the start of the century due to political infighting, which led to the opportunistic insurrections of the northern barbarian tribes (starting the Sixteen Kingdoms period), which quickly overwhelmed the empire, forcing the Jin court to retreat and entrench itself in the south past the Yangtze river, starting what is known as the Eastern Jin dynasty around 317. 
Towards the end of the century, Emperor of the Former Qin, Fu Jiān, united the north under his banner, and planned to conquer the Jin dynasty in the south, so as to finally reunite the land, but was decisively defeated at the Battle of Fei River in 383, causing massive unrest and civil war in his empire, thereby leading to the fall of the Former Qin, and the continued existence of the Eastern Jin dynasty.
In China, the period known as the Sixteen Kingdoms, where various barbarian tribes formed their own kingdoms, persisted. After the fall of the Former Qin towards the end of the previous century, the north of China was eventually once again reunited by Northern Wei in 439. Meanwhile, in the Eastern Jin dynasty, the Jin statesman and general Liu Yu started consolidating his power and eventually forced the last Emperor of the Jin dynasty, Emperor Gong of Jin, to abdicate to him in 420, creating the (Liu) Song dynasty, which was also the starting point of the period known as the Northern and Southern dynasties.
Zhongdu served as the Jin capital for more than 60 years, until the onslaught of the Mongols in 1214. The Mongols, a tribal nomadic people from the Mongolian Plateau and southern Siberia, had assisted the Jurchen in the war against the Khitans, but were not given the promised compensation. In 1211, the Mongols led by Genghis Khan took revenge against the Jin by invading northern China. By 1213, he had controlled most of Jin territory north of the Yellow River with the exception of the capital Zhongdu. In March 1214, he set up headquarters in Zhongdu's northern suburbs and with brother Hasar and three eldest sons, Jochi, Chagatai and Ögedei, began to besiege the city. Though the Jin court was weakened by a palace coup, the city was protected by three layers of moats and 900 towers. When disease broke out within the Mongol ranks, Genghis Khan sent Muslim envoy Ja'far into the city to negotiate, and the Jin court agreed to a peace treaty by ceding territory and accepting vassal status. Among Genghis Khan's demands was marriage to a Jurchen princess. The Qicheng Princess, daughter of Wanyan Yongji, was designated for the Mongol chieftain. She along with 100 guards, 500 boys and girl servants, 3,000 bolts of cloth, and 3,000 horses were sent to the Mongol camp. The Qicheng Princess became one of the four main wives of Genghis Khan, who lifted the siege and withdrew north of the Juyong Pass.
Historically, the population of Tibet consisted of primarily ethnic Tibetans. According to tradition the original ancestors of the Tibetan people, as represented by the six red bands in the Tibetan flag, are: the Se, Mu, Dong, Tong, Dru and Ra. Other traditional ethnic groups with significant population or with the majority of the ethnic group reside in Tibet include Bai people, Blang, Bonan, Dongxiang, Han, Hui people, Lhoba, Lisu people, Miao, Mongols, Monguor (Tu people), Menba (Monpa), Mosuo, Nakhi, Qiang, Nu people, Pumi, Salar, and Yi people.
King Zhaoxiang reigned as the King of Qin for 57 years, and was responsible for the state of Qin achieving strategic dominance over the other six major states. During his reign, Qin captured the Chu capital Ying in 278 BC, conquered the Xirong state of Yiqu in 272 BC, slaughtered a 450,000-strong Zhao army at Changping in 260 BC, and overthrew the Eastern Zhou dynasty in 256 BC. These aggressive territorial expansions and the strategic weakening of other rival states paved the path for Qin's eventual unification of China three decades later by his great-grandson Ying Zheng.
Western authors' writings on Tibetan history are sometimes controversial. For example, whilst Hugh Richardson, who lived in Lhasa in the 1930s and 1940s, before the takeover by the PRC in 1951, writes in "Tibet and Its History" that Chinese versions of Tibetan history are contemptible and he considers the Chinese rule brutal and illegal, Israel Epstein, a naturalized Chinese citizen born in Poland who similarly claims the authority of first-hand knowledge, although following the Chinese takeover, supports Chinese rule. There are few academic assessments of the recent history of Tibet. Anthropologist and historian Melvyn Goldstein, who is fluent in Tibetan and has done considerable fieldwork with Tibetans in exile and in Tibet, considers pre-1950 Tibet to have been a feudal theocracy impaired by corrupt and incompetent leaders. It was "de facto" independent of China from 1911 to 1949, but not recognised as "de jure" independent of China by any nation, including its protective power Great Britain.
The reign of the first imperial dynasty was to be short-lived. Due to the First Emperor's autocratic rule and his massive labor projects, which fomented rebellion among the populace, the Qin dynasty fell into chaos soon after his death. Under the corrupt rule of his son and successor Huhai, the Qin dynasty collapsed a mere three years later. The Han dynasty (206 BC–220 CE) then emerged from the ensuing civil wars and succeeded in establishing a much longer-lasting dynasty. It continued many of the institutions created by the Qin dynasty, but adopted a more moderate rule. Under the Han dynasty, arts and culture flourished, while the Han Empire expanded militarily in all directions. Many Chinese scholars such as Ho Ping-ti believe that the concept (ethnogenesis) of Han ethnicity, though an ancient one, was formally entrenched in the Han dynasty. The Han dynasty is considered one of the golden ages of Chinese history, and to this day, the modern Han Chinese people have since taken their ethnic name from this dynasty and the Chinese script is referred to as "Han characters".
The fall of the Han dynasty was followed by an age of fragmentation and several centuries of disunity amid warfare among rival kingdoms. During this time, areas of northern China were overrun by various non-Han nomadic peoples, which came to establish kingdoms of their own, the most successful of which was Northern Wei (established by the Xianbei). Starting from this period, the native population of China proper began to be referred to as Hanren, or the "People of Han", to distinguish them from the nomads from the steppe. Warfare and invasion led to one of the first great migrations of Han populations in history, as they fled south to the Yangtze and beyond, shifting the Chinese demographic center and speeding up sinicization of the far south. At the same time most of the nomads in northern China came to be sinicized as they ruled over large Chinese populations and adopted elements of their culture and administration. Of note, the Xianbei rulers of Northern Wei ordered a policy of systematic sinicization, adopting Han surnames, institutions, and culture.
Many immigrants lived in the Xiongnu pasturelands, but at first they did not mix with the Xiongnu. To be a Xiongnu, one had to be a member of a clan, born of Xiongnu parents. The newcomers were well off, but were outsiders, and could marry only among themselves, not the Xiongnu. Only later did they intermix, increase in numbers, even created a state that existed from 318 to 350 AD.
To the north of the Xiongnu empire and Dingling territories, at the headwaters of the Yenisei around Tannu Uriankhai, lived the "Gekun" (鬲昆), also known as the Yenisei Kirghiz in later records. Further to the west near the Irtysh river lived the Hujie (呼揭). Other tribes living north of the Xiongnu, such as the Hunyu (浑庾), Qushe (屈射), and Xinli (薪犁), are only mentioned once in Chinese records, and their exact location is unknown.
Yap, apparently describing the early period, places the Chanyu's main camp north of Shanxi with the Tuqi King of the Left holding the area north of Beijing and the Tuqi King of the Right holding the Ordos Loop area as far as Gansu. Grousset, probably describing the situation after the Xiongnu had been driven north, places the Chanyu on the upper Orkhon River near where Genghis Khan would later establish his capital of Karakorum. The Tuqi King of the Left lived in the east, probably on the high Kherlen River. The Tuqi King of the Right lived in the west, perhaps near present-day Uliastai in the Khangai Mountains.
The Wusun originally lived between the Qilian Mountains and Dunhuang (Gansu) near the Yuezhi. Around 176 BCE the Yuezhi were raided by the Xiongnu, who subsequently attacked the Wusun, killing their king and seizing their land. The Xiongnu adopted the surviving Wusun prince and made him one of their generals and leader of the Wusun. Around 162 BCE the Yuezhi were driven into the Ili River valley in Zhetysu, Dzungaria, and Tian Shan, which had formerly been inhabited by the Saka (Scythians). The Wusun then resettled in Gansu as vassals of the Xiongnu. In 133–132 BCE, the Wusun drove the Yuezhi out of the Ili Valley and settled the area.