18. The Yuezhi were a nomadic people who resided in the territory of modern-day China, spending most of their history waging war in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to independently survive
The Yuezhi were an ancient civilization who, during the latter half of the 1st millennium BCE, resided in an arid grassland region of the modern-day Chinese province of Gansu. Almost all of our knowledge and understanding of the Yuezhi comes from surviving Chinese accounts written many decades after the events described, with limited archeological evidence creating a highly speculative and incomplete account of the ancient culture.
One of the earliest Chinese descriptions of the Yuezhi, “The Book of Han”, depicts the “the Great Yuezhi” as “a nomadic horde” who “moved about following their cattle, and had the same customs as those of the Xiongnu. As their soldiers numbered more than hundred thousand, they were strong and despised the Xiongnu. In the past, they lived in the region between Dunhuang and Qilian.” This noted antagonism with the Xiongnu would be the ultimate downfall of the Yuezhi, who would suffer defeat at the hands of Xiongnu in 176 BCE after the unification of China and Xiongnu between 221-209 and their subsequent combined invasion of Yuezhi lands in 207; in the aftermath of the loss of their ancestral home, the Yuezhi would split, with the Lesser Yuezhi migrating south and being later assimilated into the Qiang, Jie, and Zhao cultures.
The Greater Yuezhi would fare little better, forcibly migrating northwest into the Ili Valley through conquest before being displaced themselves in 132 BCE by the Wusun; fleeing south, the Greater Yuezhi eventually fragment into five major separate tribal entities in approximately 128. Eventually, around 30 BCE one of these five – the “Kushanas” – would unite the divided tribes through conquest to form the Kushan Empire; this new entity would survive until 375 CE, at which point it too would fragment into a loose confederation of semi-independent kingdoms who would in turn gradually fall to neighboring rivals and be subsumed into other civilizations.