Dzungar Khanate

The Dzungar Khanate was the last nomadic empire in human history, the Oirat Mongol state that held Inner Asia for a century against Russia, the Kazakhs and Qing China. Its founders, Khara Khula and his son Baatur, united the western Mongols in the 1630s around the Ili valley with their capital at Ghulja, and built a state that contemporaries described with astonishment: copper cannon cast by a Swedish prisoner, musketeer infantry drilled beside horse-archers, tax registers, and Tibetan Buddhism as the state creed with influence reaching into Lhasa itself. Under Galdan the khanate took Kashgaria, threatened the Khalkha east, and forced the Kangxi emperor to campaign in person; the Qing-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 closed the northern door. Galdan's nephew Tsewang Rabtan and his son Galdan Tseren kept the balance for two generations, playing Qing against Russia while the lamas of Lhasa blessed their wars. The succession crisis after Galdan Tseren's death gave Qianlong his opening: Amursana's defection invited Qing armies in 1755, and when he rebelled in turn the Qianlong emperor ordered the extermination, carried out in 1757–1758 with smallpox as ally. The Dzungars were massacred to near-extinction; the survivors were settled as Ölöd banners or fled to the Volga. The Ili valley emptied, the Qing filled it with colonies, and the age of the horse empires ended not with a battle but with an administration.