Discovery of Lost Uyghur City Fuels Geopolitical Wrangling

During an expedition in Mongolia’s Tuul Valley, a team of archaeologists from Turkey and Mongolia unearthed evidence that establishes the true location of the legendary ancient city of Togu Balik. Lost for centuries, this important urban center was built by Turkic clans known as the “Nine Oghuz,” who were the forerunners of the Muslim people known as the Uyghurs.

The discovery of Togu Balik will have profound implications for the understanding of ancient Turkic civilizations in the region, the Turkish and Mongolian archaeologists say.

The excavation project’s lead archaeologist, Professor Saban Dogan said, according to a press release by Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA):

“Togu Balık, mentioned in historical sources but whose exact location was previously unknown, is much older than the known Uyghur cities. The unearthing and excavation of this city will push back our findings on the settled life of the Uyghurs by at least 100 years.”

Excavations in Mongolia’s Tuul Valley by Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA) in 2024. (TIKA)

Togu Balik, Lost City of the Turks

Togu Balik was found in the Tuul Valley in northern Mongolia. The ongoing excavations have unearthed cultural artifacts and ruins that reveal new data about early Turkic practices and beliefs, and about their urban planning preferences as well.

The excavated area covers 38.6 square miles (100 square kilometers), and the digging has been carried out by an international team of 30 researchers searching for information about how the predecessors of modern Turkish people lived. Togu Balik represented one of their major accomplishments, as the city featured impressive monuments, infrastructure projects, and burial complexes that could only have been constructed by an advanced culture.

Doban states:

“There are countless cultural assets from the ancient Turks… We found artifacts proving it is Togu Balık.

The discovery of Togu Balik marks a significant milestone in our understanding of Turkic history. The site provides crucial insights into the transition of Turks to settled life.”

What was discovered included ceramics and structural remains linked specifically to the Uyghurs, showing they were the ones who built this impressive urban enclave in Mongolia nearly 1,400 years ago. Their presence in the region predates this, as they would have needed to be well-established in the area before they would have been able to build a city as large and complex as Togu Balik.

The researchers report excavations have confirmed the site is that of Togu Balik. (TIKA)

The History of the Uyghurs in Asia: An Ongoing and Heated Dispute

There is political controversy connected to this discovery because it involves the Uyghurs.

While they occupied Mongolia in the past, these Islamic people are currently confined to the autonomous region of Xinjiang, which borders Mongolia but is controlled by China. According to reports in the western media, the Chinese have been attempting to assimilate the Uyghurs into Chinese culture against their will, an activity that has been labeled “cultural genocide” by some western nations (primarily the United States and the United Kingdom). The Chinese deny this characterization of their policies in Xinjiang, stating that they have legitimate security concerns about Uyghur activities that they’ve been forced to address.

China has claimed that the areas of Xinjiang occupied by the Uyghurs today have historically belonged to China, and archaeological work in this area has been used to support these assertions. The official verdict of China’s archaeological community is that the Uyghurs didn’t arrive in the Mongolia-Xinjiang region until the ninth century AD, before which the area was supposedly occupied exclusively by Chinese peoples from the Han culture.

Western political figures and some academics have accused the Chinese of weaponizing archaeology, by using their discoveries in the region to bolster their historical claims over the lands of present-day Xinjiang, and to subsequently deny the Uyghurs the right to live freely. The Chinese have disputed this, saying that the archaeologists assigned to work in the region are simply searching for information about the Chinese presence along the Silk Road trade route that connected the east and the west starting in the second century BC. They say artifacts and ruins found in Xinjiang (through which the Silk Road passed) prove that Chinese influence in the area is ancient and indisputable.

According to Jia Chunyang, executive director of the Center for Economic and Social Security Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, the west is offering a misleading narrative about what Chinese archaeologists are doing in Uyghur-occupied territory.

“Their goal is to give the international community the false impression that the Xinjiang region, Central Asia, and some areas along the Silk Roads have little historical connection to China, so as to slander China for ‘falsifying’ history,” Jia told the Global Times. “By denying China’s history, they deny China’s current policies based on said history.”

When Archaeology Gets Tangled in Politics, the Truth Can be Elusive

It seems the latest discoveries do refute at least some of what Chinese archaeologists, who are supported by the Chinese state, have said about the history of the Uyghurs in the greater Mongolian/Xinjiang region.

The discovery of Togu Balik, and its dating to the seventh century AD, show that the Uyghurs have deeper roots in the region of western Xinjiang, going back far into the first millennium at least. And according to Alimjan Inayet, a professor of Uyghur folklore at Ege University in Izmir, Turkey, historical documents produced by China itself show that the Uyghurs populated a huge area ranging from the Tuul Valley in Mongolia to much of Xinjiang long ago.

“Uyghurs have inhabited the East Turkistan geography since time immemorial,” he told Radio Free Asia (‘East Turkistan’ is the Uyghur’s preferred name for Xinjiang). “These historic documents show that Uyghurs didn’t come to East Turkistan in the 840s AD like current Chinese historians allege but are the most ancient tribes that lived on this vast land. There is no historical basis for China to claim that Uyghurs came to this land only after the 840s.”

Viewed from a larger perspective, it seems that discoveries made by China at Silk Road archaeological sites have revealed more about the influence and history of China in Xinjiang, which may be more extensive than was previously realized. It is also not clear to what extent the search for such information is driven by political ends, since archaeological endeavors are presumably motivated by an intense curiosity on the part of archaeologists to discover the truth about past events, whatever it might be.

 At the same time, however, the discovery of Togu Balik does seem to conclusively refute some Chinese claims about the history of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. It remains to be seen if the Chinese government will allow their archaeological community to acknowledge this fact.

Top image: Turkish and Mongolian archeologists excavate the ruins of Togu Balik in northern Mongolia in 2024.    Source: Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism/Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency

By Nathan Falde