Qing Forces Destroy the Dzungar Khanate

1755

Qianlong's armies crossed the Altai, took Ili, and shattered the last great steppe confederacy. What followed was deliberate: smallpox, starvation, massacre. Modern scholars call it a genocide - perhaps a million Dzungars, perhaps more, ceased to exist as a people. Xinjiang became Chinese territory. The vast pasturelands of Dzungaria were resettled with Manchu bannermen, Uighur farmers, and Chinese colonists, erasing the nomadic world that had flourished there.