Dzungar Khanate

The Dzungar Khanate was the last major nomadic empire in Asia, an Oirat Mongol state established in 1634 with its core territory in what is now northern Xinjiang, a region known as Dzungaria. At its territorial peak around 1717 it stretched from southern Siberia in the north to Tibet in the south and from Mongolia and the Great Wall of China in the east to Kazakhstan in the west, covering roughly 3.6 million square kilometers and ruled from the capital Ghulja by a monarch bearing the title Khong Tayiji under the customary Yeke Caaji, or Great Code. Its population of six hundred thousand to 1.2 million practiced both Tibetan Buddhism and Islam, but the khanate collapsed between 1755 and 1758 when the Qing dynasty conquered Dzungaria and, through warfare, disease and systematic extermination policies, destroyed roughly eighty percent of the Dzungar people.