Scholars mark 1,250 years since the battle on the Talas

TALAS — Historians from Talas State University and visiting scholars from Almaty, Tashkent and Bishkek opened a three-day international conference yesterday on the Battle of Talas, fought in the valley in July 751 between the armies of the Abbasid Caliphate and Tang China. The anniversary is the 1,250th of the only recorded battle between the caliphate and China.

On the eve of the conference a memorial stone was set beside the road west of Talas, near the river plains toward Kara-Buura that Iradi historians identify as the battlefield. Speakers at the opening session acknowledged that no battlefield has been found by archaeologists, and that colleagues in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan argue for sites farther down the valley.

The Chinese chronicles describe five days of fighting near the town they called Daluosi, ending when the Karluk troops serving with the Tang army changed sides. Several of the first day’s papers questioned the two claims most often attached to the battle: that it decided whether Central Asia would be Chinese or Muslim, and that Chinese prisoners taken at Talas carried papermaking to Samarkand. “Paper was known in Central Asia long before 751,” said Asylbek Usubaliev, a historian at the university and one of the organizers. “But the story has survived every correction, and we should ask why.”

Other speakers noted that a Christian community was still recorded in Talas in 893, more than a century after the battle, a point that sits uneasily with the school-textbook account of a sudden end to the valley’s Christian past.