Khanate is a Turco-Mongolian-originated word used to describe a political entity ruled by a Khan. After the Mongolian empire, which at its height stretched from Europe to the Sea of Japan, disintegrated and was finally dissolved in 1386, the Golden Horde broke into smaller Turkic-hordes and set up their own independent principalities (or Khanates) which were led by ruling dynasties which could claim (some more spuriously than others) to be descendants of the Mongol Khans and therefore carry the right to assume the title of Khan.
Over the next five hundred years these Khanates, most numerous in Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, steadily declined in power and would disappear, usually through conquest, with only a few making it to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries such as the Crimean Khanate which was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1783. One however survived into the twentieth century, this was the Kumul Khanate in northern China.The Kumul Khanate existed primarily as a semi-autonomous feudal khanate within the Xinjiang region of the Qing dynasty of China and then, after 1912, the Republic of China until it was abolished and repressed by Xinjiang governor Jin Shuren in 1930-31, making it by far the longest lived, and last, Khanate in history.
The Khans of Kumul were direct descendants of the khans of the Uyghur Khanate. It came under Qing Dynasty rule in 1757 after the Ten Great Campaigns and was allowed to remained a vassal Khanate of the Qing empire, in recognition of the Khanates support in fighting against the Zunghars for the Qing, a decision which allowed it to be preserved as a political entity much longer than its contemporaries.
The Khans of Kumul were also given the title of Tsing Wang (Prince of the First Rank), by the Qing empire and were allowed to keep extensive power's by the Qing court, with the exception of administering execution, which had to be allowed by a Chinese official posted in Kumul. The Khans were officially vassals to the Emperor of China, and every six years were required to visit Beijing to be a servant to the Emperor during a period of 40 days.
This arrangement also had a very real practical advantage for the Chinese as the population of the Khanate consisted entirely of Uyghurs - a Turkic ethnic group, it was the very fact that the khanate was allowed to exist which prevented the Uyghurs from rebelling against Chinese suzerainty , since the khanate represented a government where a man of their ethnicity and religion was reigning.
Upon the death of the last Khan, Maqsud Shah, in 1930, the governor of Xinjiang, Jin Shuren, replaced the khanate with three normal provincial administrative districts Hami, Yihe, Yiwu and immediately raised taxes and opened Kumul to Han Chinese immigrants. This set off the Kumul Rebellion, in which Yulbars Khan attempted to restore the heir Nasir to the throne, and which the Republic of China eventually won with significant material support from the Soviet Union. This included the purchase of two biplanes from the Soviet union in September 1931 at 40,000 Mexican silver dollars each, which were equipped with machine guns, bombs and flown by Russian pilots. Such modern weaponry was more than a match for the conscripted nomadic armies of the Uygur rebels.
If there is any legacy for such a late death of a eleventh century political entity, it is the high proportions of Uygur Turkic peoples still living in the Xinjiang region of northern China, also the Khanates former capitol of Kumul is apparently very well known in China as the home of the famously sweet Hami melons.
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| Forcibly conscripted Turcik-Uyghur soldiers near Kumul in 1930 |