Battle of Zhizhi

His deputy commander, Chen Tang, claimed that Zhizhi was planning to build up a great empire and proposed a pre-emptive attack.

It marched west on both sides of the Tarim Basin, reunited near Kashgar, and moved across Kangju territory reaching the western shore of Lake Balkhash.

At this point a party of several thousand Kangju cavalrymen, returning from a raid on Wusun, stumbled onto the rear of the Chinese army, attacked it, and made off with a large quantity of food and weapons.

Chen Tang sent his Hu troops back and defeated the Kangju, killing 460 of them and freeing 470 Wusun captives.

Zhizhi himself thought of escape but decided to remain because he knew that he had too many enemies in the surrounding country, and fighting continued.

The following spring Gan Yanshou and Chen Tang arrived at Chang'an and presented Emperor Yuan of Han with Zhizhi's severed head.

A hypothesis by the Sinologist Homer H. Dubs, according to which Roman legionaries clashed with Han troops during the battle and were resettled afterwards in a Chinese village named Liqian,[9] has been rejected by modern historians and geneticists on the grounds of a critical appraisal of the ancient sources and recent DNA testings of the village people.

[12] A new hypothesis (Greek Hoplites in an Ancient Chinese Siege, Journal of Asian History) from 2011 by Dr Christopher Anthony Matthew from the Australian Catholic University[13] suggests that these strange warriors were not Roman legionaries, but Hoplites from the Kingdom of Fergana also known as Alexandria Exchate or Dayaun which was one of the successor states of Alexander the Great's Empire.