Burana Tower: Balasagun and the Medieval Urban World of the Chuy Valley

The Burana tower rises from the floor of the Chuy Valley in northern Kyrgyzstan like a broken-off column: a brick minaret with its upper half missing, standing alone among grassy mounds, with the snow peaks of the Tian Shan behind it. Those mounds are what remains above ground of a medieval city widely identified as Balasagun, a merchant town that became a capital of the Turkic Karakhanid dynasty, then the seat of the Qara Khitai, and finally a casualty of the Mongol age. Read together, the tower, the rebuilt mausoleums and the carved stones gathered around them describe an urban world that lasted for several centuries on the northern Silk Road before it faded back into farmland. On Day 18 of our small group Silk Road journey from Xi’an to Tashkent, the group pauses here on the road from Issyk-Kul to Bishkek.

The Chuy Valley: a corridor between steppe and mountains

The Chuy River drains the northern slopes of the Tian Shan and runs west through northern Kyrgyzstan, for a stretch along the border with Kazakhstan. Where it leaves the mountains it waters a broad, flat valley of fields and pasture, and for travellers heading between China and the oases of Transoxiana it offered what the high passes and desert stretches elsewhere on the route did not: grass for animals, water and room to settle. On our history-led Silk Road tour from Xi’an to Tashkent, the valley is where the Kyrgyz mountain leg opens out towards the lowlands of Central Asia.

The first towns here were built by Sogdians, the merchant people of the Samarkand region whose trading colonies stretched along the routes east. Suyab, whose ruins lie at Ak-Beshim a few kilometres west of present-day Tokmok, grew up as a Sogdian settlement in the fifth or sixth century. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang passed through in about 629, when Suyab was a principal seat of the Western Turkic khagans; the Tang dynasty later kept a garrison there and built a fortress in 679. Excavators have found Buddhist temples at Ak-Beshim and a Nestorian Christian church, and UNESCO also records Manichaeism in the Chuy and Talas valleys. It was a mixed world of merchants and nomad rulers, and the wider story of how such towns tied the network together is told in our article on the history and legacy of the Silk Road.

Balasagun: from Sogdian town to Karakhanid capital

Balasagun was the town that eventually took Suyab’s place. Writing in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the historian C. E. Bosworth concluded that it “must have been a Sogdian foundation”, and a strong clue survives in the work of Mahmud al-Kashgari, the eleventh-century scholar of the Turkic languages, who reported that Sogdian was still spoken in Balasagun alongside Turkic. He also recorded its Turkic name, Quz-Ordu. Muslim historians first mention the town in about 942–43, when Turkic raiders overran it; these Turks were probably the Qarluqs who founded the Karakhanid confederation.

The Karakhanids turned to Islam in the mid-tenth century, and Balasagun became one of their centres in the eastern part of their realm, while Suyab declined and was abandoned in the eleventh century. Conversion spread beyond the ruling house: Iranica notes that in 1043–44 some ten thousand tents of Turks who spent their winters around Balasagun accepted Islam. The town sat where the settled world of mosques, markets and brick buildings met the seasonal pastures of the nomads, and its importance came from serving both.

Yusuf of Balasagun and the “Wisdom of Royal Glory”

Balasagun is remembered above all through a poet. Yusuf Khass Hajib, a native of the town, completed the Kutadgu Bilig in 1069–70 and presented it to Tavghach Bughra Khan, the Karakhanid prince of Kashgar. The title is often translated, following Robert Dankoff, as “Wisdom of Royal Glory”. It is a long poem in Karakhanid Turkic, built as a set of dialogues between four figures: a king who stands for justice, a vizier for fortune, a sage for intellect and an ascetic for the end of life. As a guide to government written in a Turkic language for a Muslim Turkic court, it is counted among the founding texts of Turkic literature, and the court it was written for is part of the story of Kashgar as a Silk Road crossroads.

Reading the Burana tower

The Burana tower is usually dated to the eleventh century, the Karakhanid period, and it was built as a minaret for the town’s Muslim population. It stands on an octagonal base, and above it a round shaft of baked brick tapers as it rises, wrapped in horizontal bands of relief brickwork in which the bricks themselves are laid to form zigzags, lattices and diamonds. The tower is generally said to have been about 45 metres high when complete, and it now stands at about 25 metres; earthquakes over the centuries damaged it, and the upper half is thought to have come down in a quake in the fifteenth century.

The doorway into the shaft is set several metres above the ground, and a modern metal staircase leads up to it. Inside, a steep and narrow stair winds up to the broken top. The base and the west-facing side were repaired in a restoration in the 1970s, after the west side had come close to collapse. A local legend explains the missing top differently: a khan built the tower to shut away his daughter after a fortune teller foretold her death, a spider hidden in a basket of fruit bit her anyway, and the khan’s grief broke the tower.

Burana belongs to a family of Karakhanid brick minarets. Among them, the Kalyan Minaret in Bukhara was built in 1127 for the Karakhanid ruler Arslan Khan Muhammad and still stands at more than 45 metres, with the same round, tapering shaft and the same bands of patterned brick. Seen side by side, Burana reads as its earlier, broken relation, and our article on Bukhara’s scholarship, architecture and urban life picks up the story at the western end of the same dynasty’s world.

How much walking is involved at Burana?

The visit is on foot across open ground. The tower, the rebuilt mausoleums, the field of carved stones and the museum building are spread across an open, grassy site, and the tour page gives no distance for the stop. The Silk Road tour as a whole is rated Level 2, Moderate, which the tour page defines as being able to carry your own luggage, climb and descend stairs, and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground.

Balbals, mausoleums and the open-air museum

Much of Burana is laid out as an open-air museum. Rows of balbals, the carved stone grave figures of the early Turkic peoples, stand in the grass near the tower. Most show a simple face with a moustache, and many hold a cup at the chest. They are generally dated to between the sixth and tenth centuries, earlier than the minaret. Stones carved with petroglyphs, some dated as far back as the second century BC, have been gathered on the site as well.

Closer to the tower, the excavated foundations of three baked-brick mausoleums have been partly rebuilt to a low height, one of them octagonal; their different shapes and sizes hint at the rank of the people buried in them. A small museum on the site displays finds from Balasagun and the surrounding valley, and the whole museum complex covers about 36 hectares. Around it, low earth ramparts mark the lines of the medieval town walls. Like the stone caravanserai of Tash Rabat, high on the mountain road towards Kashgar, Burana shows how much of the Silk Road’s built world survives only as outlines in the grass.

Qara Khitai, Mongols and a city that faded

Balasagun’s second life began with a conquest from the east. In the 1130s the Gür Khan of the Qara Khitai, a dynasty founded by refugees from the fallen Liao empire of northern China, took the town from the Karakhanids; Iranica gives 1137 and other sources 1134. He set up his army camp in the Chuy Valley nearby, and Balasagun became the centre of a realm that, for most of the twelfth century, held the Karakhanid rulers of Kashgar and Samarkand as vassals. A non-Muslim dynasty with Chinese court traditions now governed a largely Muslim Turkic population from the valley.

The end came in stages. In 1210, according to the Persian historian Juvayni, the Gür Khan had to retake the town “with great slaughter” as his power crumbled, and shortly afterwards it passed to the Mongols during Chinggis Khan’s campaign against the usurper Küchlüg, usually dated to 1218. Balasagun did not prosper under Mongol rule, and by the fourteenth century the site was a village among ruins.

Its location was then forgotten for long enough that scholars argued over it. In the nineteenth century the ruins at Ak-Beshim were taken for Balasagun, until excavations in the 1950s showed that Ak-Beshim had been abandoned by the eleventh century, too early to be Balasagun; it is now identified as Suyab. Bosworth, writing in 1988, still treated the exact site as uncertain, but the identification of Balasagun with the ruins around the Burana tower is the one used today, including by UNESCO.

Burana and the Silk Roads World Heritage listing

In 2014 the World Heritage Committee inscribed “Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor”, a serial listing of 33 sites across China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. All three Kyrgyz components lie in the Chuy Valley: the City of Suyab at Ak-Beshim, the City of Balasagun at Burana, and the City of Nevaket at Krasnaya Rechka. UNESCO’s description says the cities of the Chuy Valley are “witness to the power centre of the Zhetysu region from the 9th to the 14th centuries”, which is as good a summary as any of what the tower and its mounds represent.

How long does the Silk Road tour spend at Burana?

It is a stop on a travel day rather than a full day. After two nights at Issyk-Kul, the lake at the heart of the northern Kyrgyz route, the group has an early morning departure on Day 18 for Bishkek, which the tour page places 400 kilometres to the west, and pauses at Burana en route to view the tower and the nearby archaeological museum. The group reaches Bishkek in time for a late lunch, followed by an orientation, the History Museum and the Tsum, a Soviet-period supermarket, with dinner accompanied by traditional music and an overnight at the Park Hotel or similar.

The Stans tour stops here on Day 17, on its way from Bishkek to Issyk-Kul, and its tour page adds lunch with a Kyrgyz family living near the tower.

How far is Burana from Bishkek?

About 80 kilometres east of the capital, close to the town of Tokmok in the Chuy Valley. On the Silk Road tour it is reached from the other direction, on the long drive west from Issyk-Kul. For country-wide questions such as currency, food and when to travel, our answers to common questions about Kyrgyzstan are the place to start.

What Burana reveals about the Silk Road

Burana makes a simple point about the Silk Road: the routes created cities, and the cities depended on the routes. Sogdian merchants founded towns in the Chuy Valley because caravans and herds needed water and grass; Turkic khagans, Tang generals, Karakhanid princes and Qara Khitai rulers each made the valley a seat of power; and when the Mongol age redrew the map, Balasagun shrank to a village. What remains is a broken minaret, a scatter of foundations and a field of stone faces, enough to picture a capital that once sat at the meeting point of the steppe and the oasis.

That is why Burana sits where it does on our Silk Road journey, between the mountain lakes of Kyrgyzstan and the brick cities of Uzbekistan. Travelling as a small group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader, you reach the tower after crossing the Tian Shan from Kashgar, and from Bishkek fly on to Tashkent before continuing to Nukus, Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand, where the Karakhanid brickwork you saw in the Chuy Valley has its sequel.