A legend with a date: the Ashina wolf story and the fall of the Northern Liang, 439

Abstract

The ruling clan of the Göktürks, the Ashina, is known almost only through Chinese histories, which give three accounts of its origin: a wolf legend, a genealogy from the state of Suo and a flight of five hundred families to the Rouran. We count the witnesses behind each account in the four texts that carry them. The flight rests on the Sui Shu alone; the Bei Shi and the Tongdian conflate the two older histories and add no witness. The end of the wolf legend in the Zhou Shu and the sentence on the flight in the Sui Shu share six strings in the same order. Read figuratively, the legend narrates the flight: a people destroyed, survivors unable to fight or move, help from others, a stage at Gaochang, submission to the Rouran on the Golden Mountain. The Wei Shu places the forces of Pingliang, the clan’s recorded home, in the campaign that destroyed the Northern Liang in 439, and follows the remnant of the Liang house to Gaochang and under Rouran rule by 460. We date the flight to 439. Files: the article (PDF) and a supplementary archive holding the passages read, the binary coding table, the raw Chinese Wikisource transcriptions used (downloaded 10 October 2026), the two Python scripts that check every quoted Chinese string and compute the parallel text of Fig. 2, and the LaTeX source. The Wikisource transcriptions are available under CC BY-SA 4.0.