During the sixty-one years of the reign of the Kangxi Emperor, there were several feats that he was proud of, such as the capture of Aobai and Pingsan Domain, and the conquest of the Dzungar Khanate of Kaldan was one of the most proud of them.
From the 29th year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1690 AD) to the 35th year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1696 AD), the Kangxi Emperor personally led three large armies to conquer the Dzungar Khanate, and finally defeated it completely in the Battle of Zhaomoduo in the 35th year of the Kangxi Dynasty. After seven years, the once invincible Dzungar Khanate was defeated and retreated under the blows of Kangxi, and its Great Khan Kaldan was also killed the next year after the defeat of the army.
But in fact, this was not the case, Kangxi's three expeditions to Kaldan, each time more difficult, can win because there are a variety of unexpected factors, and after Kangxi's death, the Dzungar Khanate still existed, so that it cost the energy of the yongzheng and Qianlong emperors, and finally completely pacified it. The reason why Gardan is so stubborn and difficult to fight is mainly because its strength is not weaker than that of the Qing Dynasty, or even stronger.
Kaldan's rise stemmed from a covert assassination in the ninth year of the Kangxi Dynasty. In the ninth year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1670 AD), Kaldan's brother, the Sengge Taiji of the Mongol Dzungar Clan (Taiji was the title of the old Mongol prince), was secretly killed by the Chechen Taiji faction of the opposing faction. This assassination brought great chaos to the Dzungars, and for a time, everyone in the tribe was terrified. At the critical moment, Kaldan, the younger brother of Sanghataiji, stepped forward and gathered the remnants of the Sangha, led by him personally, to the Altai to conquer Chechen Taiji, according to historical records, Kaldan "took the lead alone, the Prancing Horse raised the gun, the deepest, killed a hundred and ten horses, and destroyed his army", and finally defeated Chechen Taiji. And Chechen Taiji himself was also killed in the melee, and his tribal population fell into the hands of Kaldan.
At this time, Kaldan was already a very famous living Buddha in Tibetan areas, and his ambitions since childhood were also above this, so when he was young, he pushed away the position of Taiji that his father originally wanted to pass to him, but after this great change in the tribe, Kaldan officially became the Taiji of the Dzungar Department after marrying his brother's wife, Anukoktun. After this, the Dzungars, under the leadership of Kaldan, began to embark on the path of strong rise. The reason why Kaldan was able to rise has a lot to do with the strategy he adopted at the beginning of his reign over the tribe, according to records, at that time, Kaldan changed his old habits and advocated "inviting and returning to the outside world, courtesy and courtiers", and internally it was "teaching and pasting, cultivating laws and regulations, believing in rewards and punishments", and at the same time, constantly developing equipment such as war attack equipment, so that the Dzungar department quickly began to become strong.
The gradual strengthening of the Dzungar clan also attracted many surrounding tribes to come to the aid, such as in the twelfth year of the Kangxi Dynasty, the Tenzin Hongtaiji of the Heshuo Special Department led the crowd to return, and similar to his active surrender, which abounded at that time. In this regard, Gardan adhered to the principle of not rejecting the comers, after all, he grew up in the grassland since he was a child, and he deeply knew that the size of the population determined the level of strength, so under the influence of this thought, the comprehensive strength of the Dzungar Department was also getting higher and higher.
At the same time, after the expansion of the territory controlled by Kaldan, it naturally bordered and dealt with Tsarist Russia at that time, for Tsarist Russia, Kaldan abolished the ban made by his father and brother not allowing Russians to enter the territory, and changed to active trade, friendly mutual market, and it is precisely because of this that Tsarist Russia will continue to contribute behind the back when Kaldan is against the Qing Dynasty. After this series of actions and constantly launching wars of expansion, by the seventeenth year of the Kangxi Dynasty, the entire western part of the desert was basically controlled by Kaldan, and he thus became the "Tenzin Bosoktu Khan" (the ordained king) of the region at that time.
By this time, Kaldan was no longer what he used to be, and he was no longer satisfied with just ruling the western region, but looked further afield. Just hundreds of years ago, Genghis Khan, the ancestor of Kaldan, with tens of thousands of Mongol cavalry, fought against the Jin Dynasty, destroyed the Western Xia, and finally established the Great Mongolian State, while the successive Mongol Great Khans after Genghis Khan expanded the territory of the Great Mongolian State to the extreme. What Kaldan wanted to achieve was the glory of his ancestors, and he wanted to establish a unified Great Mongolia again.
Of course, the reconstruction of the Great Mongol State did not happen overnight, and before that, Kaldan still needed to do a lot of things, so from the eighteenth year of Kangxi to the twenty-second year of Kangxi, Gardan spent several years to pacify the surrounding forces one by one, and finally, its sphere of influence reached an unprecedentedly broad point. From the Om River in the north, to the Nomadic land of the Kazakhs south of Lake Balkhash in the west, to the Ob River in the east, and to the entire southern Xinjiang region of the Tianshan South Road, all of which were included in the Gardan. With this strength, Kaldan began to set his sights on the Khalkha tribes of Mongolia. The Mongolian Khalkha was one of the staunchest allies of the Qing government in the early Qing dynasty, and as early as the Nurhaci period, it had close relations with the Qing government, also known as the Later Jin.
Later, after the entry of the Qing army into the customs and the Shunzhi period, the status of mongolian khalkha in the Qing Dynasty gradually rose. In other words, the Khalkha at that time was equivalent to the younger brother of the Qing Dynasty, and The idea of Garda to fight the Khalkha was undoubtedly not to give the Qing Dynasty face. But this was not what Kaldan was thinking about, he was thinking about how to unify Mongolia, and Khalkha was a stumbling block on this road. Therefore, in the twenty-seventh year of the Kangxi Dynasty, after preparations, Kaldan personally led a large army to invade Khalkha, and because of its fierceness, Tushetu Khan and others in the Khalkha department were caught off guard and eventually defeated.
At the same time, Tsarist Russia, which had always harbored ambitions, also smelled the opportunity and sent people to contact Kaldan and expressed his willingness to send troops to assist, so this made Kaldan's confidence soar, and in the twenty-ninth year of the Kangxi Dynasty, he once again mobilized tens of thousands of troops to prepare to take Khalkha in one fell swoop. The younger brother was bullied, and the Qing government, as the boss, naturally could not sit idly by, and under the pleading of many princes and nobles in the Khalkha Department, the Kangxi Emperor decided to send troops to face the Kaldan in the sky. This was the first of the Kangxi Three Expeditions against Kaldan, the famous Battle of UlanButong, which took place during this period. Many historical materials describe the Battle of Ulanbutong as a great victory for the Qing army, but in fact, the Victory of the Qing Army is not false, but the way it won was not by relying on military strength, but by relying on the large number of soldiers and the abundant grain and grass support, and the Kaldan who ran out of ammunition and grain was lost.
According to historical records, at that time, the Kangxi Emperor sent 100,000 troops, and appointed his brother Fuquan as a great general to go to conquest Gardan, after which, the Kangxi Emperor was not at ease and personally went to the front, but Gardan used camels to form a "camel city", so that the Qing army took a long time to break through this "Luo City". After the attack, the cunning Gardan used the strategy of false surrender to deceive Fuquan, and finally led the rest to escape back to his territory. Therefore, the first time Kangxi personally conquered Kaldan, its strategic purpose was not achieved, that is, Kaldan lost some soldiers and horses, and his own strength was not shaken.
After fleeing back, Kaldan encountered another fire in the backyard, and his nephew Tse-Alabutan took advantage of his army to march east, raiding his hometown and leaving Kaldan without a base. But even in this case, Kaldan's ambitions still did not stop, and by the thirty-first year of Kangxi, Kaldan, whose strength had been restored, actually wrote to Kangxi without shame, and put forward the request of "The Holy Father (referring to Kangxi) Junnan, I grow north". This kind of unreasonable request was naturally firmly rejected by the Kangxi Emperor, and the Kangxi Emperor also deeply understood that Kaldan was a huge hidden danger, and he would not be able to sleep unsteadily without destroying himself. Therefore, in the thirty-third year of the Kangxi Dynasty, the Kangxi Emperor ordered that the army be sent to requisition Kaldan.
In this conquest, the Qing army made extremely full preparations, such as investing 160,000 troops in terms of troop strength, and in addition, in order to maintain the supply of grain and grass, only the large trucks transporting grain were as many as 6,000 vehicles. Everything shows that Kangxi not only attaches great importance to Kaldan's opponent, but is also quite cautious. On the other hand, Kaldan contacted the Tsarist Russians again, proposing to send troops to help them jointly fight against the Qing army, and at the same time he also threatened to the outside world that Tsarist Russia would send 60,000 shotguns to help him fight back.
In order to disillusion the ambitions of Kaldan, and also to deter Tsarist Russia, the Kangxi Emperor himself once again came to the front line in the thirty-fourth year of Kangxi and sat in the Middle Route Army. With Kangxi's central strategy, the Qing army was almost desperate to kill the enemy in front of the battle, and at the end of that year, after several small victories, the Qing army encountered the main force of Kaldan in May of the following year. It is said that it is the main force, in fact, at that time, Gardan only had about two thousand people, and it was by relying on these two thousand people that Kaldan and the Qing army fought inextricably, and both sides lost a lot of horses. If it were not for the later general Feyangu's strategy of dividing his troops to attack the two wings of Gardan, it is estimated that Kaldan would have persisted for a while, but even after the flanks were disrupted, Kaldan still fled under the eyes of the Kangxi Emperor. It can be seen from this that the combat strength of Kaldan and his subordinates should not be underestimated, which is why the Kangxi Emperor attacked him like a great enemy.
After this battle, Gardan's comprehensive strength was severely destroyed, and he himself was no longer able to organize a counterattack against the Qing Dynasty, and finally in the thirty-fifth year of Kangxi, Kaldan fell ill and died by the Buyantu River after rejecting the Kangxi Emperor's surrender. However, although Kaldan died, the Dzungars were still not completely pacified, and after Kaldan's death, his nephew Tseyu Alabtan ascended to the throne of the Great Khan of the Dzungar Khanate. During the reign of him and his son Kaldanze Zero, the Dzungar Khanate had to give the Qing Dynasty a moment from time to time, in short, to keep the Qing Dynasty from peace. Including the Battle of Hetongpo, which caused the Qing army to lose a lot of troops after the Yongzheng Emperor succeeded to the throne, it took place during the reign of Gardanze Zero.
The real complete pacification and recovery of Dzungar was after Qianlong ascended the throne, but the reason why Qianlong was able to recover it, in addition to the strength of the Qing army itself at that time, the most important thing was the civil unrest that occurred in the upper echelons of Dzungar in the fifteen years of Qianlong, and it was this civil strife that made several Dzungar nobles defect to the Qing court, so with this opportunity, Qianlong was able to finally pacify Dzungar. If there is no civil strife in Dzungar, then the Qing Dynasty will not know how long it will take to calm down and recover Dzungar. This is why it is not an easy thing to say that the Qing court's great defeat of Kaldan and Dzungar was not an easy task, which lasted for three generations of emperors, repeatedly suffered serious illnesses, and was completely eliminated under various factors and circumstances. And there is a reason why Dzungar is so difficult to fight.
First, it is strong in its own right. As mentioned above, after the rise of the Dzungars, their strength was quite strong, and in its heyday, its territory reached more than four million square kilometers. Moreover, Dzungar's neighbor, Tsarist Russia, initially fought with the Dzungars many times, but each time it invaded, it was defeated by it, which shows the strength of the Dzungars. Moreover, during the reign of Kaldan, a series of reforms were carried out within Dzungar, including writing and various policies, which were a strong thrust for Dzungar. The Qing Dynasty from the Kangxi Emperor to the Yongzheng Emperor, this is also illustrated by the use of troops by Dzungar, if its strength is not good, it would have been eliminated long ago. It was later that civil unrest occurred that Qianlong had the opportunity to eliminate the Dzungars.
Second, geographical advantages. The territory of Dzungar is relatively western, and it is a place unfamiliar to the Qing army, so from this point of view, the Qing army does not have the advantage. After all, fighting in unfamiliar areas can easily get lost or be ambushed, but for the Dzungars who grow up here, it is a unique advantage. Moreover, the climate in the area where the Dzungars are located is also a test for the Qing army, with a large temperature difference between day and night, a lack of water resources, and the threat of a sandstorm from time to time, all of which, without exception, make the Qing army's combat more difficult. Maybe a small mistake will wipe out the Entire Qing Army.
Moreover, it was the Tsarist Russia that fueled the waves. After the Tsarist Russia could not defeat the Dzungars, they turned to support, and the reason for supporting them was nothing more than to obtain certain benefits, including that during the Dzungars' confrontation with the Qing Dynasty, the Tsarist Russia did not provide Dzungars with weapons and equipment. Under the above factors, it was really not easy for the Qing Dynasty to eliminate Dzungar, that is, under the efforts of the three generations of Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong, and with the help of various resources and factors, it was finally annihilated.