The Oyirad Family Trees Discovered in Kazan, Tatarstan:
With a Special Reference to Amursanaa, the Khoyid Chief
50th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Kazan 2007
Early in 1995 the present reporter obtained from Kazan, Tatarstan, the copy of what supposedly were Juun Ghar family trees of the 18th century. Professor Mir- Kasim A. Usmanov of the Kazan University was kind enough to prepare and send the Xerox copies of the precious materials. Upon her examination they turned out to contain genealogical tables of three Oyirad tribes, the Juun Ghar, the Khoyid and the Tor- ghuud. The Torghuud family tree is the shortest among them, listing the names of only ten princes. It is significant, however, that one of those Torghuud princes is Shereng. When the Juun Ghar power was destroyed by the Manchus in 1755, Shereng took refuge among the Russians, who placed him in the care of the Volga Torghuuds. Then in 1771 he joined the Torghuud exodus from the Volga back to the old Oyirad home on the Ili. The Juun Ghar family tree lists 49 princes. More interestingly, as many as 77 princes are listed in the Khoyid family tree. The Manchu-Chinese source Hsi-yu T’ung-wen-chih records the names of only fifteen Khoyid princes, and Mongolian and Oyirad chronicles contain even less of them. The situation goes to prove how valuable the Kazan family trees are in studying history of the Oyirad tribal confederation.
The Khoyid family tree, registering fifteen generations counted from the founder, lists the name of Amursanaa in its twelfth generation. This is the very Amursanaa, who was instrumental in the destruction of the Juun Ghar Empire, assumed the traditional imperial title khong tayiji in an unsuccessful bid for independence from the Manchu power, sought refuge among the Russians and died of smallpox in Siberia. The so-called Juun Ghar family trees from Kazan have almost certainly been copied from what Amursanaa and his retinue carried with them on their flight into Russia. The lost originals must have been written in the todo alphabet, which were sent to Kazan, then the cultural center of Siberia. In Kazan they were phonetically transcribed into the Cyrillic alphabet, cooperatively by a person able to read the todo and another able to write the Russian. That the reason why each personal name is written with accents and the spellings of personal names reflected the peculiarities of the local dialect of Russian spoken among the Tatars.