What is the relationship between Tocharian in the Western Regions of China and the Great Moon Clan?

The Tocharians are the Yueshi, and the Kushan Yueshi who went south to establish the Kushan Kingdom belong to the same Yueshi tribe, and the Yueshi is the name of the Han people. After the decline of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, the Serbs began to invade Bactria, and then the Kushan Yueshi (i.e., the Great Yue) of the Yue clan conquered Bactria before Zhang Qian arrived. According to the ancient Greek historian Strabo in the 1st century BC, in the 2nd century BC "the Tocharians ......occupied the Greco-Bactrian kingdom".

Under the rule of the Yue, Bactria was known as Tocharistan in the West because the Yueshi were known as Tocharians in the West.

The title of Xirong first came from the Zhou Dynasty, the Zhou people called themselves Huaxia, and then called the people of the four directions around China Dongyi, Nanman, Xirong, and Beidi respectively, in order to distinguish Huaxia, Xirong is the general name of the ancient Chinese people to the Western ethnic minorities.

Tocharian is Yueshi, and Yueshi is the name of Tocharian in the Han Dynasty. However, there is still a great deal of controversy in the historiography about its origin and development.

As for Xirong, it is actually the general name of the Western ethnic minorities in the Zhou Dynasty, because of the limitations of historical data and people's understanding at that time, it is impossible to distinguish in detail which ethnic groups are included in Xirong. But the tribes like the Qiang are certainly included in it.

No, not a contemporaneous nation.

The Yueshi Guati Gutti and the Tocharian Tukri Tokaroi are two ethnic groups. Pre-Qin, Yueshi were distributed near the Hexi Corridor, and Tocharian was distributed in eastern Xinjiang. Because the Yue clan was close to the Central Plains Dynasty, the Central Plains Dynasty used Rong (Ge Shi guadi) to refer to the ethnic groups in the west in general.

Later, under the invasion of the Xiongnu, Tocharian moved westward, occupied Bactria, and established Bactria (Hanyin). The Yueshi followed one after another, and occupied Great Xia. Later, the Kushan Department of the Yue clan established the Kushan Kingdom.

The Tocharians may have been mistaken for Cypriots by Sima Qian.

In the West, the Yueshi people are known as the TochariansAnd there is such a definition: a branch of proto-Indo-Europeans, originating in the Ural Mountains and South Siberia, moving south into the Tarim Basin, and reaching the Hexi Corridor in the east. During the Han Dynasty, the Yueshi were defeated by the Xiongnu and moved westward, conquering Bhaktri Paidanya and the Ganges River valley, and establishing the Kushan Dynasty.

The Y chromosome of the Tocharians is haplogroup R1A1A-M17.

A more detailed discussion is as follows: the Tocharians were one of the first ancient ethnic groups to settle in the north and south of the Tianshan Mountains, and their traditional territory was in the Taklamakan Desert, with the Tianshan Mountains to the north, the Kunlun Mountains to the south, the Gobi Desert to the east, and the Pamir Plateau to the west.

The Tocharians described in the Chinese character records were people with large beards, deep eye sockets, and high noses. They have played an important role in the emergence and development of the civilization of the Western Regions and even the entire Chinese civilization. Wheat originated in West Asia and was introduced to China by the Tocharians from the West.

The Loulan civilization, which has a thousand-year history of civilization, the Qiuci civilization, which has had a significant impact on the history of Chinese Buddhism, and the Turpan civilization, which integrates various cultural factors from the East and the West, were also created by the Tocharians.

However, there are great differences in the cognition of Chinese and foreign scholars about the origin of the Yueshi people. The theory that seems to prevail is that the Tocharians belonged to an early branch of the Indo-European-speaking peoples, and were distinguished from the later Iranians-Greeks-Latins-Germanic peoples.

As an early Indo-European speaking group of peoples, they migrated east and south in large numbers during the last global diffusion of Indo-Europeans. The main direction is to enter northern India and western China and the remote areas of northern China.

There are also different voices, namely the theory of indigenous Chinese origin. Jiyue's is the "Yu Clan" in "Yi Zhou Shu Wang Hui Jie", and the "Yu Knowledge" or "Yu Clan" in "The Biography of Mu Tianzi". Regarding their ethnic affiliation, ancient Chinese texts such as the Wei Luo refer to them as the Qiang people, and the Old Tang Book refers to them as the Rong people.

The Book of the Later Han Dynasty: The Biography of Xiqiang records that Yue's "speech is slightly the same as that of Qiang", indicating that Yue's language is likely to belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family.

In addition, Naranyan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in the United States, proposed that the Indo-European language groups themselves were formed in present-day western China, because the Yueshi people have lived west of the Yellow River and the western regions of China since ancient times. Some Chinese scholars even believe that they originated in Shanxi, China.

These arguments are all very good, at least to show that before there was no concept of a state, humanity completed the integration of human races. Therefore, it is a mistake to apply the concept of the state to the ancient race, and before the existence of the state, the yellow and white races were all over the East, and they appeared in a syncretistic attitude. So, when studying the question of the identity of these people, we might as well look at their own attitudes after the emergence of the concept of the state.