Khorasan Tegin Shah

Turk Shahi king · reigning 680 – 738 CE · Tang ally

Khorasan Tegin Shah is the longest-reigning Turk Shahi king and the dynasty’s most successful diplomat. He inherits the Kabul-Zabul kingdom from Barha Tegin in 680 CE and rules until 738 — a fifty-eight-year reign that spans the high tide of Umayyad and early Abbasid pressure on the Hindu Kush.

The Tang correspondence

Khorasan Tegin Shah’s diplomatic engagement with the Tang court is the best-attested foreign policy of any Turk Shahi king. The Tang dynastic annals record his embassies under the name Wu-san T’ê-chin Shai (= Sanskrit Shri Tagino Shaho), and Janos Harmatta’s reconstruction of the succession sequence after him is built around the Tang record. His son or successor Phromo Kesaro (Chinese Fu-lin-chi-so; reigning 738–745) is invested by the Tang court as King of Kashmir and Greater Bolor.

Sources

• Tang dynastic annals (T’ang shu, Hsin T’ang shu)
• Janos Harmatta, “The Turk Shahi succession” (Pakistan Archaeology, 1979)
• Kuwayama, Across the Hindukush of the First Millennium (2002)
• Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia (2021)