Buddhism in the West Uyghur Kingdom and Beyond

During the workshop, on which some of the papers contained in this volume are based, we dealt with the spread of Buddhism in various empires in Inner Asian History, among others the so-called steppe empires. Before dealing with the topic of my paper, I would like to draw the attention to the fact that there is a certain amount of disagreement in scholarly literature regarding the relationship of these steppe empires to powerful Chinese dynasties. Barfield designated the former as “shadow empires” that “arose as secondary phenomena”² only because of military expansion of the latter to which they attached as