Battle of Talas
751 battle between the Abbasid Caliphate and the Chinese Tang dynasty
The Battle of Talas (Chinese: 怛羅斯戰役; pinyin: Dáluósī Zhànyì; Arabic: معركة نهر طلاس, romanized: Maʿrakat nahr Ṭalās) was an armed confrontation between the Abbasid Caliphate along with the Tibetan Empire against the Tang dynasty and its allies in 751. In July of that year, the Tang and Abbasid armies clashed at the Talas River over control of the regions surrounding the Syr Darya. The Tang army under Gao Xianzhi was defeated by the Abbasid army under Ziyad ibn Salih and Karluk mercenaries. Sources differ on whether the Karluks defected to the Abbasids or if they were Abbasid allies from the start. The defeat marked the end of Tang influence in Transoxiana and halted Tang westward expansion.
After the battle, the caliph dispatched an envoy to the emperor, who arrived in December 752 to negotiate the restoration of diplomatic relations. Chinese prisoners captured at Talas in 751 are said to have introduced papermaking to the peoples of West Asia, although this account is disputed by several findings.
Location
The exact location of the battle has not been confirmed but is believed to be near Taraz and Talas, on the border between present-day Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The Chinese name 怛羅斯; Dáluósī was first seen in the account of Xuanzang. Du Huan located the city near the western drain of the Chui River.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Battle of Talas” as 751 battle between the Abbasid Caliphate and the Chinese Tang dynasty. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q492415. Authority coordinates are 42.525, 72.233. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of Talas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.