The Dzungar Khanate was an Oirat (western Mongol) khanate whose ruling elite adopted and patronized Tibetan Buddhism, ruling the grasslands of Dzungaria, in what is now northern Xinjiang, from the 1630s to the 1750s. Often called the last great nomadic empire of the steppe, it fought the Qing dynasty of China for three generations. Qing armies conquered it in 1755 and, after a Dzungar revolt, completed the destruction of the people and the khanate by 1758. Most Dzungars died in war and massacre or from the smallpox and famine the campaigns unleashed, and others fled abroad; a number of scholars characterize the killing as genocide.
For thousands of years, mounted herders had ridden out of the Central Asian grasslands to terrify the farming empires at their edges. The Dzungars were the last to do it. When the Qing emperor finished with them in 1758, the trouble was not that he had beaten an enemy but that he had emptied a homeland. Whole valleys stood silent, and the throne shipped in settlers from half a continent away to graze animals on grass that had lost its people.