Dingling

The Dingling were an ancient people who appear in Chinese historiography in the context of the 1st century BCE.

The Dingling are considered to have been an early Turkic-speaking people. They were also proposed to be the ancestors of Tungusic speakers among the later Shiwei people, or are related to Na-Dené and Yeniseian speakers.

The origins of the Dinglings are frequently linked to the earliest nomadic groups mentioned in Chinese annals, specifically the Xunyu (獯鬻), who appear in records dating back to the Xia Dynasty (c. 2000 BC). This connection was most notably established by the scholar Wang Guowei, a towering figure in early 20th-century Chinese historiography. In his groundbreaking phonetical studies of bronze inscriptions, Wang concluded that the names Xunyu, Xianyun, and Guifang were merely historical variations of a single ethnic lineage that eventually emerged as the Xiongnu. Under this influential framework, the Xunyu are identified as the foundational proto-Turkic stock emerging as early as the 3rd millennium BC. Since the Dingling are described in later chronicles like the Wei Shu as descendants of the Chidi (Red Di) a group Wang Guowei categorized within this same ethnic complex they are regarded as a primary northern branch of this ancient lineage. This establishes a direct historical thread from the 2000 BC Xunyu through the Dingling to the later Turkic tribes.

Modern archaeologists have identified the Dingling as belonging to the eastern Scythian horizon, namely the Tagar culture.