Balasagun

Balasagun was the capital of the Karakhanids in the Chu valley, founded in the ninth century and soon the leading city there, replacing Suyab. The poet Yusuf Balasaguni, author of the Kutadgu Bilig, was born here in the eleventh century. The Qara Khitai took it in 1134 and again in 1210, after a hard siege and heavy plundering. In 1218 Genghis Khan's army entered without a fight and called the place Gobalik, "good city". It never recovered from the sacking.

By 1337 Balasagun was a town of Muslims, Buddhists and Nestorian Christians in decline. The last mention of it as a city dates from 1312, and its Nestorian graveyard was still in use in the fourteenth century. The plague that swept Central Asia in 1338–1339, and grew into the Black Death, is thought to have finished it; the city ceased to exist in the middle of the fourteenth century. What remained was a village among ruins southeast of Tokmok. An earthquake in the fifteenth century took the top half off the Burana tower, an eleventh-century minaret that had stood about 45 metres high.