Modu Chanyu

According to Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, Modu was heir to his father, the chanyu Touman, but his father sent him as a hostage to the Yuezhi. Modu escaped, trained his horsemen to obey the whistling arrow, and in 209 BC seized power.

He defeated the Donghu in the east and the Yuezhi in the west and brought the northern peoples under his rule. In 200 BC he surrounded the Han emperor Gaozu at Baideng and through the heqin peace made China send gifts every year. Modu created an army organised in units of ten and a state divided into left and right wings, a structure that lived on in later Turkic states.