A raid with one witness: the Tujue on the Western Wei frontier before the embassy of 545

The earliest act of the Göktürks in the Chinese histories is a raid on the Tabgaç-led Western Wei frontier in the twelfth month of Datong 8 (December 542 or January 543), three years before the first embassy to them. It rests on a single passage, the biography of Yuwen Ce in the Zhou Shu. The Bei Shi abridges the same biography and the Tongdian quotes it as an example of a stratagem; both are copies. No other text examined repeats the raid, not even the Zizhi Tongjian, which retells another episode of that biography. The note counts every mention of the Tujue and the Rouran in the Zhou Shu. The Rouran are named as raiders, or as expected raiders, of this frontier in seven passages before 552, the Göktürks in one. The chapter on the Göktürks has Bumin's people come to the frontier to trade. The only other report of Göktürk inroads before 545 is a sentence of the Zizhi Tongjian that no older text contains. If the raiders were the Ashina, they came from 1,800 to 2,100 km away; if the name is later than the event, the Wei of 542 knew them as someone else. The texts do not decide between the two readings. A figure of the same decade, "over 50,000 luo" of Tiele (Tölös) who submitted to Bumin, counts households and not soldiers. The text of the Zhou Shu follows the Zhonghua shuju edition (Beijing, 1971) for juan 27 and 50, transcribed from a scan of the print with the help of Claude Code (Anthropic); the other juan rest on a digital transcription not collated with the print. Chinese- and Japanese-language studies and the Cefu Yuangui could not be obtained. Not peer-reviewed. A supplement with the source texts, counts and scripts is a separate record.