The Xiongnu temporarily abandon their interest in…

The Xiongnu temporarily abandon their interest in China and turn their attention westward to the region of the Altai Mountains and Lake Balkash, inhabited by the Yuezhi (Yueh-chih in Wade-Giles), an Indo-European-speaking nomadic people who had relocated from China's present-day Gansu Province as a result of their earlier defeat by the Xiongnu.

Endemic warfare between these two nomadic peoples reaches a climax in the latter part of the third century and the early decades of the second century BCE; the Xiongnu are triumphant.

The Yuezhi now migrate to the southwest where, early in the second century, they begin to appear in the Oxus (the modern Amu Darya) Valley, to change the course of history in Bactria, Iran, and eventually India.