# Battle of Talas The **Battle of Talas**, fought in 751 on the Talas River in present-day [[Kyrgyzstan]], pitted a [[Tang Dynasty]] expeditionary force under Gao Xianzhi against an Abbasid army and its allies. The Tang force collapsed when its Karluk Turkic auxiliaries defected mid-battle. The engagement was small by the standards of either empire but settled the frontier between the Chinese and Islamic spheres in Central Asia for centuries, and the An Lushan rebellion four years later ensured the Tang never returned in force. By long tradition, Chinese prisoners taken at Talas carried papermaking west, seeding mills at Samarkand and then Baghdad — the technology transfer that underwrote the manuscript and translation culture of the [[Islamic Golden Age]]. The specific attribution is disputed by modern scholarship; the westward transmission of paper in this period is not. > [!note] Stub > Spine stub. Expand: the campaign context and Gao Xianzhi's Central Asian expeditions, the Karluk defection, the papermaking transmission historiography, and the battle's place in Chinese and Islamic memory.