> Instead of clashing with the Chinese Empire to their south, the Uighurs forged a durable but uneasy alliance with the Tang dynasty in China, a rare feat for a steppe empire. The Uighurs traded their surplus horses with the Chinese in exchange for silk. They then traded that silk with merchant allies in the fertile lands to their west.<p>This paragraph seems to betray a deep misunderstanding of historical Chinese relations with steppe peoples to the north. This was the status quo. The Chinese empires more often than not tried to buy off the nomads with markets and the nominal tributary system. It was more often than not ruinously expensive and fraught with failure for the non-foreign Chinese empires to attempt to subjugate the steppes in the pre-gunpowder era; far cheaper to play them off against one another and create a buffer zone. This goes back more than 2000 years, to the Han dynasty and the Xiongnu, if not earlier.
That's one thing I've never understood about the zombie shows. Instead of showing people banding together to deal with the problem, they almost always show people acting selfishly and tearing each other down. That's always seemed the biggest fallacy of those shows.