This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Uyghur Khaganate, Manichaeism's chief remaining patron anywhere in the world, was destroyed in 840 CE by a Kyrgyz invasion that scattered the Uyghur people from their Mongolian homeland and ended, in a single military campaign, the steppe empire that had sponsored the faith as its state religion for seventy eight years.
With the imperial state that had protected it gone, Manichaean temples and clergy across former Uyghur territory in China lost official protection almost overnight, left exposed in a way the faith had not been since Shapur I's own death in Persia many centuries before had ended a different period of royal favor.
The collapse was as sudden as the adoption had been unexpected. A religion that had gone, within a single reign, from a persecuted underground movement to an empire's official faith now lost that empire just as quickly, with no comparable patron anywhere else in the world left standing to take its place.
What the Khaganate's collapse changed for Manichaeism's spread was the loss of its last major state sponsor anywhere. A religion that had gone from Persian court favor to Roman persecution to Central Asian state religion now had no empire left willing or able to protect it, leaving it to survive, if it survived at all, without imperial cover for the first time in centuries.