Noin-Ula burial site
The cultural affinity of the Xiongnu was with the peoples of southern Siberia and Central Asia; with the Chinese they exchanged arrows rather than culture: the Xiongnu shot with hand bows, while Chinese employed crossbows, although the Chinese had developed the crossbow from the traditional hand bows. Lev Gumilev elaborates the roots of the Chinese cultural influence found in the Noin-Ula cemetery. The Chinese culture was spread not only by material objects, but also by population admixture. There were populations of Xiongnu that have live under the Han rule as military allies. The Chinese migrated continuously to the steppes, the first big wave arriving in the 3rd century BC during the Tsin dynasty (Pin. "Qin"), when captured Chinese became subjects of the Chanuys, a process repeated during the following centuries. The numerous Han people who deserted and entered Chanuy service (for example, Vey Lüy, Li Lin) also taught the Xiongnu the subtlety of diplomacy and martial arts. Populations of the Xiongnu people also lived under Han rule, mostly serving as military allies under Han command. The capture of populations of Xiongnu by the Han forces in a series of Han versus Hun wars also contributed to additional ethnic integration of the north-central Asian neighbors.
Origin of the Huns
Other scholars have put forth evidence from non-European sources to support a link. Writing in third-century China, a Buddhist monk from northern Bactria (modern Afghanistan), named Zhu Fahu (in Chinese) or "Dharmarakṣa" (in Sanskrit), translated the ethnonym "Huṇa" from Sanskrit into Chinese as "Xiongnu". This is the earliest attested usage of the name Huṇa, and Étienne de la Vaissière argues that "the use of the name Huṇa in these texts has a precise political reference to the Xiongnu". A second important piece of textual evidence is the letter of a Sogdian merchant named Nanaivande, written in 313: the letter describes raids by the "Xwn" on cities in Northern China. Contemporary Chinese sources identify these same people as the Xiongnu. De la Vaissière, therefore, concludes that "'Hun/Xwm/Huṇa' were the exact transcriptions of the name that the Chinese [...] had rendered as 'Xiongnu'".
Another important historical document supporting the identification is the "Wei shu". Scholar Friedrich Hirth (1909) believed that a passage in the "Wei Shu" identified the Xiongnu as conquering the Alans and the Crimea, the first conquests of the European Huns. Otto Maenchen-Helfen was able to show that Hirth's identification of the people and land conquered as the Alans and the Crimea was untenable, however: the "Wei Shu" instead referred to a conquest of Sogdia by a group that Maenchen-Helfen identified with the Hephthalites, and much of the text was corrupted by later interpolations from other sources. De la Vaissière, however, notes that a Chinese encyclopedia known as the "Tongdian" preserves parts of the original "Wei Shu", including the passage discussed by Hirth and Maenchen-Helfen: he notes that it describes the conquest of Sogdia by the Xiongnu at around 367, the same time that Persian and Armenian sources describe the Persians fighting the Chionites. Sinor explicitly denied any connection between the Chionites and the Huns, claiming the former to have been Turks, unlike the Huns. However, writing in 2013, Hyun Jin Kim refers to a "general consensus among Historians that the Chionites and the Huns were one and the same". A fifth-century Chinese geographical work, the "Shi-san zhou ji" by Gan Yi, notes that the Alans and Sogdians were under different rulers (the European Huns and the Chionites respectively), suggesting some believed that they had been conquered by the same people.