and his face was wide. "Some of the “Hu", including the Köktürk Qaghan Mu-kan and the Qirghïz Turks, were reported by the Chinese to have Europeoid features, such as aquiline noses, red hair and light-coloured eyes." According to Chinese historian Xue Zongzheng, the original Ashina tribe members had physical features that were quite different from those of East Asian people. However, over time, members of the Ashina tribe intermarried with Chinese nobility, which shifted their physical appearance to a more East Asian one. According to Xue, having a physical appearance like a Sogdian was by the time of Qilibi Khan (Ashina Simo), an eighth generation descendant of Bumin Qaghan (founder of the First Turkic Khaganate), presented as a sign of mixed ancestry among the Ashina. This suggests that the transformation of the physical appearance of the Ashina tribe was almost complete by the mid-7th century AD. Similarly, Turkish historian Emel Esin noted that the early members of the Ashina tribe, much like the Yenisei Kirghiz, had more Europeoid features, but became more East Asian-looking over time, due to intermarriage. She also wrote that members of the Ashina tribe sought to marry Chinese nobles, "perhaps in the hope of finding an occasion to claim rulership over China, or because the high birth of the mother warranted seniority". Esin notes that the later depiction of an Ashina prince, the Bust of Kul Tigin, has an East Asian appearance. Genetics According to Canadian scholar Joo-Yup Lee, it is possible that the Ashina tribe belonged to the paternal haplogroup R1a1. The reasoning for this assumption is that the Ashina tribe was said to be closely related to the Yenisei Kirghiz people, and also to the Iranian Saka. The modern-day descendants of the Yenisei Kirghiz, the Kyrgyz people, have one of the highest frequencies of haplogroup R1a-Z93. This lineage is associated with Indo-Iranians who migrated to the Altai region in the Bronze Age, and is carried by various Türkic groups. American historian Peter Golden has reported that genetic testing of the proposed descendants of the Ashina tribe does seem to confirm a link to the Indo-Iranians, emphasizing that "the Turks as a whole ‘were made up of heterogeneous and somatically dissimilar populations". The paternal haplogroup identified in the proposed descendants of the Ashina was R1a-Z2124, the so-called "Pashtun cluster". The first genetic analysis on an early royal Ashina member (the daughter of Mugan Khagan, the