The history of Mongolia

Mongolia occupies the high grasslands, mountains and desert of the eastern Eurasian steppe, a land where pastoral nomadism has been the dominant way of life for some three thousand years. A succession of nomadic empires rose here, beginning with the Xiongnu in the third century BCE, and in the thirteenth century the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his heirs built the largest contiguous land empire in history, stretching from Korea to Hungary. After the empire broke apart, the Mongols returned to the steppe, adopted Tibetan Buddhism and in the end fell under the Qing dynasty of China. Independence was declared in 1911, but for most of the twentieth century Mongolia was a one-party socialist state closely bound to the Soviet Union, until a peaceful revolution in 1990 made it a parliamentary democracy.

People have lived on the Mongolian plateau for hundreds of thousands of years, and modern humans were present by about 40,000 years ago. Cave paintings in the Khoid Tsenkher cave in the west and the rock art of the Altai mountains record hunting peoples who followed the game of the steppe. In the Bronze Age, from around 3000 BCE, herders of cattle, sheep and goats spread across the region, and in time the domesticated horse and the wheeled cart made long-range mobile pastoralism possible. The most striking monuments of the late Bronze Age are the deer stones, upright slabs carved with flying deer, of which hundreds survive, along with large stone burial mounds called khirigsuur. By the first millennium BCE the mounted archer, the felt tent and seasonal migration between pastures had shaped a way of life that would endure into modern times.

The first state on the plateau was formed by the Xiongnu. Around 209 BCE their ruler Modu Chanyu united the tribes and created a confederation reaching from Lake Baikal to the Great Wall. The Xiongnu defeated the first emperor of the Han dynasty in 200 BCE and forced China to pay tribute and send princesses as brides, until Han armies drove them back in the late second century BCE. The Xiongnu later split, and some historians link their western remnants to the Huns who reached Europe centuries later, a connection that remains debated.

A series of powers followed. The Xianbei, a people probably speaking an early Mongolic language, dominated the steppe from the second century CE, and the Rouran Khaganate from the fifth. In 552 the Rouran's vassals, the Göktürks, rebelled and founded the first Turkic empire, whose inscriptions in the Orkhon Valley are the oldest known texts in a Turkic language. After a period of submission to the Tang dynasty, Turkic rule ended with the Uyghur Khaganate, which from 744 ruled from a walled capital, Ordu-Baliq, on the Orkhon River and adopted Manichaeism. The Uyghurs were destroyed by the Yenisei Kyrgyz in 840. In the tenth century the Khitans, speakers of a language related to Mongolian, founded the Liao dynasty in northern China and controlled much of the plateau until they were overthrown by the Jurchen Jin dynasty in 1125.

In the twelfth century the plateau was divided among rival tribal confederations: the Mongols, Tatars, Keraits, Merkits and Naimans. Temüjin was born around 1162 into a Mongol aristocratic family, but after his father was poisoned by Tatars his family was abandoned and lived in poverty. Through alliances, especially with the Kerait ruler Toghrul, and a series of hard-fought wars, he defeated every rival. In 1206 a great assembly, a kurultai, on the Onon River proclaimed him Genghis Khan, universal ruler.

Genghis reorganised Mongol society for war. He broke up the old tribes and grouped the people into units of ten, a hundred, a thousand and ten thousand, led by commanders chosen for loyalty and ability rather than birth. A personal guard of about 10,000 men formed the core of the state. A code of law known as the Yassa, a script adapted from the Uyghur alphabet and a system of relay stations, the yam, held the expanding realm together. The Mongol army was made up almost entirely of mounted archers, each with several horses, able to cover great distances and to feign retreat and encircle their enemies.

The Mongol Empire expanded first against its neighbours. Genghis forced the Tangut kingdom of Western Xia to submit, then in 1211 invaded the Jin, taking their capital, Zhongdu, the future Beijing, in 1215. In 1219, after the governor of a Khwarazmian frontier town massacred a Mongol trade caravan, he invaded the Khwarazmian empire of Central Asia and Iran. Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv, Nishapur and other cities were stormed, and those that resisted were often destroyed and their inhabitants slaughtered. Genghis died in 1227 during a campaign against Western Xia, which was then annihilated.

His son Ögedei, elected great khan in 1229, completed the conquest of the Jin in 1234 and built a walled capital at Karakorum in the Orkhon Valley. He sent a great army west under his nephew Batu and the general Subutai. Between 1237 and 1240 it conquered the principalities of Kievan Rus', sacking Kyiv, and in April 1241 it crushed Polish and German knights at Legnica and the Hungarian army at Mohi in the Mongol invasion of Europe. News of Ögedei's death that December, and the need to choose a successor, drew the army back. Under Möngke, great khan from 1251, his brother Hülegü destroyed the Assassin fortresses in Iran and in 1258 took Baghdad, killing the last Abbasid caliph in the siege of Baghdad. The Mamluks of Egypt halted the Mongol advance at Ain Jalut in 1260.

At its height in the late thirteenth century the empire covered some 24 million square kilometres. Its conquests cost millions of lives; contemporary chroniclers reported massacres on a vast scale, and while their figures are often exaggerated, the destruction of cities, irrigation works and populations in northern China, Central Asia and Iran was real and long-lasting. The empire also joined East and West as never before. Under the so-called Pax Mongolica, merchants, envoys and missionaries travelled the Silk Road in relative safety, Persian and Chinese administrators served the same rulers, and goods, technologies and ideas moved across Eurasia. The khans tolerated all religions and exempted clergy from taxes. The same networks are thought to have helped carry the Black Death west in the 1340s.

Möngke's death in 1259 led to a civil war between his brothers Kublai and Ariq Böke, which Kublai Khan won in 1264. The empire then divided in practice into four states ruled by different branches of Genghis's family: the Golden Horde on the Russian and Kazakh steppe, the Ilkhanate in Iran and Iraq, the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia, and the realm of the great khan in the east. The western khanates adopted Islam and gradually merged with the peoples they ruled.

Kublai moved his capital to Dadu, on the site of Beijing, and in 1271 proclaimed the Yuan dynasty. By 1279 he had conquered the Song dynasty, uniting all of China under Mongol rule for the first time. His fleets failed against Japan in 1274 and 1281 and in Java and Vietnam, but his court, described by Marco Polo, was among the most splendid in the world. Kublai and his successors patronised Tibetan Buddhist lamas. The Yuan was weakened by factional struggles, inflation and famine, and in 1368 the rebel leader who founded the Ming dynasty drove the last Yuan emperor out of China.

The Mongol court retreated to the steppe, where its rulers, known as the Northern Yuan, kept the title of khan. For two centuries the Mongols were divided between the eastern Mongols and the western Oirats, and fought each other and the Ming. In 1449 the Oirat leader Esen captured a Ming emperor at the battle of Tumu. Around the end of the fifteenth century Queen Mandukhai and the young Dayan Khan reunited the eastern Mongols, dividing them into six tumens, among them the Khalkha, who are the core of the population of modern Mongolia.

Dayan Khan's grandson Altan Khan raided China until a peace in 1571 opened border trade. In 1578 he met the head of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, Sonam Gyatso, and gave him the title Dalai Lama, meaning ocean of wisdom. Buddhism spread rapidly among the Mongols, displacing much of the older shamanic religion, and in 1585 the monastery of Erdene Zuu was founded beside the ruins of Karakorum. Zanabazar, recognised in 1639 as the first Jebtsundamba Khutughtu, the spiritual head of the Khalkha, was also a celebrated sculptor whose gilded bronzes are national treasures.

The Manchus, who founded the Qing dynasty, absorbed the southern Mongols, now Inner Mongolia, by 1636, after defeating Ligdan Khan, the last great khan. In 1688 Galdan, ruler of the Oirat Dzungar Khanate, invaded Khalkha, and the Khalkha princes fled south and appealed to the Qing. At Dolon Nor in 1691 they submitted to the Kangxi Emperor, and Qing armies defeated Galdan in 1696. The Dzungars themselves were destroyed by the Qing in the 1750s in a campaign of extermination, often described as the Dzungar genocide, that killed most of their people.

For two centuries Outer Mongolia was a Qing frontier, governed through the hereditary princes and Qing officials at Urga, the present Ulaanbaatar, which grew around the moving monastery-palace of the Jebtsundamba Khutughtu. Buddhism flourished: by 1911 there were some 700 monasteries, and their monks made up about a fifth of the population. Chinese merchant firms dominated trade, and many herders fell deeply into debt to them. When the Qing began encouraging Chinese settlement and closer administration in the early twentieth century, Mongol resentment grew.

After the Chinese revolution broke out in 1911, the Khalkha nobility declared independence on 29 December and enthroned the eighth Jebtsundamba Khutughtu as the Bogd Khan, the theocratic ruler. The Republic of China refused to recognise the break, and the Kyakhta agreement of 1915 between Russia, China and Mongolia reduced the country to autonomy under Chinese suzerainty. In 1919, with Russia in civil war after the Russian Revolution, Chinese troops reoccupied Urga, only to be driven out in 1921 by the White Russian warlord Baron Ungern-Sternberg. Mongolian revolutionaries led by Damdin Sükhbaatar, with the Red Army, defeated Ungern and in July 1921 set up a people's government. After the Bogd Khan died in 1924, the Mongolian People's Republic was proclaimed, the world's second communist state after the Soviet Union.

Under the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, the country followed the Soviet model closely. In the late 1930s Khorloogiin Choibalsan, acting in concert with Joseph Stalin, carried out purges that killed at least 30,000 people, among them about 18,000 Buddhist lamas, and almost all of the country's monasteries were closed or destroyed. Herds were collectivised, a first attempt in the early 1930s causing revolt and the slaughter of livestock. In 1939 Soviet and Mongolian forces under Georgy Zhukov defeated the Empire of Japan at Khalkhin Gol on the eastern border. In 1945, as part of the Yalta settlement, Mongolians voted almost unanimously for independence, and China recognised the country in 1946.

Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal led Mongolia from 1952 to 1984 as one of the most loyal Soviet allies of the Cold War, joining the United Nations in 1961 and the Soviet economic bloc in 1962. Cities, industry, mining towns such as Erdenet, universal schooling and healthcare were built with Soviet help, and the Cyrillic alphabet replaced the traditional Mongolian script. During the Sino-Soviet split tens of thousands of Soviet troops were stationed in the country.

Inspired by events in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, young activists including Sanjaasürengiin Zorig began street demonstrations in Ulaanbaatar in December 1989. In March 1990 the ruling party's leadership resigned, and in July the first multiparty elections were held. Soviet troops and subsidies were withdrawn, and with the dissolution of the Soviet Union the economy collapsed before market reforms took hold. A new constitution in 1992 created a parliamentary democracy with a directly elected president. Power has since alternated between the renamed Mongolian People's Party and the Democratic Party. Mining, especially of copper, gold and coal, transformed the economy in the 2000s, with the Oyu Tolgoi copper mine as its flagship, though the boom also brought debt, corruption scandals and dependence on exports to China. Mongolia's foreign policy seeks a balance between China and Russia, its only neighbours, and ties with "third neighbours" such as Japan, South Korea and the United States.

In 2021 Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh was elected president. The 2024 parliamentary election, held for an enlarged 126-seat State Great Khural, returned a reduced majority for the Mongolian People's Party, and Prime Minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene formed a coalition with the Democratic Party. After youth-led protests he lost a confidence vote in June 2025 and was succeeded by Gombojavyn Zandanshatar, who in turn resigned in 2026 amid a parliamentary deadlock and was succeeded by the ruling party's chairman, Nyam-Osoryn Uchral.