Khalkha Mongols

The Khalkha are the largest group of Mongols and the core population of the modern state of Mongolia. They emerged as a distinct grouping in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries under the descendants of Dayan Khan, and their princes ruled the steppes of northern Mongolia until they submitted to the Qing in 1691. In Mongolia's 2020 census they numbered about 2.66 million people, close to 84 percent of the country's population.

After the fall of the Yuan dynasty in China, the Mongols of the steppe were divided among rival lords. Dayan Khan (1464 to 1517), a descendant of Genghis Khan, organised his subjects into tümen, large military and territorial units, and the Khalkha formed one of the three tümen of his Left Wing. Two of his sons were set over them. Alchu Bolad became the ancestor of the Five Khalkha, who lived east of the Greater Khingan range in what is now Inner Mongolia, while his son Geresenje received the Seven Khalkha of the north. The Manchus later called these the Inner and Outer Khalkha. The origin of the name itself is uncertain; Mongolians have long linked it with the Khalkhin Gol, a river in the east of the country.

Geresenje's descendants founded the great princely houses of the Tüsheet Khan, the Zasagt Khan and the Setsen Khan, and in 1725 the Qing created a fourth, the Sain Noyon Khan. The northern Khalkha fought regular wars with the Oirats to the west. One of the most famous princes, Abtai Sain Khan (1554 to 1588), campaigned against the Oirats, adopted the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, and in 1585 founded the monastery of Erdene Zuu, built partly with stones from the ruins of the old imperial capital of Karakorum. After meeting the third Dalai Lama in 1587 he banned shamanism among his people. Meanwhile the southern Five Khalkha were conquered by the rising Manchus and absorbed into their banner system.

Abtai's great-grandson Zanabazar was proclaimed the Khalkha's supreme religious leader in 1639, at the age of four, and became the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu. He was also a celebrated sculptor in bronze. His travelling monastic camp eventually settled on the site of today's Ulaanbaatar. When the Dzungar ruler Galdan invaded Khalkha territory in 1688, Zanabazar and some 20,000 refugees fled south to seek the protection of the Kangxi Emperor. In 1691, at Dolon Nor, the three Khalkha khans declared themselves vassals of the Qing, and Qing armies went on to defeat Galdan. Khalkha remained under Qing rule for over two centuries.

To the north, Khalkha khans had resisted Russian expansion into Transbaikalia from the mid-seventeenth century, but the wars with the Dzungars ended that resistance. Mongol groups cut off by the new border around the Selenge valley gradually came to be counted as Buryats.

When the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911, princes and lamas in Khüree proclaimed Mongolia's independence on 1 December, and the eighth Jebtsundamba Khutuktu was enthroned as the Bogd Khan. That state, centred on Khalkha lands, was the forerunner of today's Mongolia. Khalkha Mongolian, the dialect of central Mongolia, became the basis of the Cyrillic written standard and is in effect the national language. Most Khalkha live in Mongolia, while small Khalkha banners survive in Inner Mongolia and Qinghai in China, descended from groups that moved south in the seventeenth century.

Our 1650 map draws a territory labelled Khalkha Mongols across northern Mongolia and parts of southern Siberia, an approximate outline of the lands under the Khalkha khans, bordered by the Dzungar Khanate, the Qing Empire and Russia.