Mongols

The Mongols are an East Asian people whose homeland lies in Mongolia, the Inner Mongolia region of China and parts of southern Siberia. They are the largest of the Mongolic-speaking peoples, numbering around ten million today, and in the thirteenth century they built under Genghis Khan the largest contiguous land empire the world has seen.

Chinese histories trace the Mongolic peoples back to the Donghu, a nomadic confederation of eastern Mongolia and Manchuria that was broken by the Xiongnu around 209 BCE. Its survivors, the Xianbei and Wuhuan, carried the line forward, and from the Xianbei came later groups such as the Rouran, the Khitans and the Shiwei. The name Mongol first appears in a tenth-century Chinese history, the Old Book of Tang, for a Shiwei tribe living along the Argun River. Whether the earlier Xiongnu were themselves proto-Mongols is still debated; many scholars see them as a mixed Mongolic and Turkic confederation.

For centuries the Mongolian steppe was dominated by others, first Turkic khaganates and then the Khitan Liao dynasty. In 1206 a council proclaimed Temüjin, known as Genghis Khan, ruler of all the Mongols, and his armies and those of his heirs then spread across Eurasia. The word Mongol widened into an umbrella name for the steppe tribes united under his rule, while many outsiders in Europe and western Asia called them Tatars. By 1279 the Mongols had conquered the Song and ruled all of China as the Yuan dynasty. As the empire broke into separate khanates, Mongol groups in the west adopted Turkic languages, Islam and local cultures and were absorbed into peoples such as the Tatars, Uzbeks and Kazakhs.

After the fall of the Yuan in 1368, Mongol rulers held on in the steppe as the Northern Yuan. The western Oirats and eastern Mongols competed for power, and Esen Taishi briefly united them in the fifteenth century, defeating a Ming army at the Tumu Crisis in 1449. Dayan Khan reunited the eastern Mongols during his long reign (1479–1543), and the Khalkha became the leading group in what is now Mongolia. In the seventeenth century the Manchu Qing dynasty absorbed Inner Mongolia, and after an Oirat invasion the Khalkha princes submitted to the Qing in 1691. The Qing destroyed the Oirat Dzungar Khanate in 1755–1758; some scholars estimate that around 80 per cent of the Dzungar population died from war and disease.

Outer Mongolia declared independence after the Chinese revolution of 1911 and later became the Mongolian People's Republic, closely tied to the Soviet Union. Under Soviet direction, Stalinist purges in the 1930s killed tens of thousands; estimates range from about 22,000 to as many as 100,000. Inner Mongolia remained part of China, and the Buryats and Kalmyks, Mongolic peoples of Russia, suffered heavy losses under Soviet rule, including the deportation of all Kalmyks to Siberia in 1943.

Most Mongols speak a Mongolic language, chiefly Mongolian, with Buryat, Oirat and smaller related tongues, and many also speak Russian or Mandarin. China counts over six million Mongols and Mongolia about three million, with smaller communities in Russia and abroad. The old faith was Mongolian shamanism, centred on sacred mountains such as Burkhan Khaldun. In 1576 the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism was made the state religion, and Buddhist monasteries became the main centres of learning and art, while shamanic practice survived alongside it. Mongolian use in Inner Mongolia has seen several periods of decline and revival.

Our 1100 map shows a broad territory labelled Mongols across the Mongolian steppe and southern Siberia, an approximate outline for the tribes before Genghis Khan's rise. Beside it lies the Khitan Liao realm, and on the 1200 map the Mongol Empire takes its place; later maps also show the Khalkha Mongols.