Northern Yuan

The Northern Yuan was the Mongol state on the steppes of Mongolia after the Mongol rulers of China were driven out in 1368. Its rulers, descendants of Kublai Khan, kept the title of Great Khan and the dynastic name Yuan, and saw themselves as the rightful rulers of China, while the Ming dynasty built walls against them.

In 1368 Ming armies took Dadu, today's Beijing, and the last Yuan emperor, Toghon Temür, fled north to Shangdu, Xanadu, and then to Yingchang, where he died in 1370. His son Ayushiridara continued to rule from Karakorum, and Mongol forces fought the Ming, defeating a Ming invasion in 1372. In 1388, at Lake Buir, a Ming army defeated the khan Tögüs Temür and captured tens of thousands of people. Tögüs Temür was killed soon after by a rival, Yesüder, a descendant of Ariq Böke, and the line of Kublai was interrupted.

In the following decades, the Mongols were divided between the eastern Mongols, including the Khalkha and Chahar, and the western Mongols, the Oirats. Strong men who were not Genghisids, such as the Oirat leader Esen and the eastern chief Arughtai, held real power, while Genghisid khans reigned as figureheads. The Yongle emperor of Ming led five campaigns into Mongolia between 1410 and 1424. In 1449 Esen defeated a Ming army at Tumu and captured the Zhengtong emperor. Esen later killed the khan and declared himself khan, but was murdered in 1455.

Around the end of the fifteenth century, Batu Möngke, a young descendant of Kublai, became khan, with the support of Queen Mandukhai, the widow of the previous khan, who married him and led armies herself. As Dayan Khan, he reunited the eastern Mongols, defeated rival chiefs and reorganised the Mongols into six tumens, in two wings, placing his sons over them. His reforms established the political structure of the Mongols for the following centuries.

Dayan Khan's grandson Altan Khan, ruler of the Tümed in today's Inner Mongolia, became the most powerful Mongol leader of the sixteenth century, though not Great Khan. He raided China repeatedly, besieging Beijing in 1550, until the Ming agreed in 1571 to give him a title and open border markets for trade. He founded the city of Hohhot. In 1578 he met the Tibetan lama Sonam Gyatso at Kokonor and gave him the title Dalai Lama, "ocean-like guru", posthumously applied to his two predecessors. The Mongols converted to Tibetan Buddhism, and Buddhist monasteries, such as Erdene Zuu, founded in 1585 near the ruins of Karakorum, spread.

In the early seventeenth century, the Manchus rose in the east. The last Great Khan, Ligdan Khan of the Chahar, tried to reunite the Mongols by force, which drove many Mongol leaders to ally with the Manchus. Ligdan, also a patron of Buddhism who had the Kanjur translated into Mongolian, was defeated and died of smallpox in 1634 near Kokonor. In 1635 his son Ejei surrendered to the Manchu ruler Hong Taiji, giving him the imperial seal of the Yuan, which Hong Taiji used to support his claim to found the Qing dynasty in 1636. The Khalkha Mongols of Outer Mongolia submitted to the Qing in 1691 at Dolon Nor, after being attacked by the Dzungars.

Our maps show the Northern Yuan on the 1400, 1492 and 1500 maps. Its largest outline, about 6.4 million square kilometres on the 1400 map, stretches across today's China, Russia and Mongolia. The basemap draws it more widely than the Mongols' real control. Ulaanbaatar's site lies inside it throughout.