Mongolia's history: the steppe empires' homeland and its long wait for recognition

Who held the Mongolian plateau before the Mongols

The oldest monuments still standing on the plateau are the deer stones of the Late Bronze Age. UNESCO dates them to about 1200 to 600 BCE: stone steles up to four metres tall, carved with stylised stags and set in complexes with burial mounds called khirgisüürs and sacrificial altars. About 1,500 are known across the Eurasian steppe and more than 80% of them stand in Mongolia, which is why four complexes on the Khangai ridge were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2023.

Statehood on this territory is usually dated from the Xiongnu, whom Modu Shanyu brought into a confederation in 209 BC and whose capital lay on the Orkhon River. Their ethnic core is still argued over; Alexey Okladnikov, Paul Pelliot and Byambyn Rinchen held it to be Mongolic. A Han army was ambushed at Baideng in 200 BC and a treaty of 198 BC left everything north of the Great Wall to the Xiongnu. UNESCO added the cemetery complexes of the Xiongnu nobility to its list in 2026.

The empires that followed were Xianbei, Rouran, Turkic, Uyghur and Khitan, and most of them governed from the same valley. The Rouran, between 330 and 555, were the first to use "khagan" as an imperial title. The Göktürks rose against them in 552 in a revolt that began among ironworkers in the Altai. The Uyghur khagan Bayanchur founded Ordu-Baliq on the Orkhon in 751, and the Yenisei Kyrgyz destroyed the Uyghur state in 840. The Khitan Liao, from 916 to 1125, held the basins of the Kherlen, Tuul and Orkhon.

The Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape, inscribed in 2004, gathers that sequence into 121,967 hectares about 360 kilometres south-west of Ulaanbaatar: Turkic memorial sites of the 6th and 7th centuries, the Uyghur capital at Khar Balgas, the Mongol capital at Kharkhorum and the monastery of Erdene Zuu. Herders still graze the grassland, and the UNESCO description treats that grazing as part of what was inscribed.

How Temüjin turned the steppe tribes into one state

In the 12th century the plateau was split among five confederations: the Khamag Mongol in the Onon, Kherlen and Tuul basins of the Khentii, the Tatars around Lakes Hulun and Buir, the Keraites on the Tuul, the Merkits on the Selenge and the Naimans between the Altai and the Khangai. Temüjin, born in 1162, was nine when his father Yesükhei was poisoned by the Tatars in 1171. He defeated the Merkits in 1189, the Tatars in 1202 and the Naimans in 1204, and a congress of Mongol aristocrats on the Onon proclaimed him Chinggis Khan, Genghis Khan in most English sources, in 1206.

He broke the old tribes up and reorganised the population into 95 units of a thousand warriors each, built from households grouped by tens. The Wikipedia history of Mongolia works backwards from that system to a population of at least 750,000 and about 95,000 cavalry, on the assumption of four people a household and every adult man a soldier. After the Naiman defeat a Naiman official, Tata Tunga, spread the Uyghur alphabet among the Mongols, and it became the basis of the classical Mongol script.

The campaigns that followed reached northern China, Khwarazm, Iran and the Rus principalities. Genghis Khan died on 16 August 1227 and is reputed to be buried on Burkhan Khaldun in the Khentii, one of four mountains he made sacred during his lifetime; UNESCO inscribed the mountain in 2015 on that association and on its place in The Secret History of the Mongols. The sources disagree about Karakorum. UNESCO's description of the Orkhon Valley says Chinggis Khaan established it in 1220, the Wikipedia article on the empire dates the capital to 1235, and Britannica says it was built by his son Ögödei, "not Genghis Khan, as is sometimes said".

Why the empire left the homeland behind

Each of Genghis Khan's four sons received a domain, with the youngest, Tolui, keeping the eastern homeland. The empire held together through Ögödei, elected great khan in 1229, through Güyük and through Möngke, who died in 1259. The succession was then fought out between two brothers with different ideas of what the conquest was for. Britannica describes Arigböge as closer to Genghis Khan's view that the people of the felt tents should stay on the steppe and draw tribute from farms and cities. Kublai, proclaimed at Kaiping in 1260, preferred to rule the sedentary world, won by 1264 and moved the capital from Karakorum to Dadu, on the site of present Beijing.

The Yuan dynasty he founded ended in 1368, when Ming troops drove Toghon Temür out of Dadu and later sacked Karakorum. What survived on the plateau is called the Northern Yuan in the historiography, and for most of the next three centuries it was a contest between Genghisid princes in the centre and east and the Oirat of the west, who claimed no descent from him. Dayan Khan, proclaimed as a child in 1470, reunited the Genghisid groups; his grandson Altan Khan of the Tümed founded Hohhot in 1557.

How Tibetan Buddhism returned

Altan Khan met the head of the Gelug school in 1578, gave him the title dalai and received the title King of Dharma in return. Abtai Khan of the Khalkha founded the monastery of Erdene Zuu in 1585. In 1639 a boy of the Tüsheet Khan line, Zanabazar, was recognised as an incarnation and enthroned in 1640 as the first Javzandamba, the head of the Mongolian Buddhist church. Britannica records that the Qing later ruled that no descendant of Genghis Khan could be found to be an incarnation and that the Javzandamba must always be discovered in Tibet.

How the Qing absorbed the Khalkha

The Manchu organised the southern fringe as a military reserve before they took Beijing in 1644, and Britannica dates the administrative idea of an "Inner" Mongolia to that arrangement. The Khalkha princes of the north, attacked by the Oirat under Galdan, submitted to the Manchu at Dolon Nor in 1691 in exchange for guarantees of their titles. The Qing campaigns against the Oirat ended in their destruction in the 1750s; Britannica gives 1759 for the end of the conquest and the Wikipedia article gives campaigns of 1755 and 1758. A revolt in western Khalkha in the 1750s, led by Chingünjav alongside the Oirat leader Amursanaa, was the last general war the Mongols fought in that period.

Outer Mongolia was then run through the four hereditary Khalkha khanates, with Manchu officials, ambans, at Khüree, Uliastai and Khovd. Mass Chinese settlement was forbidden in the north. Chinese firms controlled the trade in tea, rice and tobacco and lent at high interest, and Britannica describes the currency at the start of the 20th century as livestock, tea bricks, silver ingots and foreign coins. By 1911 Outer Mongolia had 700 monasteries whose 115,000 monks made up 21% of the population.

How independence was declared twice in ten years

When the Qing collapsed, the Manchu amban was ordered out of Khüree in December 1911 and the eighth Javzandamba was proclaimed Bogd Khan of an independent Mongolia that claimed Inner Mongolia and Tuva as well. Russia signed a treaty with his government in 1912 but read it as recognising autonomy. In January 1913 Mongolia and Tibet signed a treaty at Niislel Khüree declaring themselves free of Manchu rule and separate from China. A Russian, Chinese and Mongolian treaty at Kyakhta in 1915 then obliged the Bogd Khan to accept autonomy under Chinese suzerainty.

Chinese troops under Xu Shuzheng occupied the capital in 1919 and deposed him. The Mongolian People's Party was founded in June 1920 by nationalists who had made contact with the Bolsheviks. In February 1921 the White Russian cavalry of Baron Ungern-Sternberg drove the Chinese out and restored the Bogd Khan under the baron's control. A Mongolian force under Damdin Sükhbaatar, with Soviet units, took the Mongolian part of Kyakhta on 18 March 1921 and reached the capital in July, and independence was declared again on 11 July 1921. That date is now the first day of Naadam.

What the People's Republic did to the monasteries

The Bogd Khan died in May 1924, the search for his reincarnation was blocked, and a Great Khural adopted the first constitution in November 1924, naming the country the Mongolian People's Republic and its capital Ulaanbaatar, "red hero". Bodoo, the first prime minister, had been executed in 1922, and Danzan followed in 1924. Collectivisation from 1929 brought monastery-led uprisings that were put down by April 1932.

How many died in the purges

From September 1937 to April 1939 arrests organised by Khorloogiin Choibalsan and Soviet NKVD officials reached the party, the army and the clergy. The death toll is given differently by each source. Britannica says some 35,000 perished, more than half of them lamas. The Wikipedia article on the People's Republic gives 20,000 to 35,000 executed in Mongolia and the Soviet Union and cites official figures of about 17,000 monks killed. The country article says at least 30,000 people died, 18,000 of them lamas, and that the number of monks fell from 100,000 in 1924 to 110 in 1990. Two former prime ministers, Peljidiin Genden and Anandyn Amar, were shot in Moscow in 1937 and 1941. Britannica records that about 30,000 victims had been cleared by the end of the 2000s.

What changed in the land and the script

A conference in Moscow in 1931 agreed a Latin script for Mongolian, official use began in 1933, and Cyrillic replaced it in 1945. Soviet and Mongolian troops under Georgy Zhukov destroyed a Japanese force on the Khalkh River in August 1939. After the war the collectivisation of the herds was completed in the 1950s, Darkhan was founded in 1961, and the first stage of a Soviet and Mongolian copper mining venture at Erdenet went into operation in 1978.

How Mongolia's statehood was accepted abroad

At Yalta in February 1945 the Allies agreed to keep the status quo in Mongolia, which was still recognised internationally as part of China. The Republic of China agreed in the Sino-Soviet treaty of that year to recognise Mongolian independence, and in keeping with the treaty a referendum was held on 20 October 1945, in which by official figures 100% of the electorate voted yes. Mongolia and the new People's Republic of China confirmed mutual recognition on 6 October 1949.

The Republic of China, by then in Taiwan, withdrew its recognition and in 1955 vetoed Mongolia's application to the United Nations. Mongolia was admitted on 27 October 1961, together with Mauritania, after the Soviet Union threatened to veto the admission of newly independent African states. Relations with the United Kingdom followed in 1963 and with the United States in January 1987. Taiwan's foreign ministry announced on 3 October 2002 that it recognised Mongolia as independent.

Between the two neighbours, the Sino-Soviet split decided which way the country leaned. China withdrew the labourers building its factories and flats in 1962, and a mutual aid treaty with the Soviet Union in 1966 carried a secret annex allowing Soviet troops and missiles to be stationed in Mongolia. They left between 1987 and 1992.

How the democratic revolution unfolded in Ulaanbaatar

Demonstrations for political freedom began in Ulaanbaatar on 10 December 1989, and the Mongolian Democratic Association, whose coordinator was Sanjaasürengiin Zorig, held two large rallies that month. After further rallies and a hunger strike on Sükhbaatar Square, the Politburo resigned on 9 March 1990. Amendments that year removed the party's guiding role and legalised opposition parties, and at the first multiparty elections in July 1990 the revolutionary party won about 85% of the seats in a 430-seat People's Great Khural. The fourth constitution came into force in February 1992, and the last Russian troops left in September 1992.

The revolutionary party won 71 of 76 seats in June 1992 and lost power for the first time in 1996, when the Democratic Alliance took 50 of the 76. It came back in 2000 with all but four seats. After the June 2008 election, protesters burned the party's headquarters in Ulaanbaatar; five people were killed and some 700 arrested. In 2005 the remains of Sükhbaatar and Choibalsan were moved from their mausoleum in front of the State Palace, and a monument to Genghis Khan was unveiled there in July 2006 for the 800th anniversary of the Mongol state.

Two amendments have changed the constitution since then. In 2019 the president was limited to a single six-year term, and in May 2023 the State Great Khural was enlarged from 76 to 126 members, 78 elected in 13 districts and 48 from national party lists, in time for the election of 28 June 2024.