Mongolian

The Mongols are the nomadic pastoral peoples of the Mongolian steppe, speaking Mongolian and bound by descent from the tribes united under Genghis Khan. The name first appears in Tang records as a Shiwei tribe of the Ergune River. In 1206 Temüjin took the title Genghis Khan and welded the steppe tribes into one nation whose conquests ran from China to Eastern Europe; his grandson Kublai founded the Yuan dynasty, which ruled all of China from 1279 until 1368, when the court withdrew north as the Northern Yuan.

After 1368 the Mongols divided between the eastern Borjigin khans and the western Oirats. The Oirat leader Esen crushed a Ming army at the Tumu Crisis of 1449 and briefly claimed the khan title. Dayan Khan reunited the eastern tribes around 1500 into six tumens, from which the Khalkha became dominant. His grandson Altan Khan raided Beijing in 1550, accepted Ming investiture as Prince of Shunyi in 1571 and built his capital at Guihua, the present Hohhot; his embrace of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism in the 1570s made it the faith of the Mongol elite, and in 1601 his great-grandson became the fourth Dalai Lama. The last great khan, Ligdan, died fighting the rising Manchus in 1634, and Inner Mongolia submitted to the Qing by 1636. After the Dzungar Galdan overran Khalkha lands in 1688, the Khalkha princes submitted to the Qing at Dolon Nor in 1691 and were organised into banners under Qing rule.