Telengit

The Telengit, or Telengut, are a Turkic people of the Altai mountains, dwelling chiefly in the Chuia steppe of the southeastern Altai. In the fourteenth century their princes, titled Biy, built their own ulus, which Russian documents of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries called the Teleut Land.

Long balanced between Russia and the Dzungar Khanate, the Telengit kept their independence until the Dzungars overran them in the eighteenth century, enrolling them as an ulus of four thousand yurts and resettling part of the people on the Ili River. When Dzungar power collapsed, these exiles returned to the Altai.

Organized into two Chui volosts, they remained beyond imperial control even after the other Altaians came under Russian rule in 1756. They were nomadic and semi-nomadic herders, living in felt yurts and following shamanic cults later overlain by Russian Orthodoxy.