Eastern Sayan Mountains

The Eastern Sayan belongs to the mountain country between southern Siberia and northern Mongolia, where the headwaters of the Yenisei and streams feeding Lake Baikal divide among high ridges. Its southeastern heights include Munku-Sardyk, the highest summit of the Sayan system. In the wider range, mountains became an imperial boundary: the Treaty of Kyakhta of 1727 established a frontier between Russia and the Qing dynasty. This political division crossed a region with much older patterns of movement and livelihood. Sayan reindeer husbandry has been traced by the ethnographer Sevyan Vainshtein to the Samoyedic taiga population around the beginning of the first millennium. Ancestors of the Evenks lived beside these mountains and may also have participated in domestication. Hunting and herding thus form an important part of the regional past, alongside the later history of states drawing borders.