ABSTRACT
What are we to understand by the expression 'Modern Mongolia'? Where are we to begin our story, and what lands and peoples are we to include? The solution to this problem is not at all obvious, either geographically or historically. Until the present century there has never been a 'Mongolia' whose boundaries were fixed and accepted. Even the great Mongol empire of Genghis Khan and his successors was an unstable, indeterminate grouping of tribes which flowed out in all directions as far as it could, engulfing lands and peoples which were never to be assimilated. We should cast our bounds far too wide if we tried to include all those parts of Asia where Mongols live or a form of the Mongol language is spoken, for even after the empire had disintegrated the Mongols maintained their nomadic pattern of life, and terrible civil wars and forced migrations again and again scattered them over the face of central Asia, so that today more Mongols live beyond the frontiers of the Mongolian People's Republic, the only independent Mongol state, than within them. Kalmuck Mongols have dwelt around the lower Volga for the last three hundred years, though many of this group migrated back to China in 1771, under their name of Torguts, and were settled in Jungaria, recently depopulated by the armies of the Manchu empire. The Kalmucks experienced a temporary break in the continuity of their life in south Russia in 1943 when their republic was abolished and they were deported to Siberia: in 1957 the Kalmuck Autonomous Republic was once again restored. Considerable numbers of Kalmucks also live outside Eurasia altogether, in settlements in the USA. Buriat Mongols live round the shores of Lake Baikal and farther eastwards inside the Soviet Union, and have been at home there at least since the time of
Genghis Khan. A mixed people known as Monguors live in Kansu in China, near the city of Hsi-ning, and Mongols nomadize in the wastes of Tsaidam and Kukunor. Remnants of Mongolspeaking people are still to be found in Mghanistan. The largest group of Mongols is formed by the one and a half million or so now living within the borders of China, where they form a small minority of the population of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region.
