ABSTRACT
The Social situation From 1691, the year of the Convention of Dolonnor, Mongolia's world position underwent a radical change. Up till then the various khans, though not entirely independent in action, had played some sort of international role. They had negotiated on more or less equal terms with Russia and Jungaria, as well as on terms of less than equality with the Manchus, whose nominal vassals they were. They had been able to trade with Russia and to send down their trade missions to China as they had done through the previous century or two. Nomadizing with their followers they were not restricted to particular areas, though the biggest movements did admittedly take place only under the stress of compulsion. But now Mongolia was to become a frontier province of the Manchu empire, cut off as far as was practicable from contact with Russia. She was to be organized on feudal-military lines, so as to constitute a reserve of mobile soldiery ruled by hereditary princes who were to be bound to the Manchu royal house by a system of hierarchical ranks and titles, by salaries and rewards, and by marriage alliances. Their allotted role was to be the protection of the Manchu dynasty in China. To use the words of K' ang Hsi himself:
The Manchus pursued a double policy towards the Khalkha nobility. On the one hand they broke the power of the khans by reducing them in practice to the level of authority and influence of the other banner princes when in 1691 they reorganized the three aimaks of Khalkha into thirty-four banners: over the next
century or so these were further subdivided till their number was almost tripled. But on the other hand they tried to preserve the pure nomadic character of the Mongols. They made little change in the structure of society, except to elaborate the feudal system with a proliferation of previously unknown noble titles. The basic division of society into nobles and commoners remained as before. But administratively they imposed far-reaching innovations, trying to forestall the contamination of the Mongols by contact with Chinese immigrants or by the penetration of Chinese trade and agriculture. They policed the frontier with Russia by means of a continuous chain of watch-posts manned by Mongol soldiers, which formed at the same time a frontier zone where the Chinese were even more strictly forbidden to resort. Late in the eighteenth century internal watch-posts were set up, too, to check the movement of Chinese inside the country. They mobilized and equipped the Mongols as soldiers, and even after the Jungar menace was eliminated and most Manchu troops were withdrawn in 1761, they maintained a regular Mongol army which was trained by such age-old methods as the execution of regular large-scale battue-hunts.
