ABSTRACT
There can be fewer blanker pages in the history of the civilized world than the story of Mongolia in the nineteenth century. A few travellers traversed parts of the country and reported on what they had seen, usually in Russian publications which remained as obscure and generally unknown abroad as the curiosities they described. For the study of the actual history of this remote, depopulated and apparently barbarous corner of the Chinese empire there has been, until quite recently, neither the enthusiasm nor the necessary documentation. It continued to remain quite outside the range of interest of the ordinary educated man and only in the last few years with the appearance of source material in Mongolia itself and the devotion to academic research of a handful of western scholars, has the curtain of ignorance been even slightly lifted for us, so that we can begin to observe Mongolia and her recent history as a phenomenon in itself, and not just as a reflex of what was happening to her great neighbours, Russia, China and Japan.
