This article examines the negotiation, content and significance of two capitulation agreements signed in August and December 1912 between Tibetan and Chinese representatives, which facilitated the withdrawal of Chinese troops from Tibet following the collapse of the Qing dynasty. Drawing on British and Chinese archival sources - no Tibetan-language originals having been identified - this research reconstructs the diplomatic process that culminated in these agreements and analyses their broader political and legal implications. This article contributes to addressing broader questions about state formation, diplomatic recognition and the intersection of military conflict with international law during the transition from imperial to modern state-building in Inner Asia. The article provides compelling evidence for Tibet's de jure independence from 1912 onward, challenging conventional narratives about Tibet's political status and offering new insights into the diplomatic foundations of Tibetan statehood.
This article examines how late Qing and early Republican Chinese and Mongol elites debated the idea of collective survival following the Qing's collapse. It considers 'independence' not as a move towards nationhood but as a solution discussed within a shared yet contested vocabulary of extinction and protection. Using print genres (such as translated histories, newspaper serials, etc.) and the 1912-13 telegrams between Yuan Shikai and the Bogd Khaan, it shows how reasoning about extinction involved three connected steps: recognising danger, naming the threatened group and justifying a protection strategy. Chinese reformers used concepts such as wangguo (state death) and shijian (history as a mirror), especially referencing Korea, to argue that only a successor state of imperial proportions could prevent dismemberment. Mongol elites, however, saw integration into the Republic of China as a form of extinction through assimilation by Chinese settlement, dispossession and administrative control, and viewed separation and, at times, Russian protection as ways to defend their nation, religion and territory. The Yuan-Bogd exchange demonstrates how the same precedent (Korea) and the same term ('protection') could lead to differing conclusions about which political form could sustain collective life.
The Treaty of Punakha of 1910 defined the relations between Bhutan and the British Empire shortly after the accession to the throne of Ugyen Wangchuck (1862-1926) and the birth of the Kingdom (1907). The agreement recognised the full internal autonomy of the Himalayan kingdom, while foreign policy remained subject to British guidance. Between late 1912 and 1914, the dispute over a salt tax levied by the Tibetan government on Bhutanese subjects in the enclave of Darchen (Dar chen) offers an interesting case for a clearer understanding of the Anglo-Bhutanese and Tibeto-Bhutanese relations in the years immediately following the Treaty and the fall of the Qing dynasty (1912). This paper reconstructs this episode, highlighting a substantial contradiction between Ugyen Wangchuck's formal recognition of British suzerainty and his despatch of a document to the authorities in Lhasa.
Nomadic peoples have traditionally lived without clearly demarcated boundaries, structuring their societies around social groups rather than fixed territories. The League-Banner system, introduced into Mongolian society during the Qing period, brought together two dimensions-social grouping and territoriality. However, the fundamental unit, the banner, functioned primarily as a social group rather than a territorial entity. The emergence of a new Mongolian state after the 1911 Chinese Revolution, together with increased interaction with modern sovereign states, particularly the Republic of China, challenged this tradition and led to the separation and redefinition of these two dimensions. This paper examines tensions within Mongolian society that had not surfaced under the Qing, drawing on evidence from several banners across Mongolia, particularly in Inner Mongolia, in the period following the 1911 Chinese Revolution.
A negdel was an agricultural cooperative that existed in the Mongolian People's Republic (MPR) between 1954 and 1992, primarily based on animal husbandry. While various research studies have analysed the negdel within the context of a socialist collective and an agricultural cooperative, this article provides an overview of the key roles played by the sum-negdel within the central planned economy of the MPR, and it aims to delineate its distinct characteristics. The Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) and the government of the MPR established an administrative and cooperative system known as the sum-negdel at the very beginning of Mongolian socialism, in 1959-60. This system was designed to facilitate direct management of the negdel as an agricultural cooperative organisation, and to fully integrate it into the central plan of the command economy of the MPR. At its core, the sum, the smallest administrative unit in Mongolia, and the socialist agricultural cooperative, or negdel, formed a single system characterised by shared land, population and labour force, and a unified purpose. Consequently, we propose that the history of the Mongolian economy, of agriculture, and of rural society during the socialist period be examined through the lens of the `sum-negdel' method, recognising the interdependence and unique dynamics of this combined system.
The toll of the protracted war in Ukraine on Russia's ethnic minority populations has added considerably to growing discontent and frustration with their declining cultural sovereignty and their experiences of long-term second-class status within the Russian Federation. Exacerbating this are seeming regional inequalities in drafting and war casualties, and the fear that some ethnic minority groups, such as Buryats, may constitute a disproportionate percentage on the Russian side (Vyushkova & Sherkhonov 2023). Following Russia's `partial mobilisation' in September 2022, thousands of men from the Buryat region have fled to Mongolia and elsewhere to escape conscription. This article, based on ethnographic fieldwork among them, explores the ways in which Buryat men in Ulaanbaatar reflect on their ethnic and national positioning at a time of great uncertainty. It asks whether their emigration, at least temporarily, from Russia, and their grievances towards it, can productively be analysed as a mode of resistance or refusal.
The 1913 execution of George Grant, a Scottish employee of the Chinese Telegraph Administration, by an Inner Mongolian military group has generated a productive Orientalist archive. This study focuses on the Orientalising roles that popular genres, such as boys' adventure fiction and cowboy westerns, play in narrating Grant's execution. These texts generate a European and North American imaginative geography about Mongolia. Soon after Grant's death, journalist reports and travel accounts depict Grant in ways similar to the rhetorical strategies of boys' adventure fiction. Grant appears as a role model of an ideal working-class British imperial hero, displaying such traits as `perseverance', `devotion to duty' and self-sacrifice. Forty years after Grant's death, Schroder and Easton (1953) fictionalise Grant's execution and export the Mongolian frontier to the American West. Throughout this textual history, Mongolia becomes a depository for ideas and anxieties about masculinity.
Aduuchin, the dance of the `Mongolian horsemen', was composed in the 1960s by the Mongolian choreographer Ts. Sevjid. It epitomises the Mongolian national dance (Mongol & uuml;ndesnii b & uuml;jig) repertoire, both by its evocation of the horsemen of the steppes, and by its style, which combines the movements of local dances with Russian ballet technique. The riding gestures in the dance are perceived as typically Mongolian, so much so that a movement in the `Gangnam Style' video, by the Korean pop singer Psy, has been seen as an international `theft' from Mongolian dance. However, my archive research has established a concealed link between this dance and the Polovtsian Dances by the Russian choreographer Fokine (1909). Through the prism of an anthropo-history of dance, this article examines choreographic circulations and porosities throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the way in which some salient gestures are stabilised as vectors of collective identity.
Anthropological and regional studies have covered in some depth the symbolic and agentive qualities of certain bodily substances, such as bone, blood and flesh. This article reviews some of the contexts and accounts that involve bone marrow in Mongolia. These include its consumption as food, its use as a political metaphor, its role in traditional Mongolian medicine, its significance in patrilineal kinship and biomedical discourses, and its place in health entrepreneurship. The article introduces qualities and capacities of bone marrow in each of these contexts, calling for further attentions to the margins and contextual overlaps that appear as particularly productive sites for making and remaking the substance.
This article explores Russia’s integration tests for migrants, introduced in 2015 and still in use today. These tests cover Russian language, history and law, and they serve as tools for cultural integration while reinforcing Russia’s vision of a Eurasian civilisation. The article analyses the content of four main preparatory textbooks for the tests and the broader sociopolitical context of xenophobia and national identity construction.
