Mongolia

The Creation of Inner Mongolia Inner Mongolia was created as a separate entity from the rest of Mongolia by the Manchus, because the Mongols in this region submitted to the Manchus in the mid-seventeenth century, about 60 years before Khalkha, or what later became known as...

Introduction Buddhism was still flourishing in Mongolia even at the beginning of the 20th century. But between 1937 and 1939, Stalinist forces destroyed all the monasteries, with the exception of several temple buildings that remained partly intact, killed masses of lamas, and...

Introduction to Buryatia In the year 2010, there were 286 000 Buryats in the Republic of Buryatia, in Russia, who constituted 30% of the population of the republic. In Chita district, Buryats make up just 5–6% of the population, and Buryats living in the Aginskoye subdistrict...

Introduction Kalmykia is situated in the lower Volga-Don river basin, to the northwest of the Caspian Sea. There are 170,000 Kalmyks, and they constitute approximately half of the population of both the capital, Elista, which has a total population of 90,000, as well as the...

First Contacts with Buddhism After the fall of the Han Dynasty in 220 CE, Buddhism became strong in northern China, which was fragmented and ruled by a succession of non-Han Chinese people and states. The greatest patron of Buddhism among them was the Toba Northern Wei Dynasty...

Monastic sites differed not only in their size and number of their lamas, the circumstances of their foundation, and their arrangements or layouts, but also in their specific functions. These included the types of temples and monastic colleges they had and thus the ceremonial...

The Monguors 蒙古尔 or Tu people 土族 (known as Hor pa in Tibetan) are located in what is now the Tuzu Autonomo­us District 土族自治县 of Qinghai 青海, north of Xining 西宁, between Xi­ning and the Nanshan 南山 Moun­tains. Their main city is Huzhu 互助. The Monguors, who are also known as the...

The Kokonor Mongols (Tib. sTod-sog) are the descen­dents of the Khoshut (Qoshot) Western Mongols, origi­nally from East Turkestan, who defeated the Tsang forces of Central Tibet in the sev­en­teenth century and gave temporal rule over Tibet to the Fifth Dalai Lama. There...

Introduction to Tuva From the sixteenth to the nineteenth of April 1990, together with Russian Buddhist scholar Andrey Terentyev, I visited the Tuva Autonomous Republic. Tuva is north of Western Mongolia, bordering the western Altai Region. It is at the southernmost reaches of...

Chinggis Khan In 1207 CE, news reached Tibet that Chinggis Khan (Sog-po Ching-ge-se Kh’ang) (1162 – 1227) had conquered the Tangut Empire in Gansu and Amdo. The Tibetans had a close relation with the Tanguts at this time. They had already been engaged in translating Buddhist...