alternatehistory.com

At the turn of the second millenium, Central Asia prospered. Under the rule of the Abbasids, Tahirids, and Samanids, the land was irrigated intensively, allowing miles of farmland to stretch outward from the Amu Darya on land that had once been desert. But when bad harvests hit, the rulers of Central Asia used Uighur and Mongol intermediaries to buy wheat from the land “beyond the northern mountains." We now know this land as the upper valley of the Gorlog [1].

The lands “beyond the northern mountains” have always made their own unique contributions to the story of humanity. During the 1600s and 1700s, the North Asian lands now collectively named Xiboliya (a Chinese transcription of a Volgak name for a state that once existed in the far west of the region) built on prior interactions with the wider world to become an integral part of the great Eurasian network of culture, politics, and trade, while avoiding the influence of rapacious nation-states until the 20th century.

Historians often wonder what sort of mark a stronger Ming Dynasty might have left on North Asia. Even in the 1600s, when it was well past their prime, it still managed to conquer the Jurchen tribes and add their lands to the Chinese patrimony. The murder of the upstart chieftain Nurhaci, blown to bits by a cannon the Ming bought from the Dutch, was a significant achievement. A resurgent Ming might have built upon it by conquering Tibet, Yarkand, the disunited lands of the Mongols, or more [2]. However, Li Zicheng’s Shun Dynasty, founded in 1665, would have no such ambitions for many centuries. The reign of the Dashing King was spent on reclaiming the borders of the Ming Dynasty and eliminating the Ming restorationists. All of this gave the fractured realms of the Mongols ample time to stitch themselves together.

The eviction of the Mongols from China in the late 1300s tore open the tribal divides in their society. In the Northern Yuan, as the Mongol rump state of the Yuan was known, the Tantric Buddhism of the old Yuan elite fell by the wayside, and a tribe’s prestige could be quantified by the number of wives it provided for the princes of the Chinggisid ruling clan. By such measures, it is possible to track the rise of the Oirats over the early 1400s. Though the Oirat were practically identical to the Mongols in language and lifestyle, they were not considered to be “Mongols” since they could not prove their ancestry, adoptive or otherwise, to Chinggis Khan. The Oirat were classified as descendants of Khasar, one of Chinggis’s brothers. Those who could prove a connection to Genghis himself kept the title of “Mongol” for themselves, and regarded the Oirat as part of the Hoy-in Irgen—the “Forest People” of the North Asian taiga. Despite this, the Oirats built up such close links with the ruling Chinggisids that they effectively took over the state, ruling in the name of the true khans. Oirat power reached its peak under Esen Taishi, the de facto ruler of the Mongols under he was killed in 1455 for, among other things, failing to properly ransom the Ming emperor captured during the Tumu Crisis. His death opened up a vacuum which many ambitious rulers tried and failed to fill. The most successful was Dayan Khan, who successfully made the Northern Yuan state into a meaningful entity between 1479 and 1517. He organized the Mongols into six tumen— armies of pastoralists with roughly 10,000 men and their families. The tumen of the north or Left Wing were the Khalkha, Chahar, and Uriyangkhan. Those of the south or Right Wing were the Ordos, Tumed, and Yongshiyebu. Dayan Khan led the administration of the Left Wing from his seat in Chahar, while his son managed the Right Wing. The Oirats were not counted as Mongols, and were left to form four Oirat tumens of their own. This arrangement took into account the pastoral nature of the Mongols by creating administrative units of moving people, not static territories, and it had the weight of Chinggisid tradition behind it. However, by 1590, the tumens of the Northern Yuan began breaking down, giving way to smaller, more independent units known as ulus, or nations. The Northern Yuan had become a symbolic entity, and it could not stop the ulus from migrating, dispersing, bullying their neighbors, or even receiving subsidies, trading rights, and grand titles from the Ming Dynasty. The southern Tumed strongman Altan Khan, ruling from his stronghold at Koke Khota, temporarily reversed this process by conquering much of Mongolia, including Chinggis Khan’s old capital at Karakorum. Some of Altan Khan’s policies would have long-term impacts— his construction of the Erdene Zuu Monastery near the site of Karakorum secured a place in Mongolia’s future for Tibetan Buddhism, and he gave the title of “Dalai Lama” to Sonam Gyatso, who was then the head of the Gelugpa Buddhist sect and ruler of Tibet— but his empire would not long outlive him. The attempts of Ligden Khan, the last strongman of the Northern Yuan, to create a pan-Mongol state were stymied by the hatred which the south Mongols of the former Right Wing held for him. He died in 1634 as a thoroughly disappointed man.

Meanwhile, the Oirats had been forced to retreat to the far west, and their Four Tumens fended off attacks from the Mongols to their east until they developed the strength and unity for an offensive. The Dzungar tribe of the Oirats, which had been responsible for protecting the eastern frontier, came to assume a leadership role in an increasingly cohesive confederation. By 1635, Baatar Khuntaij (also known as Erdeni Batur), chief of the Dzungars, defeated his domestic enemies [3] and declared himself Khan of all the Oirats. Baatar Khuntaij had pan-Mongol ambitions, but it was up to his son Galdan Khan to realize them. Galdan’s biggest enemies were the Khalkha tribes of north-central Mongolia, who were united by Altan Khan’s gift to Mongolia: Buddhism. Zanabazar, the son of a Khalkha khan, had been identified as a reincarnation of a Tibetan Buddhist scholar. As the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu (a phrase of Tibetan origin meaning “Precious and Holy Master”), Zanabazar stood as the spiritual and eventually political leader of the Khalkha.

Galdan’s Dzungars had significant Buddhist legitimacy of their own. Baatar Khuntaij had helped the Khoshut, an Oirat tribe, establish a new khanate in Tibet that defended the country while allowing the Dalai Lama to maintain his office's traditional control over internal administration and religious affairs. In return for his efforts, the Dalai Lama granted Baatar Khuntaij the title of Khong Tayiji, recognizing him as a spiritual descendant of Chinggis Khan. However, Zanabazar was an actual direct descendant of Chinggis Khan, and his gave him legitimacy among the Khalkha that Galdan simply could not match. Though the Northern Yuan had become a cruel joke as of late, the bloodline of Chinggis was regarded with nothing but reverence. That reverence could not stop war from erupting between the Dzungars and the Khalkha in 1688, and could not secure Shun assistance for the cause of the Khalkhas [4]. It could not prevent the Dzungars from taking over the lands of the Khalkha, bringing the tribes of southern Mongolia into their orbit, and eventually taking the Imperial Seal of the Mongols from the Chahar descendants of Dayan Khan. But it could guarantee a favorable postwar situation for Zanabazar and for Mongolian Buddhism. Galdan Khan, now ruling from Chinggis Khan’s old capital at Karakorum, struck a deal with Zanabazar that resembled the arrangement the Khoshut rulers of Tibet had with the Dalai Lama. The Jebtsundamba Khutuktu and all his successors would continue to rule the Khalkha tribes in the name of the Khan. The rest of Mongolia would remain under the more direct rule of the Dzungar administration, but the Dzungars would support Buddhism in their territories and allow the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu the final say on the policies of monasteries and other religious affairs across the whole realm. The resulting Oirat-Buddhist half-theocracy would rule the Mongols until the Shun Dynasty’s northern conquests in the 1920s.

In the 1600s, however, the Shun were to be wooed, not defended against. In 1691, to appease the Shun emperor’s doubts over the new unified Mongol government, Galdan Khan sent embassies and trade caravans carrying greetings, wishes for the peaceful coexistence of the two nations, and— more importantly— thousands of furs. Fur headdresses had become fashionable among wealthy women of the late Ming dynasty— the increasingly close integration of China into the world economy had increased the local supply of silver and given more people the ability to spend on luxury goods. The rising demand for furs, and the Ming government’s ability to call on Jurchen and Mongol contacts to meet that demand, were important symbols of a “status quo” that the chaotic transition of the 1600s had destroyed. The gift of furs, which the Shun government spun as a tribute payment, showed domestic critics that the new dynasty was capable of maintaining the people’s happiness and the high stature of the nation in relation to foreigners.

Before Mongolia could go hunting for more furs, however, it needed to consolidate. The economy revolved animal husbandry, with most of the population consisting of arad— nomadic, pastoral commoners. However, even before unifying Mongolia, the Oirats had made important steps toward diversification. Attempts were made to develop grain production in Western Mongolia, with a workforce consisting of Kazakh and Chinese captives from the wars with the western tribes. After the wars of unification, arad who had lost their herds of goats and cattle during times of conflict were persuaded to accept work on the farms, growing wheat and processing it into hay. The state’s network of granaries developed in parallel with the monasteries, which in some cases housed farms and tenant workers alongside herds of livestock on their considerable estates. Workshops of Mongol, Turkic, and Chinese craftsmen created some products like saddles, but others— metal kettles and muskets, for instance— were imported in bulk from Shun China. The mining and processing industries needed to produce such things in Mongolia itself did not yet exist, because during the early Dzungar era economic development was overshadowed by cultural renaissance. A new and rapidly growing class of scholar-monks simplified the classical Mongol script into a “clear” version that conformed to contemporary phonology. With this new script, the monks produced masterpieces. They created original works on medicine, philosophy, and history, and produced masterful translations of the Tibetan Buddhist canon. These translations were not entirely faithful— the Mongols, who had gained an understanding of the world from the campaigns of Chinggis, omitted or corrected the fantastical depictions of countries, peoples, and animals in the Tibetan “geography” texts— but this only made them more remarkable in their commitment to understand, to record, and to propagate. Though some critics of the new status quo worried privately about the number of young men who disappeared into the monasteries, creating paintings and writings but ultimately contributing little to the prosperity or strength of the realm, the campaigns against the Volgaks and the emergence of the Northern Fur Road soon showed that the Mongols had plenty of martial prowess and enterprising spirit left.

Mongol records in the early 1700s begin to record the appearance of “enormous warships, with decks made of thick planks and bodies enclosed by layers of dense logwood.” The Mongols already knew about the Volgaks and their boats— the Mongols had helped the Volgaks conquer the sometimes-belligerent Kazakhs— but the Volgaks had never sent so many explorers so far eastward. The Volgaks knew how to navigate the steppes, and their boats let them take advantage of the rivers that bound North Asia together. Worse, every man among the Volgak exploration parties was an experienced musketeer and seemed intent on proving it. The Volgaks became fearsome raiders who appeared suddenly, extorted payments of grain, meat, and fur from the local population, and quickly departed to another target. Now, the Volgaks’ boats were on the Gorlog, and Mongolia needed to act. Citing the Volgaks’ violent raids on the populations north of Mongolia as a cause of concern, the Mongols intervened directly in the conflict between the Volgaks and the tribes of the Gorlog. Muskets purchased from the Shun enabled the Mongols to maintain technological parity early in the fight, but the Mongols soon realized that they did not have to fight at all. The Volgak raiders, it turned out, had little personal loyalty to their decentralized and kingless state. A stronger state might have been able to send out more loyal servants and command their loyalty even after their departure, but the Volgak state had very little influence of who decided to be a fur trapper and for what purpose. Most of the raiders would work for anyone who promised lodgings and riches, and were bought out by the Mongols with promises of land and money. The Mongolian silver mines, developed minimally in the time of Altan Khan, now expanded with the help of a Volgak immigrant workforce that faced only minimal taxes on their discoveries. Volgak musketeers and gunsmiths found that the Mongol military held their skills in high esteem. Finally, the captains of the raiding ships were employed personally by the Khan. After the successful conclusion of hostilities with the Volgaks— a treaty signed in 1725 permitted relatively free trade between the two countries along the Kazakh border— the Mongols were the protectors and suzerains of the tribes in a large area to their north that included Baigal Lake and the upper reaches of the Gorlog and Oluone [5] Rivers. Ships based on Volgak models, flying a Mongol banner, and manned by mixed crews charted Baigal Lake and traveled down the Oluone in search of furs to sell to China and Volga Russia. Mongolian and Tibetan monks sometimes followed the fur traders, and most settled down permanently in the new lands they discovered.

The first monasteries in the Buryat and Tuvan lands were large “prayer yurts,” which were owned by one noble or another and could be visited by all under his charge. As the number of monks increased, these nomadic temples put down roots. The first datsan, or wooden temple, was built in 1753 by Damba Dorje Zaya, a Mongolian noble who had studied in Tibet. The Zaya Datsan, and others like it, did not move around with a pastoral population. Instead, populations moved to them. Monks in more remote areas came to the nearest datsan for copies of texts, thangkas (Buddhist religious paintings), and advice. The outlying areas of the datsans hosted increasingly permanent trade fairs, and the monasteries were known to indulge in trade and money-lending to earn their keep. In time, the datsans become production centers for books and artwork of their own, but this was not related to any kind of push for independence from Mongol influence. The main canonical books, the Kanjur and Tanjur, were still imported from Mongolia and Tibet. The monks of the Buryats and Tuvans considered themselves as part of the Mongol sangha, or community, even if the Mongol khans only held their homelands in vassalage and not direct rule. For the Buryat laity, the adoption of a Mongol identity was made easier by linguistic similarity with their southern neighbors. The process was a little harder for the Tuvans, who spoke a Turkic language, but here too the consensus was that Tuva was a unique part of a larger whole. By 1831, 3,645 lamas were recorded in a census of the northern Mongols’ 27 monasteries. Meanwhile, more still had been built further north, in the land of the Sakha [6].

The reasons why the Sakha chose to participate in the Northern Fur Road, and undergo the societal changes that they did, are not immediately apparent. After all, the Sakha had survived and thrived along the banks of the Oluone for centuries before the coming of the Mongol ships. The Sakha of the south, who lived close to the Oluone, got by through a mix of farming and pastoralism like the Buryats, their distant neighbors. The northern Sakha, living in colder climates, generally adopted the reindeer-herding of their Evenki neighbors. They settled down seasonally in winter encampments of earth-covered log huts, but in the summer they traveled again, and set up camps of conical birch-bark tents near fresh pasture fields. Uniquely among the Xiboliyan peoples, the Sakha practiced ironwork and pottery, and other traditional arts included the carving of ivory and wood, and the making of jewelry. The eighty independent Sakha tribes were divided into clans ruled by toyons— chiefs of great prominence and wealth. Although the Mongols could buy furs from the Sakha, who knew where the martens and otters so desired by the Shun lived and in what numbers, the Sakha would seem to require little in return. However, the Mongols could offer silver, animals, and hay. The last two were particularly significant: the Sakha pastoralists could always do with more animals, and the sheep, chickens, and cattle that the Mongols possessed were both new and valuable. Hay, meanwhile, was an absolute necessity for the Sakha during the winters, when the pasture fields were inaccessible or dying. The Sakha sometimes fed their livestock with fish in the winters, but this was a stopgap measure that, with adequate supplies of hay, they would not have to resort to.

The establishment of links between Mongol magnates and Sakha toyons made the Northern Fur Road a reality. The Sakha were natural middlemen. Geographically, they occupy the center of Xiboliya. Culturally, the southern Sakha share similarities with the Buryats (the shamans of both peoples refer to the drum as a “shaman’s horse,” in the belief that playing it is a transcendental experience of spiritual significance) and the northern Sakha shared extensive ties with the Nenets and Evenks. Due to their resistance to a wide range of diseases and other factors, the Sakha were the largest ethnic group north of the 50th parallel. Accordingly, their contributions to the fur trade were immense. Sakha horsemen in the employ of the toyons carried supplies and furs over the trails between the Oluone and Karakorum, and organized sales of gunpowder, lead, and ironware to the Nenets and Evenks of the far northwest in exchange for sable and polar fox furs that could be sold to the Mongols. The poorer Sakha, who did not enjoy the toyons’ beneficence and resented their influence, struck out independently for the lands of the Nenets and Evenks. There, the Sakha adopted the locals’ ways of life, while the locals adopted the Sakha language as a lingua franca. This led to the ethnogenesis of the Dolgans, descended from a group of Evenks who adopted an Evenk-influenced dialect of the Sakha language, in the early 1800s.

Once the Sakha joined the network, however, they could not avoid the northward march of Buddhism. As in the lands of the Buryats, the nobles were the first to adopt the new faith. Enterprising toyons, recognizing the value of sharing a religion with the partners of the south, made a show of conversion and transformed their winter yurts and nomadic temples. It was not uncommon to inaugurate the founding of a temple or the arrival of a scholar from Mongolia with bags of kumys, a drink of fermented mare’s milk common to the Mongols, Sakha, and other Inner Asian peoples. What started out as a smart business move, however, became a societal transformation. As the shamans of the traditional Sakha faith allied with the toyons’ opponents, the toyons retaliated. That which could be adopted or co-opted by Buddhism was integrated into the new faith. For example, the evil spirits which the “black” shamans were tasked with expunging were reinterpreted as Buddhist rakshasas, allowing the growing population of lamas to make the case that they could deal with the rakshasas better than the shamans could. Since the coming of the Buddhists was in at least some way linked to the recent prosperity of Sakha society, few were inclined to disagree openly. Converts to the new faith were rewarded with gifts of horses, cattle, and precious metals. Meanwhile, the irredeemably shamanic elements of the traditional faith were stamped out as best as possible in the south, though they survived more openly in the more independent settlements of the north. Buddhist influence in the Sakha lands reached new heights upon the invention of the Sakha script in the 1790s. Based on the Mongol script, it made the Sakha language the undisputed tongue of trade in the north for the next century. Neighboring peoples who spoke Sakha as a second language paid close attention to this script, which inevitably directed their view to the religious texts that were being written with it.

In retrospect, it was all very fragile.

The Khanate of Mongolia was not a strong, rich, or populous country by world standards, and it folded before the Shun in 1919. Upon his arrival in Karakorum, Zhang Xun, the newly-minted Protector-General of the Northern Regions (北方都護, Beifang Duhu) allowed the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu to remain as the spiritual head of the Mongol sangha, but forced him to formally forswear all political power. Armies sent outward from the Jurchen territories conquered all Xiboliya south of the 60th parallel north of the equator, and the lands of the northern fishermen and reindeer-herders fell over the next few years. Some Sakha took to calling the late 20s and early 30s “the Rule of the Samanera,” because as the Shun military administration in the north gave way to a civil one (one in which, notably, the general Zhang Xun still retained his leadership role as Protector-General) the district- and prefecture-level bureaucrats were recruited from the ranks of the Buddhist samaneras, or monks-in-training. These men and women were literate in Sakha, and were thought to be intelligent and ambitious enough to learn Chinese quickly. In time, these novice monks, in an ironic reversal of fates, amassed more power than their monastic masters could have dreamed of.

Economic development in 1930s Xiboliya was overwhelmingly state-directed, and carried out by the former samaneras and imported civil servants from China. After an attempt to forcibly settle the nomadic reindeer-herders failed, the Shun administration allowed them to keep their herds and their freedom of movement within the boundaries of the new northern provinces. The state’s attention turned to developing industry based on the processing of animal products. Fat could be made into candles and soap, and fur into clothing. Infrastructure, banking, and finance were extended into the north with state assistance, which also aided the development of large farms along the Amur, Oluone, and Gorlog. These state-run plantations would be remembered as the darkest part of early Chinese rule— while most of the other measures made some effort to accomodate and co-opt the local population and its lifestyles, the plantations were completely foreign. The Chinese sought voluntary workers at first, but when these could not be found in adequate supply, years of farm labor become an acceptably punishment for illegal activity. Hemmed in by the snow in the winter and guards in the summer, the plantation workers lost their nomadic ways. The state’s policy of granting land to prisoners who had completed their sentences and needed a way to support themselves was a kind of mercy. Mongol and Sakha newspapers, which developed in the late 1930s as an alternative to Chinese-language media from further south, briefly got away with articles on conditions in the farm, but quieted down after Zhang Xun decreed that any paper found to be violating the lese majeste laws of the Shun Dynasty would be liquidated. The Chinese-language newspapers also suffered under restrictions on press freedom, but in Xiboliya the idea of “insulting the Son of Heaven” was interpreted far more loosely than in China proper.

In the meantime, around 380,000 Chinese, 30,000 Koreans, and 10,000 Japanese migrated to the northern lands. The first target was Haishenwai— which had been a Chinese city since the Ming Dynasty founded it as a frontier garrison— but from there, the initial wave of migrants traveled around the settlements in Bingzhou Bay [7]. Bingzhou and Dongfang had hosted semi-independent colonies of Chinese fisherman attracted by the area’s salmon and crab populations since the early 1800s, but after the establishment of a formal Chinese claim over the area these cities became viable targets for further immigration from the mainland. However, with the notable exception of Lucheng, the Houshan silver mines, and the military outpost of Anbei on the border with Volga Russia, the inland regions of Xiboliya were less heavily settled by Chinese. Small groups of loggers, hunters, soldiers, or bureaucrats might make their way inland, but the cold climate and the lack of opportunities compared to other areas like the Bingzhou Bay cities gave potential settlers pause. However, even if these areas remained native-majority throughout the 1930s, the demographic situation there was not completely static. The provincial capitals of the Nenets and Evenk regions on the northwest, along with the Chukchi lands of the Northeast, were typically small, purpose-built settlements with a plurality or outright majority of Sakha or Mongols. The use of Mongols and Sakha— the “large people” of Xiboliya— as administrators of the “small people” would remain controversial, as would the growing strength of Volgak Volanite Christianity, which emerged in northwest Xiboliya as a counterweight to Buddhism.

From controversy, however, burst forth new ways of thinking. As the 1940s advanced, the small but growing intelligentsia of Xiboliya would attempt to combine faith with modern science, personal achievement with collective enfranchisment, and traditional ways of life with new national consciousnesses.



[1] OTL: the Yenisei River. “Gorlog” is the Buryat name for it.

[2] Sounds a lot like the Qing dynasty. Too bad they don’t exist ITTL.

[3] In OTL, two tribes of these Oirat enemies of the Dzungars migrated to the Volga and became the Kalmyks.

[4] This is where I stop summarizing OTL Mongolian history and start branching off into uniquely-TTL events. In OTL, Zanabazar was able to get the help of the Manchus in 1691 by accepting their suzerainty in an elaborate ceremony in Dolonor, a settlement in Manchu-held Inner Mongolia. When the Khalkhas reconquered their east Mongolian homeland from the Dzungars, they did so in the name of the Qing. The Qing later launched a bloody campaign in the 1700s to conquer the Dzungar Khanate, which held out in western Mongolia beyond the Altai Mountains. The defeat and killing of the Dzungars secured Mongolia and Xinjiang for the Qing state. In TTL, none of that is possible, and the Dzungars have a better shot at supremacy among the Mongols.

[5] OTL: Lena River. Name taken from Yakut.

[6] OTL: The Yakuts. "Sakha" is what they call themselves, and the term is starting to see more usage in English nowadays.

[7] OTL: Sea of Okhotsk.