This paper presents a study on crop farming agriculture of the Mongol nomads in the Mongolian highlands. The paper essentially concludes that both the nomadic Mongols of Eastern Inner Mongolia and the Khalkha Mongol nomads, who widely inhabit the central and northern parts of the Mongolian highlands, have been sharing a number of common features since the Mongol Empire, demonstrating particularly strong connection to millet – such as prefixing the Mongolian word for "millet" with the predicate "Mongol", referring to "millet" with the single word "Mongol", and predominantly cultivating millet. They also use the same cultivation method that does not interfere with their nomadic lifestyle and consists in sowing seeds after the rainy season in early summer just before leaving for summer pastures (with no irrigation or random irrigation) and harvesting on their return from the pastures before autumn frosts set in (in Eastern Inner Mongolia this traditional type of farming is called "namuγ tariy-a"). This method differs from the one adopted in the Western Mongolian highlands inhabited mostly by Oirat nomads who learned crop farming from the Bukharans and mainly cultivate cereals with substantial irrigation.

The purpose of this study is to clarify the war situation in the "Battle of the River Ulz (Ulja)" fought in 1196 between the Jin dynasty and the Tatars (Zubu). This battle is also famous for the fact that the young Chinggis khan participated in it on the Jin side. By contributing to the Jin victory, Chinggis khan obtained the backing of the Jin and grew powerful. The main documentation for the study is the Serven khaalga inscription discovered by the authors in Bayankhutag District, Khentii Province, Mongolia. It consists of two inscriptions, one in Chinese and one in Jurchen, and the major portion of both notes the names of the places which the Jin army passed through during the Battle of the River Ulz. By carrying out a multilateral examination of these place names, from a historical, geographical and archaeological perspective, the authors managed to show clearly the route of the Jin army on a map. They were also able to shed light upon the historical and geographical situation in the eastern part of the Mongol plain at that time. The results of the study should greatly contribute to our understanding of the Jin dynasty's control of the Mongol plain and the prehistory of the rise of the Mongol Empire.

This article discusses the complex self-consciousness of Mirza Fatali Akhundzadeh (1812-1878). He is esteemed as one of founders of the Azerbaijani identity in the presentday Republic of Azerbaijan, but he is also regarded as one of the first 'Iran nationalists' in the context of the history of Iran.

It is true that he thought of Iran as his homeland and was proud to be an Iranian, but he also noticed non-Iranian elements in himself. For instance, he was not a native Persian speaker—he grew up speaking Turkic; he was an inhabitant of the Caucasus as well as a subject of the Russian Empire. Thus, he defined Iranians as descendants of the Ancient Persian Empires and insisted that his distant ancestors were connected to them.

He did not always recognize himself as Iranian. He used different group names depending on each situation. For example, when he spoke to Turkish people in the Ottoman Empire to enlighten them, he used 'Mellat-e Eslām (Muslims)' as a group name to communicate that he was one of them. He also called himself a 'Tatar' when he wrote letters to Russian officials. 'Tatar' was a Russian term applied to Turkic-speaking people in the Empire.

This article analyses the factors behind the failure of the Amu River diversion project initiated by the Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich in the territories of the Khanate of Khiva at the end of the 1870s. Shioya (2014) argued the details of the Grand Duke's project and the response of the government of Khiva to them, but the response of the general-governorship of Turkestan, the then supreme military-administrative organ of the Russian Empire in Central Asia, to the project still needs to be analysed. From the correspondence between the governor-general K. P. von Kaufman and a zoologist, D. Alenitsyn, it is evident that the former's response concerned the militarily strategic importance of the navigation of the Amu River, and the contemporary situation in Afghanistan, that is, the ongoing Second Anglo-Afghan war. Within the war ministry, the logistics connecting the navigation of the major river with the planned railroad between Central Asia and Russia were highly evaluated. In addition, the influence of the Duke's activities on the Turkmens in Khiva was also considered to bring instability to the khanate, regarding which Alenitsyn pictured the worst-case scenario, namely, the collapse of Russian rule in Central Asia with the spread of native disturbances initiated by the British-Indian army, if the army were to march through the Amu River basin. These factors, in line with the Grand Duke's misapprehension of the history and irrigation of the lower basin of the Amu, led to the failure of his diversion project.

This paper discusses the case that a Japanese soldier, Ryutaro Ito, was invited as an instructor in the Töb-i Sakikü Tangkim school established by a noble of Kharchin Mongol's Right Banner, Güngsangnorbu. I then examined the circumstances and the historical background of this case, using materials of the National Institute for Defense Studies Library and the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, Japanese newspaper articles and the Mongolian newspaper Mongγol-un sonin bičig, which had been published in Harbin. The schools founded by Güngsangnorbu had been discussed by many scholars from the viewpoints of Japanese intelligence activities and the domestic development of the Kharchin Mongol's Right Banner. Previous researchers evaluated founding schools in Kharchin Mongol as a modernization policy of Güngsangnorbu. However, in this paper I concluded that it had been carried out under a strategy of the Japanese Army. In addition, the Japanese Army was developing intelligence activities in Mongolia on the eve of Russo- Japanese War. This paper pointed out that Ryutaro Ito was dispatched for the military purposes of the Japanese Army against Russia.

In June 1930, over 430 Altai-Urianhai families moved across the Altai Mountains to Xinjiang, China. This "escape" triggered a chain of cross-border movements going out of Mongolia, initially in the region of western Mongolia and then spreading all along the border areas close to China. Altai-Urianhai's reports presented at the national congress meetings, as well as maps they produced and submitted to the governments, show that their territory had shrunk due to Kazakh domination of the region and unfavorable governmental policies. They stated that their motherland was the Chingel River to the west of the Altai Mountains, pleading for the government to return it to them. Furthermore, the government of the People's Republic of Mongolia, which was undertaking nation-state building, had started to introduce the school-education system and the conscription system. The Altai-Urianhai people considered not only those systems but also the government to be those of "Halha's", "red", and therefore "evil". In this context, they did not "escape" from their motherland, but rather returned to their homeland. Those suffering in other areas of Mongolia took the incident to be an "escape from the motherland" or a "form of resistance" rather than a "return home". In other words, they "de-contextualized" the incident from Altai-Urianhais' historical contexts, and "re-contextualized" it into their own positions in the situation of that time. Thus developed the mass refugee movements in the early 1930s in Mongolia.

Carl Gustaf Mannerheim (1867-1951) travelled across Asia from Bukhara to Beijing from 1907 to 1908 to collect military intelligence for Russia. The diary he kept during this journey provides much information about Tibetan Buddhists under the influence of the Qing dynasty, namely Kalmuk, Torgut, Sirayogur, and Tangut, and contains a report of interviews with Torgut Khan's mother and with the exiled thirteenth Dalai Lama at Wu-taishan. Based on this information, this article clarifies that many Russian Tibetan Buddhists freely travelled to Tibet and Amdo and built relationships with Tibetan Buddhists in these regions. It also provides an outline of the photographs taken by Mannerheim during his journey and the antiquities of Tibetan Buddhism currently in the possession of the Finnish National Board of Antiquities.