MIASU Research Seminar – 10 March – Uradyn Bulag & Odbayar Ganbaatar

Khalkha Mongols and Kazakhs: Chinggisid Recognition and Anti-Dzungar Cooperation

Uradyn E. Bulag and Odbayar Ganbaatar 

This presentation examines a relationship largely overlooked in Inner Asian historiography: the connections between Kazakh polities and Khalkha Mongols. We situate this relationship within two contexts—contemporary public-history invocations of Jochid/Chinggisid statehood in Kazakhstan and the recent strengthening of Mongolia–Kazakhstan diplomatic ties—while prioritising historically grounded analysis over rhetorical appeals to ‘friendship’ or ‘nomadic culture’.

Empirically, we focus on the Dzungar crisis and the Qing conquest of Dzungaria (1755–1758). Khalkha forces participated in Qing military campaigns, while Kazakh groups advanced against Dzungar remnants from the west and north. Their encounters encompassed warfare, captive exchanges, and negotiations. Although Qing frontier structures often facilitated contact, outcomes depended on steppe actors’ own assessments of risk, precedence, and legitimacy.

To clarify how political standing was articulated, we identify what we term recognition repertoires: passages in seventeenth-century Mongolian chronicles that record the ‘Tokmak Kazakhs’ as significant relatives within a Chinggisid political sphere. We then turn to Qing frontier records, where appeals to Chinggisid descent functioned less as assertions of ethnic affinity than as a shared language of precedence, deployed to negotiate alliances, protection, and hierarchy.

We offer three contributions: (1) a Khalkha-centred reconstruction that avoids both primordial-unity narratives and purely statist accounts; (2) an account of how genealogical recognition operated alongside Qing institutional channels and shared-enemy alignment; and (3) a historically grounded interpretation of today's Jochid/Chinggisid turn as the reactivation of an older repertoire of legitimation.