The Yak, the Bear and the Dragon: Uneasy Bedfellows. A Cautionary Tale of Russian and Chinese Influences on Mongolian History

In the early thirteenth century Chinggis Khan used Central Asia and North China and then throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries his successors used China, Eastern Europe, the Near East, even Vietnam, Burma and Korea, as battlegrounds for their campaigns of conquest. Little, perhaps, did the Mongol Great Khans think that some six or seven centuries later their homeland would itself be a battleground, fought over politically if not actually militarily by the empires of Russia and China and by the Communist powers which succeeded those two empires.