Historical Atlas of Northeast Asia, 1590-2010: Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, Eastern Siberia 9780231537162

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H I S T O R I C A L AT L A S O F N O R T H E A S T A S I A

1590-2010

70°E

90°E

110°E 130°E LIMITS OF BASE MAP

150°E

170°E

60°N

60°N RUSSIAN

F E D E RATI O N SEA OF OKHOTSK

50°N KAZAKHSTAN

50°N MONGOLIA PACIFIC OCEAN

TURKMENISTAN

KYRGYZ REPUBLIC

PEOPLE’S

TAJIKISTAN

OF

AFGHANISTAN

PAKISTAN

NEPAL

REPUBLIC CHINA

SOUTH KOREA J A P A N

YELLOW SEA

BHUTAN

I NDIA BANGLADESH

20°N

BAY OF BENGAL 10°N INDIAN OCEAN 70°E

40°N

NORTH KOREA

BURMA

TAIWAN (Republic of China)

LAOS

THAILAND CAMBODIA

30°N

VIET- SOUTH NAM CHINA SEA

20°N

PHILIPPINES metres

0

SRI LANKA

500 1,000

2,000

Kilometers 90°E

M A L A Y S I A SINGAPORE

INDONESIA

130°E

150°E

3,000

2000 10°N 1500 1000 500 0 Projection: Mercator

HISTORICAL

AT L A S •

•

•

•

OF

1590 – 2010

KOREA MANCHURIA MONGOLIA EASTERN SIBERIA C O L U M B I A

U N I V E R S I T Y

LI NARANGOA BY

+

ROBERT CRIBB P R E S S

NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893 New York

Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Narangoa, Li. Historical atlas of northeast Asia, 1590–2010 : Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, Eastern Siberia / Li Narangoa and Robert Cribb. p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16070-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53716-2 (e-book) 1. East Asia—History—Maps. 2. East Asia—Historical geography—Maps. 3. East Asia—Maps. I. Cribb, Robert. II. Title. G2301.S1N3

2014

911' . 5—dc23 2013044148 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America C 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 FRONTISPIECE:

Northeast Asia

COVER IMAGE:

John Tresscott, “Mappa gubernii Irkutensis, complectens provincias Irkutensem,

Jakutensem, et Udinensem” (St. Petersburg, 1776). (Courtesy of Meeting of Frontiers, Library of Congress and Russian State Library) COVER DESIGN: BOOK DESIGN:

Noah Arlow

Vin Dang

References to Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the authors nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Acknowledgments V I I Methodology and Sources Terminology and Spelling Abbreviations X V

CONTENTS

IX XIII

Northeast Asia 2 Contested Term, Contested Region Geography 4 Climate and Human Ecology 8 Peoples and Languages 11 Politics 1 4 I 1590–1700 2 1 I I 1700–1800 65 I I I 1800–1900 107 I V 1900–2010 151

INTRODUCTION

PA R T PA R T PA R T PA R T

Appendix A. Historical Maps Appendix B. Gazeeer 27 2 Bibliography 3 0 3 Map Sources 3 1 7 Index 3 2 1

232

2

I N C O M P L E T I N G the Historical Atlas of Northeast Asia, we have accumulated many academic debts. We have, first of all, benefited greatly from the scholarly environment and material support provided by the Australian National University, and the project was made possible by a substantial Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council. e Cartography Section of the School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific of the Australian National University provided the base map for the atlas, as well as the data for the elevation profiles, and was always on hand to provide technical advice. In gathering material for the atlas, we have drawn extensively on libraries and archives around the world. e library of the Australian National University and the National Library of Australia have been especially helpful, but we wish to thank also the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland; the National Archives in Kew; the Nationaal Archief in e Hague; the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the library of the University of Leiden; the Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin; the Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago; the Kroch Asia Library, Cornell University; the Bancro Library, University of California at Berkeley; the National Diet Library in Tokyo; the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St. Petersburg, Russia; the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg; Det Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen; the National Archive of Mongolia; the Library of Liaoning Province in Shenyang; the Inner Mongolia University Library; and the Inner Mongolia Library in Hohhot. As the atlas took shape, we sought advice from many colleagues, both on factual detail and on general strategies for the presentation of our material. We should especially like to thank Nakami Tatsuo, Enatsu Yoshiki, Kato Naoto, Nakashima Takeshi, omas Bartle, Mark Ellio, Chris Atwood, Lorea Kim, Ken Wells, Leonid Petrov, Sodbilig, Buyandelger, Bayildugchi, Zhou Taiping, Chimeddorji, O. Oyunjargal, Ookhnoi Batsaikhan, B. Natsagdorj, John Stephan, Remco Breuker, Erdenchuluu Kohchahar and the two anonymous reviewers for their very insightful and encouraging comments. We would like to thank our editor, Irene Pavi, for her competent and patient work on this complex and challenging project. Responsibility for the remaining shortcomings of the atlas remains, of course, with us.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T H E H I S T O R I C A L AT L A S O F N O R T H E A S T A S I A consists of fiy-six specially drawn maps covering the four centuries from 1590 to 2010. e design of the atlas—an introductory map, used as the frontispiece, showing the region’s location in Asia; four maps depicting the geography, climate and ecology, peoples, and late-sixteenth-century political landscape of Northeast Asia; forty-nine maps covering the history of Northeast Asia over a span of ten (1590–1890 and 1960–2010) or five (1890–1960) years; and two concluding maps showing mineral resources and population densities—does not allow us to provide citations to sources with the specificity that is usual in a referenced text. It is important, therefore, to explain briefly how the information on the maps was derived. All the maps are based on a standard, relief-shaded map of Northeast Asia— Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, and Eastern Siberia (including the Russian Far East)—that was kindly prepared for us by the Cartographic Section of the School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. e technical data are P R OJ E C T I O N

Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area

CENTRAL MERIDIAN

115°

L AT I T U D E O F O R I G I N

45°N

D AT U M

WGS 1984

To this base map, which reflects the geographical configuration of Northeast Asia in the late twentieth century, we added geographical and historical details using the graphics program Adobe Illustrator. We made no aempt to show systematically events that occurred in other regions that appear on the maps, such as northern China and western Japan, except as far as they are directly relevant to developments in Northeast Asia. Nor did we depict changes in coastlines or in the course of rivers, except for the changes in the channel of the Yellow River (Huang He) north of Ordos in the nineteenth century, the massive change in the lower course of the Yellow River in 1855,* and the building of major dams in the twentieth century. In particular, we were not able to take into account the complex process of desertification that has occurred during the past two centuries. It has

METHODOLOGY AND SOURCES

*On the historical geography of the Yellow River, see Xu Jiongxin “Growth of the Yellow River Delta over the Past 800 Years, as Influenced by Human Activities,” Geografiska Annaler, ser. A, Physical Geography 85, no. 1 (2003), 21–30; and Zhao-Yin Wang and Zhi-Yong Liang, “Dynamic Characteristics of the Yellow River Mouth,” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 25, no. 7 (2000): 765–782.

M E T H O D O LO GY A N D S O U R C E S

X

brought dramatic changes, including the desiccation of rivers and lakes and the disappearance of forests and grasslands, but data on this major ecological development is too meager to allow for reliable mapping. e location of places (cities, rivers, lakes, mountains, and other landforms) was obtained for the most part from standard atlases, of which the most important for our purposes were e Times Atlas of the World, e Times Atlas of China, the Russian Atlas Rossii, and the Mongolian Undesnii Atlas. We also made use of Google Maps and other online contemporary map and satellite-photograph Web sites. To locate places and geographical features not shown in these sources, we examined a very wide variety of published and manuscript maps, many of them of specific parts of Northeast Asia. In some cases, we consulted dozens of maps to satisfy ourselves of the location of a toponym. In a few cases, place-names eluded us altogether; in a few more cases, we were unable to determine which of two or more features with the same name were being referred to (many lakes in the Mongol lands, for instance, are locally known as Chagan Nuur, which means “white lake”). To locate lesser known places on our maps, we were forced to be brave and approximate: early maps do not employ standard, or even known, projections, and it is not uncommon for the same place to appear twice on the same map in different locations. In such cases, we preferred to choose an approximate location, rather than none at all, but we avoided being arbitrary; no location appears on a map without underlying evidence. In the mapping of early borders and the movement of peoples and armies, we generally were not able to draw on maps at all, but aimed to translate information from primary and secondary sources—oen vague and incomplete—into lines on the map.

In the premodern period, the demarcation lines between jurisdictions were oen fluid and imprecise. We faced a similar challenge in regard to rebellions and insurgencies, including those of the twentieth century. Many of these movements held sway over regions that fluctuated dramatically in extent over a relatively short period of time, and they oen arose from ambitions that extended far beyond the movements’ effective influence. In both cases, we rendered this fluidity by means of blurred lines and blurred edges whose location, although based on a careful reading of sources, is necessarily approximate. e same applies to the arrows that depict the movement of peoples and armies: the start and end points of journeys are oen known, but the route followed must be surmised. We used smooth lines and arrows to signify this uncertainty. e growing proliferation and precision of borders in Northeast Asia during the centuries covered by this atlas presented us with still other challenges. Until the advent of modern survey mapping, which did not reach Northeast Asia until the late nineteenth century, mapmakers typically redrew older maps, making corrections and adding or removing details according to more recent (but not necessarily more reliable) information. Most maps are thus an amalgam of information of differing provenance, differing age, and differing reliability. Individual cartographers, moreover, drew on separate sources in making their updates. Different map projections give the impression of different spatial relationships between different points on the landscape. e copying of information from older maps means that the appearance of the same information on a variety of maps cannot be taken as reliable corroboration. Mapmakers everywhere, moreover, use the depiction of complexity as a token of accuracy; inevitably, some detail is simply surmised.

M E T H O D O LO GY A N D S O U R C E S

Furthermore, whereas the convention of identifying the author, publisher, and date of publication of a book was well established by the seventeenth century, the same is not true of maps, many of which were published without direct indication of provenance or date. e consequence is that for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—and, indeed, well into the twentieth century—apparently authoritative map sources oen offer contradictory evidence on the precise course of borders and lines of communication. We aempted to resolve these discrepancies by reference to non-map documentary sources, but those materials also present problems of reliability. Accordingly, in the atlas we offer our best judgment of the location of borders and lines of communication without being able to vouch unequivocally for the reliability of every line on the maps. Specific borders are marked in red the first time they appear on a map; thereaer, they are in black. A further challenge we faced in preparing the atlas was to cope with the complexity of levels of government. Modern states are normally neatly arranged into a hierarchy of administrative categories, with states or provinces below the national level and counties, prefectures, or equivalent jurisdictions below them. One does not have to go far back into the Northeast Asian past, however, to find a bewildering complexity of relationships among political units. Episodes of state collapse and retreat oen made it difficult for us to determine where sovereignty may have resided. It was also hard to determine whether a polity that clearly had not been fully sovereign ought to be considered equivalent to a province or to a county, or even disregarded altogether. As a maer of convention in this atlas, we identified only two levels of internal administrative divi-

sion within sovereign states—corresponding to province and county—but we ask the reader to bear in mind that this classifications is a crude one, intended only to give a general sense of governmental hierarchy.

e Historical Atlas of Northeast Asia is based on extensive research in archives, map collections, and secondary literature. e most important map collections that we used are • The map collections of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. • The War Department Map Collection (RG 77), National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland • The Foreign Office map collection (FO 925), National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom • The map collection of the National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg • The online Ryhiner Map Collection of early maps, hosted by the University of Bern • The online David Rumsey Map Collection

In addition, we drew on both maps and archival material in other sections of the National Archives and Records Administration and of the National Archives, as well as material in the Nationaal Archief in e Hague and the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtiges Amt (Diplomatic Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Berlin. Each of the maps in the atlas contains information from a wide variety of sources. If one or more sources is especially important for information that is prominent in a specific map, the information appears in ”Map Sources,” following the bibliography.

XI

M E T H O D O LO GY A N D S O U R C E S

Legend KRASNOYARSK

B

ur

ya

ts

Administrative name (straight, caps, 5-9 pt)

Liaodong Wall

Military movement

GLOSSARY OF GEOGRAPHICAL TERMS

Ethnic group (curved, caps & lc, 7 pt)

Willow palisade

Population movement

alin (Manchu) = mountain ar (Mong.) = north barun (Mong.) = west bei (Ch.) = north buk (Korean) = north bulag (Mong.) = spring chagan (Mong.) = white dae (Korean) = great do (Korean) = island dolon (Mong.) = seven dong (Ch.) = east dornod (Mong.) = east gol (Mong.) = river guan (Ch.) = pass hae (Korean) = sea hai (Ch.) = sea he (Ch.) = river hei (Ch.) = black huang (Ch.) = yellow hotun (Manchu) = city jiang (Ch.) = river jing (Ch.) = capital juu (Mong.) = monastery khara (Mong.) = black khota (Mong.) = city khüree (Mong.) = enclosure köke (Mong.) = blue kou (Ch.) = gate more (Ru.) = sea müren (Mong.) = river nam (Korean) = south nan (Ch.) = south nizhne (Ru.) = lower nuur (Mong.) = lake ömnö (Mong.) = south övör (Mong.) = south ozero (Ru.) = lake reka (Ru.) = river sahahȑn (Manchu) = black seojjok (Korean) = west shan (Ch.) = mountain shira (Mong.) = yellow suburga (Mong.) = tower töv (Mong.) = centre uul, ula (Mong.) = mountain ula (Manchu) = river ulaan (Mong.) = red ust (Ru.) = mouth usu (Mong.) = water verkhne (Ru.) = upper wan (Korean, Ch.) = bay xi (Ch.) = west yeke (Mong.) = large zhong (Ch.) = centre

Maritime trade route

ta Al

Great Wall

iM ou n

Physical feature (mountains): (curved, caps & lc, italics)

ta

Great Wall gate

Road, trade route

Non-administrative region (caps, curved)

Great Wall gates (kou)

Undersea cable

. aR

River (blue, curved, Times Roman italics)

International border

=

XII

rapids

New international border

in s

ORDOS

Le n

mountain peak

Railways (under construction)

Town/city

Thir level administrative Third border bord Approximate border

Fortress or garrison Chinese administrative centre Telegraph station Treaty port temple

Demarcation line between Russian and Japanese spheres Battle site Clash

Location of Yeke Khüree Gold mine Mine Salt lake

Steam ship route

Second level administrative border New second level administrative bord border

Capital city

Railways

Massacre Foreign warship(s)

ABBREVIATIONS AC = Autonomous county AOk = Autonomous okrug AO = Autonomous oblast AR = Autonomous region ASSR = Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic DPRK = Democratic People’s Republic of Korea GMT = Greenwich Mean Time NO = National oblast NP = National Park

T H E H I S T O R I C A L AT L A S O F N O R T H E A S T A S I A presents some intractable problems of terminology and spelling. It covers more than four hundred years in the history of a region in which many languages are spoken and which has been described and analyzed in many more. Most of the places mentioned in the atlas have different names in different languages, and many have changed name over time. To make maers still more difficult, the main indigenous languages of Northeast Asia—Mongolian, Manchu, and Korean—and the languages of the principal imperial powers in the region— Chinese, Russian, and Japanese—were romanized in more than one way. e romanization of some local names was based on Chinese, Russian, or Japanese renderings of those names. e problem is exacerbated by the fact that this atlas was prepared primarily for an English-speaking audience, and some names and spellings are so deeply entrenched in common usage that it would be foolish to challenge them. Moreover, place-names oen also carry political implications. Colonial names such as Port Arthur and Port Lazareff have disappeared because they are inconsistent with national independence, and in recent years, the government of South Korea has put considerable energy into persuading the world that the sea to the east of the Korean Peninsula should be called the East Sea (Donghae), not the Sea of Japan. In choosing the place-names that appear on each map, we were guided by three general principles:

1. We aimed as far as possible to show local names as they were used at the time depicted in the maps for towns, rivers, and other geographical features, as far as we were able to identify them. Under this principle, we preferred to employ Mongolian, Korean, and Manchu place-names over those used by outsiders, except in the far south of Manchuria, which was predominantly inhabited by Chinese by 1600. 2. We recognized the political authority to name. Administrative divisions are named according to the usage of the ruling power of the time, as are cities whose names were consciously changed by new occupiers. us Port Arthur becomes Ryojun under Japanese occupation and Lüshun when it reverts to China. Similarly, we used the spelling Chakhar when

TERMINOLOGY AND SPELLING

T E R M I N O LO GY A N D S P E L L I N G

referring to the Mongol community and Chaha’er when referring to XIV

•

KO R E A N

Revised romanization of Korean introduced by the

the Chinese province that used the Mongol name. ese two principles

South Korean Ministry of Culture in 2000. This spelling has also

mean that for Manchuria, we had to choose a moment to shi from local

been used for Korean personal names, but older, better-known

Manchu names to the names of the dominant Chinese seler commu-

spellings are provided where we judged it useful.

nity. We made this shi with the map covering 1915 to 1920, in recogni-

•

lution of 1911/1912. 3. If a name is entrenched in Western usage, we retained the form that

MANCHU

The romanization of Paul Georg von Möllendorff in A

Manchu Grammar with Analysed Texts (Shanghai: American Pres-

tion of the end of Manchu power in the region during the Chinese revo-

byterian Mission Press, 1892). •

MONGOLIAN

Although Nicholas Poppe’s classical translitera-

will be familiar to Western readers. us we used Mukden until the

tion, Grammar of Wrien Mongolian (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,

well-known Mukden Incident of 1931 and Fengtian thereaer (and still

1954), is a standard for early texts, it has the disadvantage of a

later, Shenyang), and in the twentieth century, Hohhot, not Köke Khota

spelling that is now remote from usual pronunciation, which it-

(Mongolian) or Huhehaote (Chinese). We also referred to the whole of

self varies widely between dialects. As far as possible, we chose

Russian territory east of Lake Baikal as Eastern Siberia, rather than di-

spellings that are recognizable to those familiar with Mongolian

viding it, according to contemporary Russian practice, into Eastern Si-

history and are relatively faithful to current pronunciations. As

beria and the Russian Far East.

far as possible, we chose spellings that are recognizable to those

As a guide for the perplexed reader, appendix B is a gazeeer of place-names. In spelling the six major languages that appear in the atlas, we used the following romanizations:

familiar with Mongolian history and are relatively faithful to current pronunciations. •

RUSSIAN

BGN/PCGN romanization.

•

CHINESE

Pinyin romanization.

•

J A PA N E S E

Revised Hepburn romanization.

BAM CCP CER DPRK GMD IMAR MPR MPRP PRC PRPIM ROC ROK SMR UN

Baikal–Amur Mainline Chinese Communist Party Chinese Eastern Railway Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Guomindang Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region Mongolian People’s Republic Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party People’s Republic of China People’s Revolutionary Party of Inner Mongolia Republic of China Republic of Korea South Manchurian Railway United Nations

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

H I S T O R I C A L AT L A S O F N O R T H E A S T A S I A

1590-2010

introduction introduction NORTHEAST ASIA

CONTESTED TERM, CONTESTED REGION

e term “Northeast Asia” is relatively new. It was introduced into academic discourse in the 1930s by the American historian and political scientist Robert Kerner, who taught at the University of California. Kerner’s “Northeast Asia” comprised the Korean Peninsula, the Manchurian Plain, the Mongolian Plateau, and the mountainous regions of Eastern Siberia, stretching from Lake Baikal to the Pacific Ocean.1 At the time Kerner was writing, the whole of this region was, or had recently been, contested by three great powers: China, Russia, and Japan.2 In identifying the northeastern part of the Asian continent as a region warranting aention in its own right, Kerner had a scaering of predecessors. In 1692, the Dutch geographer Nicolaes Witsen had published two massive volumes under the title Noord en oost Tartaryen: Oe bondigh ontwerp van eenige dier landen, en volken, zo als voormaels bekent zyn geweest (North and East Tartary, or concise dra of some of those lands and peoples as were formerly known). “Tartary,” in the seventeenth century, was a loosely defined term for the part of Asia to the north of the tropics, and Witsen identified its northeastern portion as a distinct region partly because of its long history as a center of great empires, especially that of the Mongols under Chinggis Khan (r. 1206–1227) and his successors, that had exercised a powerful influence on world history. Witsen’s north and east Tartary, however, was characterized in geopolitics by its loose inclusion within the Russian empire. Aer Witsen, names designating Northeast Asia largely disappeared from the vocabulary of international politics. In the mid-nineteenth century, observers began to use the term “Northeastern Asia” to refer to the far eastern peninsula of the Asian continent—roughly, the region bounded by the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea in the south and the Arctic Ocean in the north. is usage was applied mostly in the context of the region’s biogeography and its anthropological affinities with neighboring Alaska.3 In the late nineteenth century, however, something approaching Kerner’s definition began to appear in newspaper accounts of international rivalries: first among China, Korea, and Japan, and later between Japan and Russia.4

NORTHEAST ASIA

Geographical terms gain acceptance because they encapsulate one or more useful insights into the way the world works. Kerner’s definition of “Northeast Asia” was useful because it drew aention to an arena for international struggle in which the limits of great-power influence were constantly in flux. Aer the Second World War, Kerner’s Northeast Asia was no longer a zone of contestation in the way it had been during the preceding decades and centuries. A new front line emerged farther south, this time between the United States and its Communist rivals. In response, the U.S. Department of State redefined “Northeast Asia,” making it largely equivalent to Japan and Korea.5 As the Cold War faded and China began to embrace market capitalism, the conception of Northeast Asia that had prevailed in the 1950s also lost its force. Ross Garnaut’s report Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy, published in 1989, reshaped the term’s meaning,6 drawing China into the region, both to reflect the emergence of the People’s Republic from the international economic isolation of the Mao years and to avoid the implicit Sino-centrism of the established term “East Asia,” which tended to conjure up the ancient cultural links among China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam as joint heirs of traditional Chinese culture. Garnaut’s definition emphasized the then primacy of industrialized Japan while recognizing the potential of industrializing China. It identified an area centered on Japan and China as a global economic powerhouse and contrasted Northeast Asia with such other great world regions as Southeast Asia, European Russia, and North America. In this atlas, we aim to give both stability and historical depth to the term “Northeast Asia.” Our perspective is not one of global power centers. Rather, we return to Kerner’s definition to examine a Northeast Asia whose history is distinct from that of China, Japan, and Russia and that commonly has been treated as only

marginal to the histories of those great powers. For four centuries, our Northeast Asia has been at the junction of the ambitions of rival power centers, but local people, both indigenes and selers, have vigorously asserted their own identities and their own aspirations in the face of outside powers. e four centuries from 1600 to 2000 were a time of vast political and social change in Northeast Asia. e early seventeenth century was marked by the rise of two political forces in the region that transformed what had been a long-standing paern of engagement and hostilities between the nomadic peoples of the steppes (Mongols and others) and the seled agriculturalists of the south (mainly Chinese).7 e first of these forces was the Manchus of the Qing dynasty, who, although they came into being as nomads and herders in the plains of the north, shied their center of power to Beijing and gradually succeeded, where previous dynasties had failed, in bringing large areas of the northern plains permanently into the Chinese world. e second of these forces was Russia, the first state that was able to project its power from the western end of the Eurasian continent into Northeast Asia. e core narrative of this atlas is the twin story of the rise and decline of Manchu and Russian power in the region and the responses to this rise and decline by the other peoples of Northeast Asia. e presence of these powers, and later of Japan, in the region galvanized and transformed local societies. New national aspirations emerged, both among indigenous peoples (Mongols, Manchus, Koreans, and Yakuts, among others) and in seler communities (Chinese, Japanese, and Russian). ese hopes engaged with and resisted the imperial ambitions of outside powers to give Northeast Asia a turbulent history of changing borders and short-lived states. e present configuration of states, nations, and borders in Northeast Asia took shape only very recently.

3

NORTHEAST ASIA

GEOGRAPHY 4

Our Northeast Asia is defined primarily by its historical experience, but it also has an environmental character distinct from that of the surrounding regions. Northeast Asia is the ecological area that lies between the tundra of the far north and the cultivated plains of China Proper to the south.8 It is bounded to the east by the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan/East Sea and to the west by the high Altai Range. e region encompasses three main ecological subzones: forest, steppe, and desert. Forest, a mixture of broad-leafed trees and conifers known as the taiga, predominates (or predominated in the past, when the impact of humans was less intense) in the north east—in the mountains of Eastern Siberia, the Khinggan Range, the Manchurian Plain, and the Korean Peninsula. West of Khinggan begins a zone of grassland, the Eurasian steppe, which stretches westward in an almost continuous strip—sometimes broad, sometimes narrow—to the edges of Europe. In the south and southwest is a belt of desert and semi-desert land, including the Gobi Desert, that separates the steppes of the Mongolian Plateau from those of Inner Mongolia. At the heart of the region lies the Mongolian Plateau, with an elevation of 900 to 1500 meters (2950–4920 .) and an area of about 2.6 million square kilometers (1 million sq. miles). e southernmost part of the plateau, Ordos, is separated from the main plateau by mountain ranges and the Yellow River (Huang He) which flows north, east, and then south in a broad loop before entering China Proper. To the east of the Mongolian Plateau, the Greater Khinggan Range (highest point 2035 m [6680 .]) runs from north to south; beyond it lies the Manchurian Plain, with an average elevation of about 300 meters (985 .) and an area of 1.6 million square kilometers (618,000 sq. miles). Enfolding these two regions to the west, north, and east is a vast arc of mountain country. In the west, peaks in the Altai Range rise to 4506 meters (14,780 .). Like the Tianshan and Himalayas farther south, these mountains were created by the slow collision of the Indian subcontinent with Asia over the past 55 to 50 million years, and they remain a zone of geological instability that experiences repeated earthquakes. Just to the east are the slightly lower Khangai Mountains, rising to 3905

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K h e rl e

.. V Ointiomn RR Hulun Nuur . R n

ARY F TA R T IT O

RA

Orkhon R.

LE SS ER

RA

NS AI NT U MO TII N 2665m E KH

4031m

KHANGAI MOUNTAINS

.

IN

aR

ST

S h ilk

AL

B

Y

E

KH

YA

OV

NG

SA

Khövsgöl Nuur

N LO

RA

. RA

AI

La

m

AN GG IN KH

LT

i Vit

ke

R.

A

RA NG E

ur

4204m

STA NOV OY MO UNTAINS

Am

Uvs Nuur Khyargas Nuur Khar Us Nuur

SA YA N

Angara R.

TAN NU U OLA

a R.

STANOVOY PLATEAU EA ST

SEA

ri

a

5

en R

s

.

Tum

eyi

Ud

i Yen

aR

. O le k m a R

Mid dle Tun gus Upper Tunguska R. ka R.

Len

Al

WEST SIBERIAN PLAIN

Lower Tunguska R.

NORTHEAST ASIA

GEOGRAPHY OF NORTHEAST ASIA

E L E VAT I O N PROFILES OF NORTHEAST ASIA WEST Wutaisahn

Yellow Rover

Honshu

WEST

EAST

WEST

EAST

Chantar Island

Tugur Bay

Sea of Okhotsk

55°N

Sakhalin

Tartarsk Strait

Sikhote Alin Range

Sungari River

WEST

Hokkaidȅ

Tartarsk Strait

Lesser Khinggan Range

0m

Sikhote Alin Range

Lake Khanka

Stanovoy Plateau

Barguzin Valley

Lake Baikal

2000 m

Manchurian Plain

Greater Khinggan Range

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