Day 24:

Correction: There are only 1,000,000 people in UlaanBaatar. About 700,000 live in the ger districts.

Okay, with a lot of repitition from last time, here's a brief territorial history of the Mongolian empire:

In 1206 Chinngis (Gengis) Khan united the various tribes of Mongolia under his leadership and founded the Mongolian empire. Together they conquered a whole lot of land. Chinngis was succeed as emperor by two of his sons, and more importantly by this grandson, Kublai Khan. Under Kublai Khan's leadership, the empire was at it's largest: stretching from present day Korea to the Ukraine, south into Vietnam, and all over the middle east.

That year, when Kublai Khan died, the provences of his empire became formally independant states, but ruled by Mongolians, of course. The Persian and middle eastern Mongolian states didn't last very long before being conquered by outside forces, so two main successors to Kublai's empire emerged: The Golden Horde in present day Russia, and "The Empire of the Great Khan" (really, the "Yuan Dynasty"), back in Mongolia's heartland and China and the Russian Far East.

In 1445, The Golden Horde split further, into eight pieces. This happened because of infighting, and also because of the growing strength of the Russian princes, intent on forming thier own empire. In the 1500s, most of the Mongolian states were swallowed up by the Russians. The largest state, the Siberian Khannate, was subjugated around 1605. Two states limped into the 18th century... the remate Khazak khannate was absorbed into the Russian empire in the 1730s, while the Crimean Khannate survived as a vassal state of the Ottoman empire until it too became Russian in 1783.

Meanwhile, back in the homefront, the Mongolians became thoroughly Chinese, declaring themselves emperors of the Chinese, as the "Yuan Dynasty." But thier rule was bound to fail: numerically rather small, they were much very dependant on the co-operation of their Chinese subjects. In 1368, the last Mongolian emperor capitulated to the Chinese, handed over his throne, and all the Mongolians went back to the motherland. And back to the state of never-ending civil war that they enjoyed in the years before Chinngis.

But, nevertheless, Mongolia continued on as an independant state into the 16th century. They showed a bit of muscle when united under the rule of Altan Khan, but with his death in 1583, this unravelled a bit more. Mongolia's northern lands became fully Russian, as the imperial army reached the Pacific Ocean in 1639. In the 1680s, the Chinese entered Mongolian lands with cannons. Moving in with the permission of one of the clans locked in a civil war, the Chinese set about conquering BOTH sides in that war. They did this around 1732, and the great Mongolian empire ceased to exist.