The Mongols are one of the great peoples in the history of High
Asia. Their name has been familiar over the whole of the old
world for close on eight hundred years. Yet at the most generous
estimate it would be anachronistic to speak of a Mongol state, in
the modern sense of the word, as existing before the end of 191 1. The imperial adventure under Genghis Khan and his successors
left the Mongols exhausted and disunited politically, and in the
seventeenth century they fell, piecemeal, under Manchu domination which continued for over two hundred years.