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Modern history of the Hobogsair Torghuts: Ayan Jav


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Video

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Authors

Bulag, Uradyn E. 
Dorjraa 

Abstract

Ayan Jav, born in Hobogsair in 1927, was the former governor (1956-1963) of the Hobogsair Mongolian Autonomous County. His political career commenced in 1946 when he attended the Three Districts Revolution. He was also a member of the 80 partisans who fought against Osman Kazakhs in the Altai district. In 1951, 8 people from Tarbagatai were dispatched to Hobogsair where they established a cell of the Chinese Communist Party; Ayan Jav was the one of the 5 Mongolians in the group. In 1953, he fought in the Korean War as a voluntary soldier for 6 months. Ayan Jav, in this video, talks about the official history of Hobogsair from the 1940s to recent years. As he remembers, after the Torghut prince of Hobogsair was arrested, the Chinese Nationalist Party authorities confiscated the weapons of his soldiers, conscripted Torghuts and collected horses and other domestic animals. As a result, the Torghuts in Hobogsair could not resist the Osman Kazaks’ attacks and the oppression of the Chinese Nationalist Party, leading to significant losses of both the population and domestic animals. In 1944, the Chinese Nationalist Party conscripted 600 Torghuts with horses from Hobogsair to Urumchi. After the Torghut revolt headed by Zongorov failed, Torghuts migrated to the Soviet side for political asylum. Suffering from poverty, the majority came back within a year, the rest returning after the victory of the Three Districts Revolution.Apart from the political turmoil, in the 1940s, Torghuts also suffered from a plague (sharaldag) that rampaged Hobogsair. According to the population survey in 1940 conducted by the Chinese Nationalist Party, there were 30,000 Torghuts and 800,000 domestic animals. In 1946, another census showed that there were no more than 7,000 of Torghuts and 80,000 of domestic animals left. Hobogsair was also flooded with 1,000 Kazakhs herding animals for Torghuts, and about 200 Han Chinese who were mostly itinerant traders.

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Keywords

Hobogsair Mongolian Autonomous County, Torghuts, history, Kazaks, Chinese Nationalist Party, plague, Torghut population

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Publisher

Kalmyk Cultural Heritage Documentation Project, University of Cambridge

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Sponsorship
Sponsored by Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin

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