As time went on, the Chinese, more astute and cunning, took little by little from the careless hands of the nomad princes the reins of real political power. The native chiefs were wheedled into giving up many ancient rights over the vassals, as well as their general taxing powers. The celibate priests, who were draining the manhood of their idle but powerful hierarchy, were subsidized and directed by the interlopers. They preached to their confiding countrymen obedience and submission. In the Mongol Gigin of Urga, the Chinese raised up a native power superior to all the old feudal lords, whose armies melted away beneath the ecclesiastical dominion. When the Gigin became in turn too great a menace, they caused it to be decreed that each succeeding incarnated Buddha must come from Tibet, and that his main powers must be delegated to a “Council of Lamas.”

In the train of the Manchus came the Chinese traders, polite, supple, calling themselves friends of the Mongols, offering their alluring wares on undefined credit terms which tangled the unsuspicious natives in inextricable usury. Peking-brought gewgaws were paid for a hundred times over in the food and clothing which the natives kept giving to the compounding voracity of the debt.

Chinese coolies pressed up the river-valleys, begging land here, intruding themselves there; more followed, and ever more, until the best of the pastures were filched away, and the nomads, in order to exist, were forced to trek to the more distant and barren slopes. Deforesting transformed into deserts whole provinces. The once famed virtue of the Tatar women is forgotten, and every Chinaman has his “friend” whom he leaves behind when he returns to his native land. The big prosperous Mongol families, that early travelers noted, are no more. Two or three children are the most that one sees to a yurta, and the population, owing to lama celibacy and the decreased means of subsistence, is declining from year to year.

This is the people and this the land which sent horde after horde through centuries to conquer the world; where in half a dozen generations a little band of blacksmiths like the Turks could breed a nation that would dominate Asia. With narrowing means of subsistence, and aliens draining their small surplus capital, the Mongol race lies prostrate beneath the Yellow Empire. The grim Malthusian tenet that the world cannot give food for all its children falls short here of the grim actuality. The silent invasion of the Chinese has been as ruthless as was the march of Genghis Khan. The economic garroting of a race is what the world has seen in Mongolia.

No longer are there men to lead or men to fight. Obediently and submissively the once fierce, ranging warriors have yielded to the artfully-imposed yoke. The army of unmatched cavalry has become a memory, and a nation of fighters has become a race of timid herders, with little heart or brain. The sons of the old soldiers have learned to shave their heads and croon Tibetan prayers, and the fires of a people’s ambition are quenched in the creed that makes abstention from effort a cardinal virtue, and annihilation life’s supreme objective. What there was of virtue and of valor lies buried in distant graves. Ringed with the bones of slaughtered captives, rusted swords at their sides, they sleep well, those old forgotten warriors. In poverty and hardship, priest-ridden and debt-ridden, decimated and degenerated, their descendants eke out their sterile days. But there lingers yet among them a half-forgotten memory of the heroic past. The wandering chanter still sings in the twilight the old “Song of Tamerlane”—Tamerlane who will come again, they say, and lead the hordes once more to victory.