[4] Many Mongols regarded the "New Policies" as a major threat to their traditional way of life, as was agreed to be preserved when they recognised authority of the Qing emperors, and began to seek independence.

In July 1911 a group of Khalkha nobles persuaded the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, the head of Mongolian Buddhism, that Mongolia must declare its independence from the Qing dynasty.

He adopted a reign title, "Elevated by the Many"; the Mongolian nobility now owed their tribute to him instead of to the Qing emperor; and the Bogd Khan assumed the right of conferring upon the lay nobles their ranks and seals of office.

For example, it enlarged its financial holdings by transferring to the religious estate (Ikh shav') wealthy herdsmen who traditionally had owed their services and taxes to lay princes.

There is a commonly held misconception that, over time, the greed of the Buddhist religious establishment so disaffected the lay nobility that it came to reject the very principles of theocracy upon which the new country had been founded.

The matter was settled in 1915 by the tripartite Treaty of Kyakhta (1915), which provided for Mongolian autonomy within the Chinese state and forbade China from sending troops to Mongolia.

In response to rumors of an imminent Bolshevik invasion, the Mongolians, very reluctantly and only after much encouragement by the Chinese High Commissioner Chen Yi at Urga (modern Ulaanbaatar), requested in the summer of 1918 military assistance from China (approximately 200 to 250 troops arrived in September).

Early in 1919, Grigori Semyonov, a White Guard general, had assembled a group of Buryats and Inner Mongols in Siberia for the formation of a pan-Mongolian state.

In August, the Mongolian Foreign Minister approached Chen Yi with a message from the "representatives of the four aimags" (i.e., the Khalkhas) with a request for military assistance against Semyonov.

By October, Chen Yi and the Mongolian princes had agreed upon a set of conditions, the "Sixty-four Points", effectively recreating the political and administrative system.

In June 1919, Xu Shuzheng, a prominent member of Duan's clique, was named "Northwest Frontier Commissioner", making him the senior Chinese military and civilian officer of Outer Mongolia.

He informed Chen that the Sixty-four Points would have to be renegotiated based upon a new set of proposals, his "Eight Articles", which called for an increase in population (presumably through Chinese colonisation) and economic development.

By December, he was back in Urga to organise a formal ceremony for the transfer of authority: soldiers were lined up on either side of the road to the Bogd Khan's palace; the portrait of the President of China was borne on a palanquin; the flag of the Chinese republic followed, and after it a marching band.

The first group owed its existence principally to Dogsomyn Bodoo (1885–1922), a highly educated, 35-year-old lama who worked in the Russian Consulate at Urga during the Bogd Khan era.

A certain Mikhail Kucherenko, a typesetter in the Russo-Mongolian printing office and a member of the Bolshevik underground in Urga, occasionally visited Bodoo and Choibalsan; conversations, no doubt, turned on the Russian revolution and the political situation in Mongolia.

Another, albeit less prominent at the time, member was Damdin Sükhbaatar (1893–1923), a soldier in the Mongolian army who, after his death, was canonised by Communist historians as the "Lenin of Mongolia".

The beginning of the East Urga group may be traced to mid-November 1919, when several of the more militant members of the lower house of the Mongolian Parliament, including Danzan and Dogson, met secretly on the first night following its dissolution by Xu Shuzheng, and resolved to resist the Chinese.

[20] Russian expatriates in Urga had elected a revolutionary "Municipal Duma", headed by Bolshevik sympathisers, which had learned of the Consular Hill group.

Shumyatsky knew little about them, and for three weeks dodged their demands for a speedy Soviet decision whether or not to provide military assistance to the Mongolians against the Chinese.

Finally, perhaps at Shumyatsky's suggestion, they sent a telegram to members of the MPP in Urga with a coded message that they should obtain a letter, stamped with the seal of the Bogd Khan, formally requesting Soviet assistance.

[23] On arriving in Irkutsk in August, the Mongolians met with the head of what was later to be reorganised as the Far Eastern Secretariat of the Communist International (Comintern), and explained that they needed military instructors, 10,000 rifles, cannon, machine guns, and money.

[24] The Mongolians divided themselves into three groups: Danzan, Losol, and Dendev left for Omsk; Bodoo and Dogsom returned to Urga, where they were to enlarge the party's membership and form an army; Sükhbaatar and Choibalsan proceeded to Irkutsk to serve as a communication link between the others.

Before separating, the group drafted a new appeal with a more revolutionary message: The Mongolian nobility would be divested of its hereditary power, to be replaced by a democratic government headed by the Bogd Khaan as a limited monarch.

A plenary session of the Comintern in Irkutsk on February 10 passed a formal resolution to aid the "struggle of the Mongolian people for liberation and independence with money, guns and military instructors".

On 28 June, the main Soviet expeditionary corps crossed the border into Mongolia, and on 6 July, the first Mongolian and Russian units entered Urga.

Formerly it was solely stated generally with regard to von Baron Ungern Sternberg that Mongol/Mongolian Communist troops had defeated him and had him executed apparently duly for his widespread impalements and killings.

On 9 July, they sent a letter to the Bogd Khaan's court, announcing that power was now in the hands of the people: "The disorder which reigns presently is as much due to the shortcomings of the [hereditary] leaders as to the fact that the existing laws and situation do not correspond any longer to the spirit of the times.

[34] The following day, the Party's Central Committee issued a resolution declaring the formation of a new government headed by Bodoo, with the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu as a limited monarch.

[35] Chinese forces slaughtered most of a 350 strong White Russian forces in June 1921 under Colonel Kazagrandi in the Gobi desert, with only two batches of 42 men and 35 men surrendering separately as Chinese were wiping out White Russian remnants following the Soviet Red army defeat of Ungern Sternberg, and other Buryat and White Russian remnants of Ungern-Sternberg's army were massacred by Soviet Red Army and Mongol forces in the same summer, in Uliastai Mongols beat Colonel Vangdabov's Buryats to death with clubs for being loyal to Ungern-Sternberg..[36] On the diplomatic front, the Soviets had proposed to the Chinese the convening of a tripartite conference, similar to that of 1914–15, to discuss Mongolia's relationship with China.

The treaty notwithstanding, the death of the Khutuktu in that same year provided an opportunity for the MPP to dispense with theocratic rule entirely, and the Party announced the establishment of the Mongolian People's Republic.