After returning from the district of Koko Nor to Mongolia and resting a few days at the Narabanchi Monastery, we went to live in Uliassutai, the capital of Western Outer Mongolia.  It is the last purely Mongolian town to the west.  In Mongolia there are but three purely Mongolian towns, Urga, Uliassutai and Ulankom.  The fourth town, Kobdo, has an essentially Chinese character, being the center of Chinese administration in this district inhabited by the wandering tribes only nominally recognizing the influence of either Peking or Urga.  In Uliassutai and Ulankom, besides the unlawful Chinese commissioners and troops, there were stationed Mongolian governors or “Saits,” appointed by the decree of the Living Buddha.

When we arrived in that town, we were at once in the sea of political passions.  The Mongols were protesting in great agitation against the Chinese policy in their country; the Chinese raged and demanded from the Mongolians the payment of taxes for the full period since the autonomy of Mongolia had been forcibly extracted from Peking; Russian colonists who had years before settled near the town and in the vicinity of the great monasteries or among the wandering tribes had separated into factions and were fighting against one another; from Urga came the news of the struggle for the maintenance of the independence of Outer Mongolia, led by the Russian General, Baron Ungern von Sternberg; Russian officers and refugees congregated in detachments, against which the Chinese authorities protested but which the Mongols welcomed; the Bolsheviki, worried by the formation of White detachments in Mongolia, sent their troops to the borders of Mongolia; from Irkutsk and Chita to Uliassutai and Urga envoys were running from the Bolsheviki to the Chinese commissioners with various proposals of all kinds; the Chinese authorities in Mongolia were gradually entering into secret relations with the Bolsheviki and in Kiakhta and Ulankom delivered to them the Russian refugees, thus violating recognized international law; in Urga the Bolsheviki set up a Russian communistic municipality; Russian Consuls were inactive; Red troops in the region of Kosogol and the valley of the Selenga had encounters with Anti-Bolshevik officers; the Chinese authorities established garrisons in the Mongolian towns and sent punitive expeditions into the country; and, to complete the confusion, the Chinese troops carried out house-to-house searches, during which they plundered and stole.

Into what an atmosphere we had fallen after our hard and dangerous trip along the Yenisei, through Urianhai, Mongolia, the lands of the Turguts, Kansu and Koko Nor!

“Do you know,” said my old friend to me, “I prefer strangling Partisans and fighting with the hunghutze to listening to news and more anxious news!”