The name "Uriankhai' means "uria" (motto, war motto) and
khan (lord) in Mongolian. The Mongols applied the name to all the forest peoples and, later, to
Tuvans. They were classified by the Mongols as
Darligin Mongols. At the beginning of the
Mongol Empire (1206–1368), the Uriankhai were located in central Mongolia. In the 13th century,
Rashid-al-Din Hamadani described the Forest Uriyankhai as extremely isolated Siberian forest people living in
birch bark tents and hunting on
skis. Despite the similarity in name to the famous Uriyankhan clan of the
Mongols, Rashid states that they had no connection. After the fell of the Yuan Dynasty, the
Jurchens were known among the
Ming Chinese as "forest people" (using the Jurchen word,
Woji), and this connotation later transferred to the Chinese rendering of Uriankhai,
Wulianghai. The latter got its name from the fact that its ancestor
Jelme came from Uriankhai. In 1375,
Naghachu, Uriankhai leader of the Mongol-led
Northern Yuan dynasty in Liaoyang, invaded the
Liaodong Peninsula to restore the Mongols to power. Although he continued to hold southern
Manchuria, the
Ming military campaign against Naghachu ended with his surrender in 1387, and these Uriankhians known from historical sources as "Uriankhians of the three guards" (兀良哈三衛) in China. On the other hand, the Uriankhai of the
Khentii Mountains were conquered by
Dayan Khan. After the rebellion of the northern Uriankhai people,
Bodi Alagh Khan dissolved Uriankhai
tumen in 1538 and it later mostly annexed by the
Khalkha tumen. The northern Uriankhai groups lived in central Mongolia and they started moving to the
Altai Mountains in the beginning of the 16th century. Some groups migrated from the Khentii Mountains to
Khövsgöl Province during the course of the
Northern Yuan dynasty (1368–1635). By the early 17th century the term Uriankhai was a general Mongolian term for all the dispersed bands to the northwest, whether
Samoyedic, Turkic, or Mongol in origin. Russian Pavel Nebolsin documented the
Urankhu clan of Volga
Kalmyks in the 1850s. The existence of the Uriankhai was documented by the Koreans, who called them by the borrowed name
Orangkae (, "savages"), especially in context of their attacks against the Siniticized world in the 14th and 15th centuries. Bokujiang, Tuowulian, Woduolian, Huligai, Taowan separately made up 10,000 households and were the divisions used by the Yuan dynasty to govern the people along the Wusuli river and Songhua area. ==Notes==