The northernmost Mongols — armoured cavalry, herders and blacksmiths of the Angara and Selenga who held Tungus and Ket tribes as tributaries and cost Russia forty years of war.
Not an ending: the western Buryats were conquered by the 1650s and the Transbaikal lands fixed inside Russia by the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk; the Buryats remain the titular nation of the Republic of Buryatia.
The classic anthropological study of Buryat society, clan structure and religion, reaching back into the pre-Russian and pre-Soviet orders.