Övör Mongol Atlas

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Hohhot

place · documented 1900–1945

Old Mongol trading town (Kökeqota) paired with the Qing garrison city of Suiyuan, unified administratively as Guisui in 1913, and a major caravan and camel-trade hub for expeditions into Mongolia.

Hohhot, known to Mongols as Kökeqota (“blue city”) and to Chinese as Guihuacheng, was through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a cosmopolitan Mongol trading and religious center rather than simply a Chinese administrative town (Charleux). It grew up as a paired, or “twin,” city: the old Mongol town (the “Old City”) sat beside the separate Qing dynasty garrison of Suiyuan (the “New City”), built under the Qianlong Emperor in the 1730s, and the two retained distinct identities for generations even though they stood only a few kilometers apart (Charleux). In 1913 the new Republic of China government administratively unified Guihua and Suiyuan into a single city, Guisui (Charleux). This entry rests substantially on a single specialist source, Charleux’s study of Western travelers’ accounts of the city, and inherits that source’s framing: it sees Hohhot largely through outside visitors’ eyes rather than through Mongol- or Chinese-language administrative records.

Caravan hub and colonization

For centuries Hohhot served as a gateway to the Mongol plateau. Expeditions bound for Uliastai, Kobdo, Xinjiang, or the Gobi routinely assembled there, hiring guides and buying camels and horses before setting out. Charleux quotes Owen Lattimore’s observation that the town’s grain and other supplies made it “a natural centre of Mongol trade and a nodal point of caravan traffic,” a characterization she pairs with Sven Hedin’s associate Henning Haslund-Christensen’s description of it as the natural terminus where Mongolia’s caravan traffic met China (Charleux). The opening of a rail line to Hohhot in 1921, alongside electricity and telephone service, changed this rapidly. Where the journey from Beijing had once taken roughly two weeks, the railway now brought a wave of Chinese settlers from Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Hebei who came to dominate the city demographically. The American scholar John DeFrancis counted about 120,000 residents in 1935, most of them Chinese, with the native Tümed Mongols reduced to a minority presence even though monks and nobles still lived within the walls and most other Mongols camped in yurts around the city’s edges (DeFrancis, cited in Charleux). DeFrancis’s figure is cited here as Charleux reports it, from his own 1993 memoir of retracing a 1930s camel-caravan journey; this atlas has not consulted that book directly.

Hohhot in the autonomy movement’s political narrative

This entry’s Western-travelers focus leaves out a role Hohhot played that this atlas documents at length elsewhere. As Guisui, the city was the objective of Demchugdongrub’s forces in October 1937, and its capture that month was followed by a second Mongolian Congress there on October 27, 1937 that founded the Mongolian Allied League Autonomous Government, also called the “Federated Autonomous Government of Mongolia” by Boyle 1972 and Hirokawa 2024, per this atlas’s master chronology. That government was formally inaugurated in the city on December 1, 1937 in the former Suiyuan provincial government compound (Jagchid; Zorigt, “Cooperation with the Japanese”; see those entries for the fuller account). Hohhot also served at various points as a Mengjiang seat of government in its own right, even after Kalgan eclipsed it as the territory’s effective political center from 1937 onward (Jagchid; see the Kalgan entry).

A fuller Hohhot entry would need to draw on Mongol- and Chinese-language administrative sources for the Mengjiang period and beyond, rather than relying, as this one currently does, on a single article about Western travelers’ impressions of the city before 1945. The city’s post-1945 history under the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is not covered here at all.

Sources