Övör Mongol Atlas

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Sechin Jagchid

person · documented 1914–1999

Inner Mongolian historian and participant-witness to the events he later chronicled; grew up in Demchugdongrub's political circle, served in several Mengjiang-era governments, and later wrote the fullest biography of Demchugdongrub used in this atlas.

Sechin Jagchid was born in 1914 in Inner Mongolia, into one of the region’s old aristocratic Mongol families. His own father was a “loyal ally” of Demchugdongrub, and Jagchid grew up within the political circle around the prince’s movement for Mongol autonomy (Jagchid). The end year given here reflects the most recent point documented by the source used for this entry, his own book, published in 1999, which describes him as then retired and living in California. It is not a date of death, which is not established by the sources used for this atlas.

A participant, not just a chronicler

Much of what makes Jagchid’s later book distinctive is that he was not an outside historian reconstructing these events from documents alone, but a direct participant in many of them. As a schoolboy in Beiping he was already present at informal gatherings where Mongol delegation politics were discussed. As a young man he served in several of the successive governments organized by the Inner Mongolian autonomy movement, and personally witnessed, and in some cases helped shape, decisions he would later narrate (Jagchid). He describes drawing on his “own notes taken at that time” and his “own capacious memory,” rather than on an archive of collected documents, as the primary basis for his account (Jagchid).

Two episodes recur across this atlas as examples of that direct participation. He served for a time as personal secretary to Wu Heling, including during Wu’s period of effective exile in Japan in 1938–39, when the two studied together at Waseda University. A decade later, in 1949, he was a drafter and delegate at the founding conference of Demchugdongrub’s last government, the Mongolian Autonomous Government in Alashan, where he personally drafted the Declaration of Mongolian Autonomy (Jagchid). After leaving Wu’s service he became secretary to Prince Sungjingwangchug, the Minister of Civilian Affairs in the Mongolian Allied Autonomous Government of 1939–41, the vantage point from which much of his first-hand account of that government’s inner workings derives. A third instance comes from outside his own book. A US intelligence translation of the founding document of the Mongolian Restoration Association, the émigré body Wu Heling launched on Taiwan in March 1949 to plan for a Mongol future should Demchugdongrub’s position in the Northwest collapse, lists Jagchid, in Mongol name-order as “Jagchitsechin,” among its founding members (Source G). That the atlas’s most-used source was himself a participant in one of the ventures it records is worth keeping in view when weighing his account; it bears on his vantage point, not on the reliability of his scholarship.

His family placed him at the center of this world from the start, which is also worth keeping in view when weighing his account. In his book’s own narrative, Jagchid identifies his father as Lubsangchoijur, a Beiping Mongol elder who served as a personal representative of the reformer Prince Gungsangnorbu and who, with others, helped launch the Mongol Delegation of the late 1920s and personally backed the rise of Wu Heling (Jagchid). Jagchid was also related to Wu by marriage; he notes that Wu had married a niece of his father. The two men nonetheless later became factional rivals, and Jagchid’s portrayal of Wu carries both that closeness and that friction. These ties mean his testimony is unusually well-placed but also embedded in the loyalties and quarrels of the movement he describes, a caveat this atlas keeps in mind wherever it leans on him.

After 1949

After the Chinese Communist conquest ended any prospect of an autonomous Inner Mongolia along the lines Demchugdongrub’s movement had sought, Jagchid left mainland China, living for a time in Japan and ultimately settling in the United States. He went on to teach and conduct research at Brigham Young University for many years (Jagchid).

As a source for this atlas

Jagchid’s 1999 book, The Last Mongol Prince, is the single most extensively used source in this atlas, cited in nearly every entry connected to Demchugdongrub and Mengjiang. Because Jagchid was personally close to his subject and a participant in many of the events he describes, his account carries the strengths and the limitations of firsthand testimony. It is unusually detailed, and often corrected against or corroborated by other sources in this atlas. It is also, by his own admission, reliant on memory decades after the fact, and occasionally openly argumentative on points where he disputes other accounts (such as the reliability of Demchugdongrub’s Chinese-published “Personal Narrative,” which Jagchid argues was edited to put words in the prince’s mouth).

Sources