Övör Mongol Atlas

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Ulanchab League

place · documented 1937–1944

Mongol administrative league in western Mengjiang, reorganized and partly dismembered under Japanese sponsorship from late 1937, whose banner princes pressed the regime for the return of Qing-era jasag rights and reclaimed-land revenue at a 1940 conference, and several of whose leaders were assassinated, raided, or abducted through the war's final years.

Ulanchab League (also romanized Ulanjap in CIA CREST-era material, per the mapping in this atlas’s project notes; the master chronology behind this entry spells it “Ulaanchab” and “Ulanqab,” normalized here to this atlas’s established house spelling) was one of the Mongol leagues reorganized under Mengjiang rule after Chinese forces abandoned Suiyuan and Chahar provinces in late 1937. Per Hirokawa 2024, when the Mongolian Allied League Autonomous Government occupied Baotou and set up its capital at Hohhot that December, Suiyuan and Chahar were abolished and reorganized into four new Mengjiang leagues, Chahar, Shilingol, Ulanchab, and Bayantala, alongside the separately administered cities of Hohhot and Baotou. Bayantala League was new: it absorbed Wuchuan and Guyang counties out of old Ulanchab territory, a division that became the league’s central grievance at the 1940 conference described below (Hirokawa 2024, via this atlas’s master chronology). The following year, per Hirokawa, the regime’s League Office System (盟公署官制) reorganized league administration from four bureaus to three: civil, livestock, and security.

The 1940 Banner-League Administrative Conference

Ulanchab League’s banner princes held a three-day First Banner-League Administrative Conference in early May 1940, per the conference’s own proceedings record (大会議事録) as relayed by Hirokawa 2024. The princes pressed the Mengjiang regime on two fronts: to preserve Qing-era jasag (hereditary banner-prince) rights against the erosion of banner authority under the new league-office system, and to recover revenue from counties and reclaimed land that had been carved out of banner territory. The latter almost certainly included the Wuchuan and Guyang land lost to Bayantala League the previous year, though Hirokawa’s own material as relayed here does not state that link explicitly. The regime made a partial concession: it kept the jasag system in place and created a new Siregetü (lama) banner, but shelved the reclaimed-land revenue question rather than resolving it (Hirokawa 2024). This local, banner-level negotiating record is a kind of west-Inner-Mongolian texture that Boyle’s national-level account of the same period does not cover.

Assassination, raid, and abduction of league leaders, 1942–44

Ulanchab’s banner princes did not have a settled relationship with the Japanese-run regime in these years, and this atlas records three separate episodes rather than one narrative, since the sources give them as discrete incidents. On June 2, 1942, Chimedrinchinhorloo, jasag of the Mööminggan banner, died by gunshot after detention by the Japanese special agency at Bailingmiao under Asaka Shirō; he had been suspected of contact with the Mongolian People’s Republic, and the death is widely read as a Japanese assassination, though this atlas records that reading as the sources’ own characterization rather than an independently confirmed fact (Hirokawa 2024). In 1943, troops under Tsesdbaljur, jasag of the Darhan banner, raided that same Bailingmiao special agency, the same year the Japanese-sponsored Köke tug (Blue Flag) Mongolian propaganda journal began publication (Hirokawa 2024; Narangoa 2004, p.58). In June 1944, Rinchensengge, jasag of the Ulad Middle banner, became Ulanchab League’s head; he was then abducted, along with Baabudorj, by the Chinese warlord Fu Zuoyi’s forces and held until the war’s end (Hirokawa 2024).

This Rinchensengge is very likely, though not confirmed by any source this atlas holds, the same “Rinchinsengge (Prince Lin)” already established elsewhere in this atlas as Ulanchab League’s head in the Mongolian Autonomous State entry’s queue-cutting episode, and as Shongno’s father in the Mongolian Youth Alliance entry. The title, rough spelling, and role all match closely, but this atlas records the identification as probable rather than settled; see this atlas’s project notes mapping table.

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