Covering over 2,000 years of history, John Man’s newest book, Conquering the North (Pegasus Books, 2025) is an impressive achievement. In a distinctive writing style that is part travelogue and part historical account, Man begins his journey with the rise of the Xiongnu—which he uses as a jumping-off point to explore the intertwined histories and, he posits, destinies of Mongolia and China.
Man spends little time on the parts of this history that are the most famous—namely Chinggis Khan and the Mongol Empire—which, he explained, he feels have been sufficiently covered elsewhere, and chooses instead to delve into periods, events, and characters that are lesser-known in the West. What mentions he does make of Chinggis are related more to the Chinese “high jacking” of his legacy and significance for their own imperial ends, which is a theme he returns to throughout the book and is an especially important focus in the latter half. In this way, Conquering the North serves as a warning as well as a history, making clear through his discussion of Russia and China’s complex historical relationship that he fears Mongolia’s current position of independence is perhaps precarious at best.
However, Conquering the North is not all doom and gloom. Man’s captivating literary style illuminates several incidences from both his own travels and from history in a tongue-in-cheek manner, including an amusing (and remarkable) series of events in Chapter 9 where he converts early diplomatic meetings between Russian and Chinese envoys into a screenplay—lending a slightly humorous and highly readable nature to events that would be easily overcomplicated or glossed over.
Man’s book is clearly the result of years of careful field research and deep knowledge of and passion for Mongolia’s complex history. Because of the vastness of this topic, he naturally had to pick and choose which figures, events, and geographic locations to focus on and which to leave out. For example, while reading I found myself wishing he had included more interviews and research from his visits to the independent nation of Mongolia, as the majority of traveling and site visits he describes seem to have taken place in Inner Mongolia and elsewhere in China, sometimes presented as “Mongolia” but also involving numerous Han Chinese interlocutors—a choice that somewhat muddies his later warnings regarding the state of Mongolian independence.
Ultimately though, Conquering the North is a compelling and readable book that will be of interest to anyone interested in the region’s history, its present-day geopolitics, or really, anyone who enjoys historical accounts, travel writing, and wants to explore the rich, vivid world of life, death, war, and diplomacy in the greater Mongolian region. A region that, as John Man attempts to make clear, is so much more than just China’s “northern frontier” if you only shift your perspective.
Conquering the North was published in the United States by Pegasus Books and is available online and in stores now.
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Written by Maggie Lindrooth, U.S. Director of ACMS