Baarin Erotic

The Baarin are a Mongol tribe whose name runs the whole length of Mongol written history. They appear in the thirteenth-century Secret History of the Mongols, where the Baarin shaman Khorchi is rewarded for foretelling Temüjin's rise, and they remain a distinct people today, concentrated in two banners of Chifeng in southeastern Inner Mongolia, China: Bairin Left Banner, seated at Lindong, and Bairin Right Banner, seated at Daban. China counts them within the Mongol nationality rather than as a separate ethnic group, but the banner is the unit Baarin people identify with, and that identity has held for nearly four centuries.

Their country sits where the Greater Khingan foothills flatten into steppe: wooded hills to the north, grazing land and, increasingly, farmland in the river valleys, with the Saihan Ula reserve in the Right Banner holding the last stretch of old forest. It is old ground. The ruins of the Liao dynasty's Upper Capital lie beside Lindong, and the Liao imperial tombs and the white pagoda of Qingzhou stand in the Right Banner, so Baarin herders have spent centuries pasturing animals among the remains of a Khitan empire. The Right Banner also yields Balin stone, a soft, variably colored stone prized across China for seal carving.

The Baarin dialect is one of the named subdialects of Inner Mongolian, sitting between the Chakhar speech to the west that underlies China's standard Mongolian and the Khorchin dialects to the east, and it sounds noticeably different from the Khalkha of Mongolia. It is written in the traditional vertical script in schools and on signage, but Chifeng is heavily Han, and most Baarin now move between Mongolian and Mandarin, with the young tilting toward Mandarin.

The tribe gave the Yuan one of its great commanders, Bayan of the Baarin, who led the campaign that finished the Southern Song. In the sixteenth century the Baarin were one of the five otogs of the Inner Khalkha under descendants of Dayan Khan. Ligdan Khan's Chahar wars scattered them in the 1620s, they submitted to the rising Manchu state, and the Qing fixed them into Left and Right banners in 1648. The court then bound the Baarin nobility to the throne by marriage: a daughter of Hong Taiji was wed to a Baarin prince, and the Kangxi Emperor's daughter Princess Rongxian married another and lies buried in the Right Banner.

Religion follows the Inner Mongolian pattern: Gelug Tibetan Buddhism laid over older shamanic practice, with ovoo cairns on the hilltops still circled at summer festivals. Baarin women's ceremonial dress, with its coral and silver headdress, is one of the recognized regional costumes of Inner Mongolia and comes out for weddings and Naadam.