This course introduces the key themes driving over five hundred years of Inner Asian frontier history from the 15th century to the start of the 20th. In this course, Inner Asia spans a region from the Korean Peninsula in the east to the Pamirs in the west and from Lake Baikal in the north to the Himalayas in the south. Over the five hundred years, Inner Asia experienced major political, social, cultural and religious changes. The legacies of the Mongol empire that had flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries still lingered. Zhu Yuanzhang, who overthrew the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, established the Chinese Ming dynasty but occupied only part of the territory of the former Yuan. The Mongols retreated to the north of the Great Wall and fragmented into smaller polities, but they remained a threat to the Chinese dynasty in the south time and again. Their cousins, the Oirats established the Jungar Khanate in modern day Xinjiang in the west, while the Manchus with the help of the Mongols arose from the east to challenge and replace the Chinese Ming in 17th century. With the patronage of Mongol aristocracy, the Tibetan Buddhism spread amongst the Mongols. By the mid-18th century the Manchus had consolidated their hegemony in Inner Asia but they faced competition from Russia in the north as well as from the Western empires along the Pacific coast and in the Himalayas. Studying this period of Inner Asian history will help us to understand the dynamics of frontiers and the continuity and discontinuity of political, ethnic and territorial issues in the region and beyond.