One people, two scripts
Look at any Mongolian sign in Ulaanbaatar and you see Cyrillic. Look at any Mongolian sign in Hohhot (Inner Mongolia, China) and you see a flowing vertical script, written in columns from top to bottom, columns running left to right. The two populations share an ancestry, a language family, and an epic — The Secret History of the Mongols — but they write their language in completely different alphabets.
Step 1: Genghis Khan and the Uyghur scribe (1206)
When Temüjin united the Mongolian tribes and was proclaimed Genghis Khan at the great kurultai of 1206, his empire urgently needed a writing system. A chancellor of the defeated Naiman tribe, a Uyghur-speaking official named Tatatunga, was captured, and conveniently knew how to write. Genghis Khan ordered Tatatunga to teach Mongolian princes the Old Uyghur script, and to adapt it for Mongolian sounds.
The resulting Mongolian Bichig ("Mongolian script") is written vertically, top-to-bottom, in columns that advance from left to right — a quirk inherited from Sogdian via Uyghur. It is still used today in Inner Mongolia and is the official script of that region, alongside Chinese characters on all official signs and documents.
Step 2: The Phags-pa interlude (1269–1368)
The Mongol empire's diversity made Tatatunga's Uyghur-derived script inadequate for writing Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit or Persian. In 1269, Kublai Khan commissioned the Tibetan monk 'Phags-pa to design a universal script. The resulting Phags-pa script (八思巴文) is a block alphabet that can write virtually any language phonetically. It was used on imperial seals and edicts throughout the Yuan dynasty, and some scholars — Gari Ledyard above all — have argued that it influenced the design of the Korean hangul (1443), though the point remains contested. When the Ming dynasty expelled the Mongols in 1368, Phags-pa fell out of imperial use, but Mongolian Bichig continued without interruption.
Step 3: Stalin's scissors (1946)
By the 20th century, the Mongolian People's Republic (modern Mongolia) was a Soviet satellite. In February 1941, Moscow pressured it to switch from Traditional Mongolian script to Latin — then reversed that decision within weeks, on 25 March 1941, and imposed Cyrillic instead, compulsory in all official documents from 1 January 1946. The ostensible reason was to align Mongolia's literacy with Soviet print infrastructure; the real effect was to cut the generation trained in Cyrillic off from any direct ability to read pre-1946 texts, classical literature, or the stone inscriptions of the Mongolian empires.
Inner Mongolia, meanwhile, remained under the Republic of China and then the People's Republic of China, both of which allowed — and in some periods actively promoted — the continued use of Traditional Mongolian script. The result: a single language community separated by a political border into two completely different literacy traditions.
Step 4: The 2020 protests
In the summer of 2020, the PRC issued new curriculum guidelines mandating that Mandarin Chinese replace Mongolian as the medium of instruction in politics, history, and language classes in Inner Mongolian schools — a policy already applied to Tibetan- and Uyghur-medium schools in earlier years. The reaction was swift and unprecedented: parents boycotted schools, students walked out, and residents across Inner Mongolia held demonstrations. Signs in Traditional Mongolian script were held up by protesters who wrote that they were fighting for the survival of their culture and language.
The revival in Mongolia
Since the 1990 democratic revolution, Mongolia has officially committed to reviving Traditional script literacy alongside Cyrillic. Street signs in Ulaanbaatar now sometimes include the vertical Mongolian script. A 2025 deadline was set for restoring Traditional script to co-official status, and it held: since 1 January 2025 the Law on the Mongolian Language has required state and local government documents in both Cyrillic and Mongolian Bichig, with a full transition targeted for 2030. Progress is slow: most Mongolians under 60 cannot read the script they used for seven centuries before Stalin's order. But the younger generation is learning — partly from pride, partly because Traditional Mongolian script is the only way to read the words of Genghis Khan as his own scribes wrote them.
During the 2020 protests, participants repeatedly linked continued use of the traditional script with Mongolian cultural continuity and language rights.