Irtysh River - History

History

A number of Mongol and Turkic peoples occupied the river banks for many centuries. In the 15th and 16th centuries the lower and middle courses of the Irtysh lay within the Tatar Khanate of Sibir, which the Russians conquered in the 1580s. In the 17th century the Zunghar Khanate, formed by the Mongol Oirat people, became Russia's southern neighbor, and controlled the upper Irtysh. The Russians founded the cities of Omsk in 1716, Semipalatinsk in 1718, Ust-Kamenogorsk in 1720, and Petropavlovsk in 1752.

The Chinese Qing Empire conquered the Zunghar state in the 1750s. The border between the Russian and the Qing empires (the present border between Russia and Kazakhstan in the north and Mongolia and China in the south) was settled in the early 19th century.