Merkit, Bayads, Barga Mongols and Tümeds inhabited in Buryatia. Imperial Russia Cossacks and other tsarists officials began moving eastward into the western Buryat lands in 1625, where they estimated 30,000 Buryats were living in southeastern Siberia, collecting tribute from other, small Siberian tribes. The Buryats resisted the incorporation into the Russian Empire's tribute system (yasak) that demanded a yearly supply of furs; it was not until the 1680s that the last of the eastern Buryat lands were forced to participate in the yasak system. In 1666, the fort of Udinskoye was founded. This area later became known as Verkhneudinsk – in 1934, it was renamed Ulan-Ude, the present-day capital of Buryatia. From 1727 it was the border crossing for the Kyakhta trade between Russia and China. Kyakhta's founder, the Serb Sava Vladislavich, established it as a trading point between Russia and the Qing Empire. The 1820 reforms of Mikhail Speransky established indirect rule over Buryatia by codifying the local clan leaders as official members of the "steppe duma" in order to incorporate them into the existing imperial government. Buddhism was recognized as an official religion of the Russian Empire by Empress Elizabeth in 1741, with the first Pandito Khambo Lama, the spiritual leader of Buryat Buddhists, elected in 1764. The first person to serve in this role was Damba Dorzha Zaiaev (1711 - 1776). At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov served as the 12th Pandito Khambo Lama of Eastern Siberia from 1911 to 1917. Itigilov stepped down in 1917 at the time of the revolution and later encouraged his students to flee to Mongolia, though he refused to flee himself. Soviet Buryatia National movements, including that of Buryatia, began to foment after the February Revolution in 1917. From March 1917, the leading Buryat intelligentsia organized a number of conferences in cities such as Petrograd, Chita, Irkutsk, and Verkhneudinsk (present-day Ulan-Ude) and invited representatives from Buryat administrative districts of the Irkutsk and Transbaikalia regions. The culmination of these conferences was the first All-Buryat Congress in April 23-25, 1917 in Chita, where activists advocated for a self-governing Buryat Autonomous Region, based on the models of Poland and Finland, with an elected body, the Buryat National Duma, that all Buryats, men and women, over the age of 18 and without criminal convictions, would participate in. This Duma would elect a permanent executive body, the Buryat National committee, which would take