evidence: The capital of Tuva, Kyzyl, claims to be the geographical "Center of Asia", as asserted by the label of a homonymous monument in the city. Whether this claim is true or false, the Tyva Republic is the cornerstone of Russian power in the yellow continent. Part of the historically Mongol region of Tannu Uriankhai, Tuva was under Manchu rule until 1911, when tsarist Russia, taking advantage of the chaos of the 1991 Revolution in China, formed a separatist movement among the Tuvans. In this way, in 1912 Tuva became nominally independent as the Uryankhai Republic, before being brought under Russian protectorate as Uryankhay Kray under Tsar Nicholas II on April 17, 1914. [...] Nevertheless, the shifting of the geopolitical center of gravity toward the Asia-Pacific region makes centrifugal tendencies within the Siberian republics of the Russian Federation always more difficult to control from Moscow. Tuva is one of Russia’s poorest republics, but its developing mining and metal working industry makes the region a natural basin for Chinese economic expansion in mainland Asia. For this reason, the battle for the modernization of the Russian economy waged by the Kremlin should give high priority to the development of those territories, like Tuva, where only the iron fist of the Kremlin has impeded the Turkic peoples of Northern Eurasia from gaining independence from what is, not for nothing, the world’s largest country.