 Some Chinese who lived among the Mongols of Inner Mongolians, while in their youth, adopted Mongol culture and married a Mongol women but when he became old he would come back and lived with the Han Chinese again.One Han Chinese military officer who defected to the Mongols was "Monkey Li" (Li Huai) who fought against the Ming.Historically, the Gobi served as a barrier to large-scale Chinese settlement in what was, before 1921, called Outer Mongolia; the unsuitability of most of the territory for agriculture made settlement less attractive.