No real price could be assigned to the eggs because “none had ever before been bought,” the Times noted. Yet Andrews set the auction reserve at $5,000 (about $71,000 today)—a price that he said would surely be “greatly exceeded by the highest bidder.” To bid, prospective buyers would send written offers. As the offers arrived, Andrews would notify other bidders until the bidding stopped.
A day after the news went out, the “Illustrated London news cabled an offer of two thousand dollars,” Andrews later wrote. “The National Geographic Society upped it to three thousand. A museum in Australia bid thirty-five hundred. Yale University offered four thousand. The publicity was enormous and, true to their promise, the newspaper men included a plea for money in every story. Checks began to come in by every mail.” Lord Rothschild, of the British Museum, made an inquiry, along with magazine owners from Washington to Australia. The winner, at five thousand dollars, was Austen B. Colgate, of Colgate & Co., whose grandfather founded the company in 1806. Colgate donated the egg to the university that bore his family name, in the upstate New York town of Hamilton. The school displayed the egg for a while, but moved it to the university vault after someone tried to steal it.
A novelty manufacturer suggested that Andrews make autographed casts of the famous Gobi egg to be sold as paper weights and desk sets. “The original Easter egg!” he told Andrews, suggesting a first run of a million copies. The egg replicas could sell for twenty-five cents each and Andrews would of course take a royalty. This idea went too far, in Andrews’s opinion. He had already declined an offer from an oil and mining company to attach a petroleum prospector to his expeditions. If he started mass producing Gobi eggs, everyone would assume the money “went into my pocket,” he explained. “Moreover, the expedition would be stamped as a money making venture in the eyes of the world. Science camouflaging business.”
Hearing of the auction, the Mongolian government complained, believing a false rumor that Andrews had sold the egg to the British Museum for a million dollars. That year, in its new constitution of 1924, the Mongolian government declared “all lands and resources within their subsoil, forests, water, and the natural resources within them” national property. Government leaders reminded Andrews that he had signed a contract promising to eventually return the fossils that he had borrowed for study. “My eggs touched off an explosion against us,” he wrote, saying the sale now threatened the museum’s Gobi permits. “Nothing else so disastrous ever happened to the expedition. Up to this time the Chinese and Mongols had taken us at face value. Now they thought we were making money out of our explorations,” he wrote, adding, “Why should the Mongols and the Chinese let us have such priceless treasures for nothing?”
Yet he also understood the assumption: “They couldn’t know that the five thousand dollars was a fictitious value engendered by publicity, or that any purely scientific or art object has a market value of just what it can be sold for to someone who has a special reason for desiring to possess it.”
Mongolia now had a constitution and self-identified as independent, but, remembering two hundred years of Chinese rule, the country ducked beneath Moscow’s wing, becoming the second Communist nation in the world. The State Department had finally installed a U.S. consulate, locating it in the Chinese city of Kalgan, near the Great Wall. Western companies like Standard Oil and the British American Tobacco Company were there, and Mongolia appeared to hope the United States would become the first Western power to recognize the nation. But after Prime Minister Dogsomyn Bodoo proposed “friendly relations, especially for trade,” and followed up on the idea with a piece in The Nation titled “Mongolia Speaks to the World,” a political rival accused him of treason and he was executed. So was the minister of finance, a Harley motorcycle enthusiast with a fondness for capitalism. The “lesson was obvious enough,” Ambassador Addleton later wrote. “Working with Americans or, for that matter, any other foreigners, might easily prove fatal.” The Americans pulled the consulate, wary of the regional instability and unconvinced of Mongolia’s value to the West.
Andrews had sensed that human life was “worth less than that of a sheep” in Mongolia. The AMNH crew had come across the ravaged remains of temples and villages, finding weathered corpses still wearing lama robes and military uniforms. One day, a Mongolian general who was close with Russia described to Andrews an attack on a Chinese encampment: “We rode at full speed through the camp, killing everyone we saw. Then we rode back again. The Chinese ran like sheep and we butchered them by the hundreds.” Andrews wrote, “Except for the modern weapons, the tale might have been a thousand years old.”
By the third expedition, in 1925, the “dashing horsemen” and “strange costumes” of Urga had been replaced by “Russians and swaggering Buriats,” Mongolian tribesmen who lived in Siberia. The city square “filled with squads of awkward Mongols being drilled as soldiers.” The Soviet secret police tailed the Americans, suspicious of plots to “annex” Mongolia for the United States. Or maybe Andrews was scouting for oil. “In short, one was treated as a spy and a generally undesirable character,” he wrote. Such an enormous enterprise as the Central Asiatic Expeditions surely had not come merely for science. After all, Andrews had the perfect cover for a spy: as a museum explorer he roamed the countryside for long periods with “high-powered binoculars, a variety of weapons, camping equipment, supplies, and a small party of assistants,” plus a wife.
Yet the Mongolians’ suspicious were somewhat correct. In the summer of 1918, Andrews had sworn an oath to serve the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence as a civilian informant, code-named “Reynolds.” The job paid eight dollars per day and required no training: “Reynolds” was simply to send information or observations by letter to the naval attaché in Peking when he thought it important, with the “salient lines penned in invisible ink.” The espionage deal was apparently fleeting. Andrews lost the intelligence contract after Yvette wrote a letter home that the U.S. government deemed “highly indiscreet,” in which she demanded that Andrews’s family be “informed as to the nature of his mission.”
Andrews went on reporting his observations publicly in magazine and newspaper dispatches that provided Westerners rare accounts of what was happening in eastern Asia. By 1926 he was writing about the fighting around Peking, where “the murder of white residents and mysterious disappearances of others happened frequently.” Ships sailing from China were “packed to the rails with missionaries, merchants, and others who had resided for years in a country which had suddenly gone mad as though smitten with an attack of the rabies.” By 1928 the Chinese were intercepting the expedition’s finds. By 1930 Andrews could get no closer to Outer Mongolia than Inner Mongolia. The Mongolian minister of war had been executed. The former minister of the interior had been dragged out of his home and shot. Chinese soldiers had executed Andrews’s old friend Charles Coltman, who had inspired him to conduct his expedition by car. Andrews wrote, “Murder and sudden death stalked ahead upon the streets. It was an exceedingly good place to leave.”
The American Museum of Natural History pulled out of Eastern Asia in August 1932, just before the purges began in Mongolia, wherein the leader Khorloin Choibalsan ultimately ordered an estimated thirty thousand intellectuals and Buddhist leaders killed, some thought on the orders of Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin. Andrews had already auctioned off almost everything in his Peking compound and departed, saying he was through with China.
“Is it surprising that I was filled with regret as I looked for the last time at the Flaming Cliffs, gorgeous in the morning sunshine of that brilliant August day?” he later wrote, remembering his last moments at Bayanzag. “I suppose I shall never see them again!” And he never did. In fact, the American Museum of Natural History would not be allowed in Mongolia for the next sixty years.
CHAPTER 12
MARKET CONDITIONS
IN THE SPRING OF 1985, MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, LEADER OF THE Soviet Union, began talking about glasnost and perestroika, signaling the
end of the Cold War. On January 27, 1987, bilateral relations between the United States and Mongolia were finally announced, in a signing ceremony in the Treaty Room of the State Department, beneath a portrait of Thomas Jefferson. Joseph Lake, a foreign service officer from Texas, was named the first permanent ambassador to Mongolia and soon opened an embassy in Ulaanbaatar. Twenty years hence, on the anniversary of the agreement, Mongolia’s postal service would issue two commemorative stamps, one featuring Abraham Lincoln, the other Genghis Khan.
Another pivotal moment came on December 7, 1988, as President Ronald Reagan prepared to exit the White House and President-elect George H. W. Bush prepared to enter it. In a landmark address to the UN General Assembly in New York, one that would contribute to his winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Gorbachev declared, “It is obvious… that the use or threat of force no longer can or must be an instrument of foreign policy. This applies above all to nuclear arms, but that is not the only thing that matters.” He went on: “All of us, and primarily the stronger of us, must exercise self-restraint and totally rule out any outward-oriented use of force. That is the first and the most important component of a nonviolent world…” Gorbachev spoke of the importance of “rule of law” and the “highest standards” for individual rights. He pledged to work with the United States most urgently to reduce arms and eliminate chemical weapons, saying, “I would like to believe that our hopes will be matched by our joint effort to put an end to an era of wars, confrontation, and regional conflicts, to aggressions against nature, to the terror of hunger and poverty as well as to political terrorism.”
Mongolia had been a Soviet satellite for the better part of a century, and depended upon socialism for basics like shelter, food, and education. Some eleven thousand graduates of Mongolian high schools and vocational schools had attended college in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Thousands had learned English there. Exposed to opposition movements and democratic ideals, they had learned that it was wrong for citizens to be jailed for, say, disagreeing with their government. They were returning home to Mongolia with new ideas about how to define freedom, the Soviet Union having “unwittingly sown the seeds of its own destruction on fertile ground,” Christopher Kaplonski, a University of Cambridge anthropologist, wrote in Truth, History and Politics in Mongolia.
A secret pro-democracy group called Shine Ue (“New Epoch”) organized. Members made leaflets on mechanical typewriters and left them on people’s doors in the night. Ulaanbaatar was now a city with nearly four hundred broadcasting relay stations, and over 90 percent of the population could read and write—one of the world’s poorest countries had one of the world’s highest literacy rates. In other words, Mongolia had both an infrastructure and a ready audience for the proliferation of information.
In June 1989, as pro-democracy demonstrations swelled in Beijing, the Chinese government declared martial law. The military opened fire in Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Over seven hundred miles north, Mongolia’s democratic revolutionaries took note but went on with their plans, forming the Mongolian Democratic Union, the nation’s first independent political organization.
After seventy years of Soviet control and centuries of Chinese rule before that, it was hard to know how to become a democracy, but holding multiparty elections seemed like a good place to start. Only one party had ever existed in Mongolia though it had gone by two names: the Mongolian People’s Party (MPP) in the early 1920s and the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) since 1924. The Democratic Party would be the first opposition party in history.
Pro-democracy demonstrations began in Ulaanbaatar on December 10, 1989, on the steps of the Youth Cultural Center. A young political science professor named Sanjaasuren Zorig led several hundred people in demands for wholesale reforms—open elections, a free press, respect for human rights, and a market economy. Each new demonstration attracted more participants than the last, despite winter temperatures of 22 degrees below zero. Demonstrators were partly stoked by a recent Playboy interview in which the expatriate Soviet chess champion Garry Kasparov joked that the Soviet Union could cash in on Mongolia by selling it to China.
By mid-January, over five thousand people were demonstrating, some of them standing outside the Lenin Museum for hours in winter battle dress of felt boots, fur hats, and deels lined in sheepskin. Surprisingly, the politburo allowed leaders to broadcast their demands on radio and TV, and to take as their symbol Genghis Khan—the “perfect warrior”—the mention of whose very name the Soviets had long banned. By March, the rallies had grown larger and moved to Sukhbaatar Square. When Democratic Union members launched a hunger strike, supporters settled in with them, declaring their intentions to “sit day and night on the stone cold square” until the politburo resigned. The rallies, though illegal, never drew a police presence, never got out of control or required the presence of tanks. Sitting atop a friend’s shoulders, Zorig spoke into a megaphone, keeping the crowd calm.
To everyone’s shock, the politburo stepped down. They were gone by the middle of March. As the first multiparty elections were scheduled for summer, news of the changes filtered to the West. “An isolated and little-known country between Soviet Siberia and China’s Inner Mongolia region, the once hard-core Communist Mongolian People’s Republic, has quietly but decisively spawned an experiment in Soviet-style reform…,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
Democratic transition usually takes time, and often spills blood, but in Mongolia it happened quickly, peacefully. That summer, a staggering 98 percent of the nation’s nearly one million citizens turned out to vote in the election for State Great Hural (parliament), some riding all day on horseback to reach the polls, dressed in their finest deels. The MPRP, the old Communist party, won most of the seats and stayed in power, but opposition parties were being formed by the dozens. The news media proliferated. Mongolians started talking about resurrecting the beautiful old vertical script, which had been replaced with a horizontal Cyrillic alphabet under the Soviets. Genghis was back, his whiskery image appearing on vodka labels and cigarette packages, and in a mass-marketed portrait that hung in homes the way some Americans display Jesus and JFK. As the country clawed toward a market economy, the visage of Genghis became a “21st Century marketing phenomenon,” deployed in the names of hotels, banks, and, in one case, an Irish pub. Lenin statues came down; Genghis statues went up.
The borders were open.
In the early days of the democratic momentum, Michael Novacek, a vertebrate paleontologist and the American Museum of Natural History’s dean of science, received a visitor in his office in New York. Novacek was a California native in his late thirties, with a UCLA zoology degree, a Berkeley PhD, and, during field season, the beard of a lumberjack. He got into paleontology through a childhood love of dinosaurs, via the books of Roy Chapman Andrews. His adult interests had broadened to the “greatness and complexity of history” that fossils represented, and he now specialized in fossil mammals, “blueprints of our own heritage.”
His visitor was Sodnam (many Mongolians go by one name), president of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, the country’s highest academic organization. Sodnam wasted no time in saying he hoped Mongolian and AMNH scientists could collaborate for the first time since the days of the Central Asiatic Expeditions. Within weeks of Mongolia’s fast break toward democracy, a delegation reappeared at the museum, to reiterate Sodnam’s words and invite AMNH scientists to return to the Gobi. By June 1990, a scouting expedition, led by Novacek, the newly hired Mark Norell, and their colleague in the vertebrate paleontology department, Malcolm McKenna, was en route to the desert. They had permission to spend a field season assessing whether the desert still held enough paleontological promise to warrant a full expedition and the recruitment of sponsors.
The team headed straight to the Flaming Cliffs, some 400 miles southwest of Ulaanbaatar. The last American scientists known to have set foot there were the crews led by Andrews and Granger, whose
names had long faded from public consciousness and whose Gobi finds remained in New York. The scientists, accompanied by members of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, expected the Flaming Cliffs to be tapped out, having been worked by the Americans in the 1920s, the Russians in the 1940s, Polish-Mongolian teams in the 1960s and ’70s, and at least one Sino-Swedish expedition. Their goal was to advance the science and make new discoveries, not simply rework old territory. If the new AMNH team could prove the Gobi was still worth exploring, they could secure funding for a series of joint expeditions, picking up where Andrews and his colleagues had left off.
The Americans’ key Mongolian colleagues in the joint venture were Demberelyin “Dash” Dashzeveg, Altangerel Perle, and Rinchen Barsbold, paleontologists whose work was published in Russian and wasn’t widely available in the West. Dash—“lean and hungry” like a “Siberian wolf,” as Novacek described him—knew the Gobi “perhaps better than any person alive.” Barsbold, an expert on Gobi theropods, the group of dinosaurs that walked on two legs and ate meat, directed the Geological Institute, which oversaw the national paleontology center and laboratory under the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. Perle worked on dinosaurs, too; he had a laugh and a flubbed English phrase for everything, and could be temperamental to the point of terrifying blind rage. At night as the crew sat around the campfire, he “sang passionate Mongolian love songs and related the highlights of his country’s long history,” Novacek wrote in Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs. On this inaugural trip, Perle proved a facile guide, bargaining for “sheep, fifty pounds of potatoes, rice, and a small chunk of fresh ginger from China” and altogether smoothing the way with provincial officials for the scientists to do their work.
Norell was fascinated with the prospect of birdlike dinosaurs, Novacek with Cretaceous mammals, some of them “small enough to curl up on a teaspoon.” The Gobi appeared to be extraordinarily valuable to science because it revealed “biological empires in transition.” The Americans soon found the desert promising enough to sign a three-year renewable exploration contract. Everyone agreed that any found fossils would be the property of Mongolia but could be taken to New York for study. A Mongolian scientist would be assigned to each expedition, and Mongolians would be hired as drivers, preppers, and field crew. Ecstatic, the Americans returned home and began planning. They bought a customized fleet of four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi Monteros—beige for McKenna, red for Norell, green for Novacek—and outfitted the rigs with heavy-duty winches and racks. They shipped themselves plaster, lumber, shovels, ropes, cable, camping gear, toilet paper, walkie-talkies, cameras, laptops, and GPS devices. They stocked up on freeze-dried and canned food, intending to supplement it with items bought on the ground in Ulaanbaatar, but when they arrived in Mongolia for the 1991 field season, they found frightening food and gas shortages now that the country had lost its Soviet subsidies. “It seemed an absurd predicament for a country with only two and a half million people and over twenty-five million domesticated animals,” Novacek wrote. “But the infrastructure of the young democracy had collapsed.” The scientists rationed supplies as they headed east from the city, following the “Big Gobi circuit,” a huge loop studded with known dinosaur sites.
The Dinosaur Artist Page 15