The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China

by John Man

  In its day Avraga was a town dedicated to the service of Genghis. The proof? Shiraishi guessed that Genghis would need vast amounts of weapons, and indeed one of Shiraishi’s colleagues, Yasuyuki Murakami, found bits of slag on and under the surface scattered over some 10,000 square metres – ‘a garbage dump for an iron factory’.

  Finds dating from later periods suggest that Avraga remained a religious site, maintained for two centuries or so after Genghis’s death to worship the souls of the Mongol khans. In the late thirteenth century, it seems, the site became open pasture. But then a new palace-tent was built, perhaps to act as a shrine for Genghis, as suggested by the discovery of pieces of fine white porcelain bowls ‘thought to have been used by people of the emperor’s class’. Around 1450 the shrine vanished for good. Avraga’s mud-brick walls sank back into the earth, grass grew over its stones, and the town vanished from sight and local memory.

  As a result, Shiraishi recalled, something appalling happened. In 2006, locals held their National Day celebrations right on top of it, leaving wheel marks, glass, plastic bottles and the remains of campfires everywhere. Something had to be done, and was. Appeals went to the local government, UNESCO and Japan’s Cultural Grasslands Programme. Money flowed, the site was fenced, the museum built, a sign raised to record the groups involved in this ‘Project to Protect the Avraga Ruins’.

  Work continued. In 2007, Shiraishi’s team discovered the remains of five furnaces. Also a solid 5-by-5-metre building with underfloor heating, like the system used in China for kàngs (heated communal sleeping-platforms). It was perhaps an inn, where a few could escape the rigours of a winter night. Dating the ash from the stove revealed that the house was in use when Genghis was still a boy, which suggests that he did not choose the site himself, but inherited it or took it over.

  When we were there, Shiraishi was supervising the excavation of a building which, he guessed, had been a little temple, with a central area and a little side-chapel. It was a simple structure, floored with clay, not tiles. Shiraishi pointed out some small holes, where long-vanished wooden pillars had been. The stone footings were still there, but Avraga seemed to have lacked stonemasons: the bases were improvised from slabs of undressed rock or small millstones. But Genghis’s religion was shamanism, which had no temples. What was this for?

  It was maybe Daoist, Shiraishi said, probably built by Jurchens, the people then ruling north China, because the basic unit was a Chinese chi (about 0.3 metre, or 12 inches). The whole temple was 30 by 30 chi, about 100 square metres – not impressive in the eyes of a Jurchen trader from Beijing, but a surprise in a region of tents and grass.

  ‘Why was it here?’

  ‘For visiting Jurchens, perhaps,’ he replied. ‘Or a group of Jurchen residents.’

  All of this threw a new light on Genghis and his times. He is often seen by his victims as springing from the dark, an unknown barbarian ignorant of the world outside his own, eager only for booty. But here was proof that the pre-imperial Mongols knew their southern neighbours intimately, through trade, architecture, religious practices and diplomacy. Any resident southerners must surely have reacted to Genghis’s revolution with a mixture of delight and suspicion: delight in the possibilities for trade presented by a strong, united nation, and suspicion of what the Mongols’ new khan intended with all those horses and men and blacksmiths busy forging swords and arrowheads.

  But no outsider could possibly have known what Genghis himself did not yet know – that wealth, though vital, was not going to be enough; that conquest would suggest something far grander: the idea that Heaven itself had ordained the spread of Mongol rule way beyond the Gobi’s gravelly wastes. In Avraga’s palace-tent, Genghis was already planning the first of the campaigns that would, over the next twenty years, re-form most of Asia.

  fn1 The incident is analysed in detail by Cleaves in ‘The Historicity of the Baljuna Covenant’ (see Bibliography).

  fn2 The first two syllables, khural (with a sound-shift of i to a), are used today for the Mongolian Parliament.

  fn3 This script is still in use today in Inner Mongolia, little changed.

  fn4 David Morgan (in his ‘Great Yasa’ paper, see Bibliography) points out that Juvaini, the Persian historian who worked for the Mongols a generation after Genghis’s death, refers to the contents of the Yasa as qawā’id, the plural of qā’ida, the word adopted by Osama bin Laden for his organization. It means many things – base, foundation, pedestal, capital, rule, custom, regulation among others, but (Morgan writes) ‘“law” is not an available option’.

  fn5 The name derives from a’uruq, meaning a base camp or military household ‘where old people, womenfolk, children, servants with baggage and supplies were left when the men went to fight and where they returned’ (de Rachewiltz, Secret History, p. 499). The word dropped from use, and the name became confused with avraga, meaning both ‘champion’ and something big, thus suitable for Genghis’s HQ.

  TO THE SOUTH

  WE NOW FOLLOW Genghis’s gaze south, across 600 kilometres of grassland and Gobi to the broad and silt-laden Yellow River, and then on upriver for another 250 kilometres, to the city of Yinchuan.

  Today, Yinchuan, capital of Ningxia province, has a population of 2 million. Hemmed by mountains to the west and the Yellow River to the east, it is surrounded by fields, orchards and a network of ancient canals. Two tall pagodas are reminders that this city was once a centre of Buddhism, with roots going back 1,500 years. Yinchuan lies just one third of the way across present-day China, but in Genghis’s day it was the capital of a culture apart, whose enigmatic relics stagger tourists. If you drive for half an hour westwards, hazy mountains harden into a rugged wall of rock: the Helan Shan, or Alashan. In front of them loom odd cone-shaped structures, 30 metres high, that look like the noses of rockets pock-marked by nasty encounters with asteroids. There are nine of them, but at first glance you can see only three or four. The others are swallowed by the space around them, an apron of gravel and soil that runs for 10 kilometres along the lower slopes of the mountains. The cones are the ruined tombs of emperors, destroyed by Genghis. They and their huge site assert the power and prestige of a culture that for over 200 years dominated an area the size of France and Germany put together.

  Why would Genghis cast predatory eyes on these people, rather than on their wealthier neighbours, the Jin, the Mongols’ traditional enemy? To understand Genghis’s strategy, look at his choices.

  China in the early thirteenth century was a land divided.

  The central and southern regions had long been under the control of the Song dynasty, which had presided over an artistic and intellectual renaissance. Its southern portion was still in Song hands, but the north – modern China’s north-east – had fallen to Jin, the kingdom founded a century before by the Jurchen from Manchuria. Genghis’s great-grandfather Kabul and his great-uncle Katula had fought Jin, and it would eventually be Genghis’s main target. But Jin was a tough nut. It had forgotten its barbarian origins and ruled its millions of Chinese peasants and its dozens of well-defended cities from behind the formidable walls of the city that is now Beijing.

  Next door to the west lay a second ‘barbarian’ kingdom, the one with the nine cone-shaped tombs, which was far more promising. It is best known by its Chinese name, Western Xia (Xi Xia), to distinguish it from another Xia kingdom that had existed further east in the fifth century.

  Here were three powers – Jin, Song and Western Xia – in a precarious balance. In the wings were two other regions, Tibet and Khara Khitai, both too distant to be considered for conquest (yet). Now add in various semi-independent tribes and clans, many bound by the network of trade routes that linked China to Central Asia and ultimately Europe. Imagine the differences of religion – Islam in the west, Buddhism, Confucianism, Nestorian Christianity and shamanism; and of major languages – Chinese, Tibetan, Turkic, Arabic, Tangut. This was the cauldron into which Genghis was about to cast himself and his people, aliens in lan
guage, culture and religion. The consequences were utterly unknowable.

  Not that Genghis could worry about the long-term consequences. His immediate task was to find the weakest point for an assault that would bring the quickest and most lucrative returns. Which of his two neighbours to attack first? Jin was too strong, with walled cities guarded by mountains. Western Xia was by comparison an open house, guarded by deserts that Mongols could cross in days; its cities were few; its armies smaller. Better to secure victory over the weaker, then turn on the stronger.

  Western Xia is hardly known to anyone beyond a few specialists, because Genghis would eventually do his best to wipe state, culture and people from the face of the earth. Its successor cultures, Mongol and Chinese, had no interest in saving its records, understanding its script or restoring its monuments. Only recently has it re-emerged on to the stage from which it was so violently ejected.

  You can see the consequences today. The strange, weather-worn cones near Yinchuan, marking the graves of the Western Xia emperors, are patterned by eight centuries of rain and punctuated with holes, which once held rafters. The rafters had supported tiled roofs, overlapping each other and curving upwards in the style of Chinese pagodas. At the peak of Western Xia’s power, in the early thirteenth century, this place would have looked spectacular, with its nine pagodas glowing with colour, in their own courtyards, with attendant ‘companion tombs’, and all guarded and tended by contingents of troops.

  The people of Western Xia referred to themselves by their Tibetan name, the Mi, and to their empire as the Great White and High Nation. But, as usual, the terminology of the dominant culture comes out top. The Chinese called them the Dang Xiang, while in Mongol they became Tangut (Dang plus a Mongolian -ut plural). The Tanguts of Western Xia: that’s how they are known today. The ancestral Tanguts had migrated from eastern Tibet in the seventh century, settling in the Ordos, the sweep of territory within the bend of the Yellow River. In 1020, they built a new capital near or on present-day Yinchuan, and thrust further westwards, building an empire 1,500 kilometres across and 600 kilometres deep. The spine of their domain was the narrow, pasture-rich route running between the northern foothills of the Tibetan massif and the hideous wastes of the Alashan Desert, which is geographically a southern extension of the Gobi. These pastures run all the way to Dunhuang and its fourth-century complex of Buddhist caves and temples on the eastern edge of the Takla Makan Desert. This part of the Silk Road, 1,000 kilometres long and in parts a mere 15 kilometres wide, was known as the Hexi Corridor (He-xi meaning ‘River-West’, i.e. west of the Yellow River); today it is more commonly called the Gansu Corridor, after the province of which it is part. A side-road led across the desert northwards along a river, the Ruo Shui, known to historians as the Etsin, which flows north through desert to a border fortress known as Etsina (to Marco Polo) or Khara Khot (‘Black City’, its Mongol name).

  The true founder of Western Xia, Yuanhao, was an ambitious and talented ruler who – like Genghis 200 years later – saw that the new nation needed effective administration, which demanded written records, using a script which was to be a supreme expression of civilization, yet also unique. His model was Chinese. But to assert Tangut individuality, Yuanhao told his scholars to devise signs that were totally original. Tangut characters look Chinese to those who don’t read Chinese; but they are not.

  It was this script that was used to record laws and translate the texts of Buddhism, which from the start had been not only the official religion, but also an ideology to assert Tangut nationalism. The output was prodigious. A Tangut edition of the 6,000-chapter Tripitaka, the corpus of Buddhist canonical writing, required 130,000 printing blocks. This was just one of thousands of works that were bought, stolen or saved – depending on one’s point of view – by the British archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein in 1907 and the Russian explorer Petr Kozlov in 1908–9, which gave the West a head start in Tangut studies. It took Chinese scholars decades to catch up.fn1 For two centuries, Tangut emperors succeeded each other in ruling what was on the whole a stable, sophisticated, prosperous realm, until it developed a major weakness. Its last great emperor, Renxiao, died in 1193, leaving inexperienced successors in the hands of scholars and bureaucrats, and defended by an army supported not by herders but by farmers and city-based traders.

  Genghis already knew a good deal about Western Xia, because Mongols and Tanguts were as interlocked as related families. The Tanguts had close links with his old ally and enemy, Toghril, the khan of the Keraits. Toghril’s brother, Jakha, had been captured and raised by the Tanguts as a boy; later, they even made him a gambu (general, or counsellor). One of Jakha’s daughters became one of Genghis’s daughters-in-law, and in due course the mother of two emperors and a ruler of Persia. As perhaps the greatest woman of her age, she will be the focus of later chapters. And when Toghril’s son fled, he did so through Tangut territory, which in 1205 became an excuse for the first Mongol raids. So they knew all about the Tanguts: their sophistication, their scholarship, their deep Buddhist faith, their wealth, the trade caravans that funnelled through the Hexi Corridor and, crucially, their weaknesses.

  There was as yet no imperial aim. Genghis needed booty for his troops, with extended payments if possible; Western Xia was the obvious source; which meant turning Western Xia into a tribute-paying vassal state before Jin stepped in. There would have been no thought of occupation, only a vague plan, probably, to use Western Xia as a stepping-stone to seize yet more wealth from Jin.

  In spring 1209 came the invasion proper. Genghis marched 500 kilometres south-west, to the Three Beauties ranges, where the Altai Mountains peter out into peaks, valleys and sheltered pastures before merging into gravelly plains. From there, the route led on south another 300 kilometres to the Helan (or Alashan) Mountains, which form the eastern edge of a desert ideal for fast-moving cavalrymen. When the Mongols seized a little fortress-town, the Tanguts sent an urgent request for help to the Jin. Luckily, Jin was in the hands of a new leader, Prince Wei, who complacently told the Tangut ruler: ‘It is to our advantage when our enemies attack one another. Wherein lies the danger to us?’

  Marching southwards over desert, mountains to the left, the Mongols came to a fortress defending the only pass leading through the mountains to the Tangut capital, present-day Yinchuan. Today you can drive through this pass in a few minutes. In Genghis’s day the track would have been along a dry riverbed in summer, or along the mountain flanks at times of flood, except that the route was blocked by the fortress and an army of perhaps 70,000.

  Genghis’s only hope was to lure the Tanguts out on to the plain. After a two-month stand-off, the Mongols used their usual tactics, pretending to retreat, but in fact holing up in the foothills, leaving a small contingent to act as bait. When the Tanguts duly attacked, the Mongols leaped on them, and won a stunning victory. The way to Yinchuan was open.

  Now they faced a problem. Yinchuan was a well-defended city, and the Mongols were fast-moving nomadic cavalrymen. They had never tried to take a city before. They had no siege bows, catapults, incendiary bombs or flamethrowers. A remedy lay to hand: Yinchuan’s ancient canal system, which led water from the Yellow River to irrigate Western Xia’s fields. The Mongols broke the dykes and tried to flood the city into surrender. This was not a good idea. Yinchuan’s surrounding agricultural land is as flat as Holland. Flood waters spread far, but remain shallow. Buildings stand clear of shallow floods. But tents and horses and carts do not. The Mongols flooded themselves out, and were forced back to higher ground.

  The Tangut leaders were also in a quandary. Their enemies were still close by, their crops were ruined, and they were not going to get help from the Jin.

  To break the impasse, both gave ground. The Tangut emperor submitted, giving a daughter in marriage to Genghis, and handing over camels, falcons and textiles as tribute. Genghis, certain that he now had a compliant vassal who would supply tribute and troops as required, ordered a withdrawal.

  But
this was his first international agreement, and it lacked bite. As events would show, he was a victim of his own wishful thinking. The Tanguts assumed the storm had passed, unaware that the real storm had not yet struck.

  Genghis’s power as leader – his charisma – derived from success in war, which in turn derived from Heaven’s backing, or rather from his followers’ belief that he had Heaven’s backing. This presented a problem: he was not the only one with such a claim. The other one was the top shaman, a man named Kököchü, who was so eminent he was known as Teb Tengri, which means something like ‘Very Divine’ or ‘Wholly Heavenly’ (no one is sure because the term was unique). Moreover, Genghis owed him support for both personal and political reasons. Kököchü’s father had been so close to Genghis’s father, Yisugei, that he may have actually married his mother, Hoelun, after Yisugei’s death. If so, the shaman was in effect Genghis’s stepfather. It was probably Kököchü who gave Genghis his new name or title. Ata-Malik Juvaini, the great thirteenth-century Persian historian of Genghis’s age, was in no doubt about his significance and self-importance: ‘There arose a man of whom I have heard from trustworthy Mongols that during the severe cold that prevails in those regions he used to walk naked through the desert and the mountains and then to return and say: “God has spoken with me and has said: ‘I have given all the face of the earth to Genghis and his children.’ ” ’

  The problem was that Genghis himself claimed to have a direct line to Heaven. This did not matter when Kököchü and he were close and in total agreement. But Kököchü became ambitious on his own account. In Juvaini’s words, ‘There arose in him the desire for sovereignty.’