by John Man
In August, while Genghis escaped the heat in the Snowy Mountains, his troops were at the gates of Wuwei, Western Xia’s second greatest city, which wisely surrendered and escaped annihilation. In the autumn Genghis rejoined his army at the Yellow River, crossed it (probably near today’s Zhongwei, where the river spreads out and breaks up into shallow side-streams) and circled north, approaching Yinchuan from the south-east – a direction precisely opposite to the one Asha had proposed in his challenge. As if scared into an early grave, the ineffective emperor, Li Dewang, died and the poisoned chalice of kingship fell to another, Li Xian, though his reign was so brief and what followed so destructive that he is virtually nothing but a wraith.
In November, the Mongols encircled today’s Lingwu,fn3 a mere 30 kilometres south of Yinchuan. Now, at last, the Tanguts made their move. Lingwu was a place watered by a large system of canals, which were frozen solid, as was the river. As the Tangut army approached along the opposite bank, the Mongols galloped across the frozen river, shattered the demoralized Tanguts and returned to their siege. No details of the battle survive, but it must have been clear to both sides that the Tanguts were finished.
Lingwu fell in December. The only detail we have of this episode is that the troops went down with some sort of disease, typhus or dysentery perhaps. We know this because the scholar, humanitarian and imperial aide Chucai, returning from Central Asia, witnessed the scenes of pillage and suffering, and did his best to minimize both. While ‘all the Mongol officers contended with each other to seize children, women and valuables, His Excellency [Chucai] took only a few books and two camel-loads of rhubarb’, which was used as medicine to treat so many conditions it was practically a panacea.
Then, while one Mongol force besieged Yinchuan, another went off to secure other smaller cities to the east and south, while Genghis, now rejoined by Subedei, headed south and west, over the Jin border just 100 kilometres away. The purpose of this advance was to prevent Jin troops coming to the rescue of their Tangut allies, and to prepare for the final conquest of the Jin heartland. Subedei crossed the Liupan Mountains to seize a 150-kilometre-wide strip of western Jin, celebrating his success by sending his lord and master 5,000 horses as a gift. Genghis, meanwhile, struck due south.
A few weeks later, directing the siege of Longde, Genghis sent his Tangut officer, Tsagaan, to report on the situation in Yinchuan. Tsagaan found that after six months of starvation and sickness the Tangut emperor was prepared to give up. All he needed, he said, was a month’s grace to prepare suitable gifts. They would not save him. Genghis intended total, brutal victory. ‘While I take my meals,’ he told his followers, ‘you must talk about the killing and destruction of the Tangut.’ As a first step in this dreadful process, the Tangut ruler had to die. So Genghis agreed to a formal capitulation, told Tolun to make the arrangements, and kept his real plans to himself.
Now it was summer. Genghis based himself in the Liupan Mountains, south of present-day Guyuan, where he continued to juggle war with politics, striking where necessary, always staying open to the possibility of getting his way by negotiation.
Western Xia was as good as finished, and Jin knew it. In the same month that the devastated nation agreed to capitulate, the Jin, according to the official Yuan history, the Yuan Shi, sent an embassy to sue for peace, to which Genghis agreed. Not that it stopped his advance through Jin. But 100 kilometres to the south of the Liupan Mountains, just short of the Jin–Song border, Genghis fell ill, so seriously ill that he was rushed north again, setting off the odd series of events that put his life’s work in jeopardy, and ended in his death.
Where the final drama of Genghis’s life unfolded has always been a matter of dispute among scholars. When researching these events, it struck me that I might find out more on the ground. In Yinchuan, archaeologists told me that there really was no problem. Locals had always known where Genghis had died. I should go to Guyuan, in the south of Ningxia, and beyond to the Liupan Mountains.
Guyuan is the poorest city in China’s poorest province, with a Muslim minority, the Hui, who are the poorest of the poor. As you drive south beyond the Yellow River, the fertile plains give way to problem areas. The soil is rich – a thick layer of dark earth dumped over millennia by the winds of the Gobi – but it does not stay around to be cultivated. Rains wash it away, sun bakes it solid, winds whip it into dust clouds, torrents carve out unstable ravines.
Yet Guyuan had a rather wealthy past. Once upon a time it was an entrepot on the Silk Road, with a 13-kilometre double wall around it and ten gates. But Guyuan fell to the Mongols without a murmur. Genghis would have known exactly why he wanted it. He already controlled the central portion of the Silk Road – Otrar, Samarkand and the other great emporia of Central Asia. If things worked out, he would soon control the Silk Road’s eastern end as well. And 70 kilometres south there was the most perfect military base, deep inside what has recently become the Liupan Shan State Forest Park.
The park’s gateway is a white concrete dragon, its spiny backbone straddling the road. Beyond lies a wilderness of astonishing beauty, and – despite being popular with daytrippers – equally astonishing isolation. It is totally unknown to foreigners, not rating a mention in any guide book and hardly any on the internet. Yet it is glory: 6,790 square kilometres of forested ridges and peaks and stream-carved ravines. Inside the park, the new road swirls up and down in hairpin bends, and finally ends at what is billed as Genghis Khan’s last camp – three ‘Mongolian tents’ made of nice, new, smooth concrete, their pointed domes strung with a streamer of little coloured flags.
But when I was there in 2002 with two Chinese archaeologists and Jorigt, a friend who taught at the Inner Mongolia University in Hohhot, I found myself staring at something that didn’t fit with concrete tents and tourists. It was a table with eight seats, a table made of one huge, circular stone and seats that were stool-sized cylinders of stone, all apparently ancient. They were in fact millstones, perhaps a century or two old, but I didn’t know that at the time.
The others joined me.
‘What on earth are these old stones?’ I asked.
‘Yuan dynasty,’ said the young guide, a twenty-two-year-old Hui named Ma. ‘You see the hole in the middle? It’s a flag support. Genghis Khan used this.’
Ma, a graduate of Yinchuan’s Tourism College, told the story with utter assurance, pointing to an official guide book as evidence. ‘In 1227, Genghis stayed here for the summer. When he attacked Western Xia, he fell from his horse and was injured. But he had a duty to fight, so he came here, and trained his forces here, and hunted, and looked after his body. But this had no effect. So he died here. It was hot so his body began to decay. So he was buried here. Only his saddle and his other equipment was taken away for burial elsewhere.’
This was an astonishing claim. Dying here was one thing; no other source suggested that Genghis might actually be buried here. I began to doubt that he had even been to this secret, overgrown, hard-to-get-to valley.
Oh, he was definitely here, said Ma. ‘It’s cool in summer, and a very good place for training, a very important military position, central for Mongolian forces from Gansu and Shaanxi provinces. If you occupy this place,’ Ma waved a hand at the surrounding hills, ‘no enemy forces can get you, and you can control all the surrounding region. And just up the road there is the place where Genghis called his generals together to brief them. This was the Training Centre. And there is another place called the Command Centre.’
I still doubted. Was it really likely that a whole army could make its way over the precipitous pass? And once here, how would they camp? The place was all forest, no pasture. I needed evidence.
The stones were evidence, said Ma. Archaeologists found them just up the road.
The sky was clear, the sun not too hot, and lunch was hours away. Ma led Jorigt and me uphill. The road turned into a track rising through fir forest to the place where the stones had been found. ‘But soon no one will know where they
found them, because these trees will all be fully grown.’
I began to understand. The area, being newly declared a national park, was to become a forest. The valleys had once been open, with farmers raising crops, breeding animals, hunting for boar, rabbit and deer, keeping in contact with the outside world along the steep pass we had just crossed – an ancient path for horses and wagons. In 1227, this valley might have been a huge glade of crops and pastures, a perfectly wonderful base to hide an army.
I needed something to make sense of all this. Maybe folklore would help. Perhaps there were some local elders to talk to.
‘Oh, no. There is no one here. Because this is a State Forest Park, everyone was moved out. The last people left four years ago.’
By now, we had wandered further up, beyond the firs and into the cool, gentle embrace of deciduous woodland. By chance, I glanced through a gap in the slender birches, and saw what looked like dark spots a couple of kilometres away.
‘But look. Aren’t those houses?’ Houses that were standing in remarkably open countryside, which was pale green as if with a mantle of ripening grain. ‘And aren’t those fields? Maybe there are people.’
‘No people!’ Ma was adamant. ‘All people have been moved!’
This was agonizing. If there were houses and crops, that meant people, and people meant information and folklore, and maybe evidence about what really happened here.
‘Look, a path.’ I pointed to a gap in the roadside bushes. ‘And wheel tracks.’
There was a silence. Despite himself, Ma was obviously intrigued. The three of us set off, finding ourselves in a woodland idyll: an open path leading over sweet streams pure as bottled water, beneath a canopy that filtered sunlight into a dappling of green. The tracks, only a few days old, were made by one of those small, two-wheeled tractors with long handlebars.
When we arrived, skirting fields of young flax, we entered a ghost village. The half-dozen stone houses were tumbledown and overgrown, their roofs of grey, curved tiles misshapen by age.
‘You ren ma?’ yelled Jorigt. ‘Anyone there?’
No echo came from the hills beyond, and no answering voices. All was silence, decay, collapse. But a cultivated field spoke of people. We would have to return and find them. We set off back in thoughtful silence.
And there, suddenly, right in our way, was a woman, a reserved and dignified figure in a grey shirt, dark trousers and a white headdress shaped like a chef’s hat, marking her as a Muslim Hui. She carried a three-year-old with cheeks as red as her overalls and held the hand of a five-year-old boy in a frayed grey jacket faintly printed all over with the name ‘Snoopy’. Over her shoulder was a bag. She was collecting an edible, asparagus-like fern. In an instant, she solved many mysteries. Her name was Li Bocheng, and it was her husband and brothers-in-law who farmed the fields. They had once lived here, but every summer they returned to plant and harvest. Oh, yes, she had heard about Genghis Khan, but if we wanted to know about him we had better talk to the men. They would return with the cows later.
By mid-afternoon we were back, to find six men, along with the woman and her two children. A house stood open, revealing a brick oven and a stone sleeping-platform scattered with mattresses. In front of the house was a plastic apron, neatly laid with medicinal roots. We squatted down on bits of stone and old sacking, while Li Bocheng brought green tea in jam-jars. Her husband, a wiry man in his thirties, wearing a shirt of black-and-white stripes, took on the role of spokesman, telling us of Genghis as if he had been the previous tenant.
All this – with a sweep of his arm towards the valley – belonged to Genghis. This was the Training Place, where his bodyguard lived, and up there, where the cattle are, that’s where he lived, the Meeting Place. Down there, below the flax field, was the Command Centre. ‘That’s what my father told me, because that’s what the old people told him, when he came here, fifty years ago. And right up there, that was what they called the Sitting Place of Genghis Khan. There’s a platform; you can see over everything.’
He could show us. We set off at eight the next morning, over the terrace above the house, with two brothers, Yu Wuho and Yu Wuse, as guides. While we walked through firs, the Yu brothers told their story.
When their parents came, this had been a community of thirty families. Once, 100 years ago, there had been a Buddhist temple here, though with the influx of the Muslim Hui it had been cannibalized for building materials and farm use (hence the grain-rollers and millstones). Then the valley had been deliberately overgrown. Now everyone else had gone. They were the last, coming in the summer over the mountains with a few dozen sheep and cattle to tend the fields and collect medicinal roots in the forests. They would go on farming as long as they could, pending compensation from the government.
We were into thick woods by now. We crossed a stream and climbed a near-vertical slope soft with mulch, at the top of which the ground, shadowed by birch trees, flattened into a confusion of odd little rock mesas. ‘The road used to come up here,’ said Yu Wuho. It was hard to make sense of the contorted, dappled ground, but I could see where a track might have run, past an overgrown outcrop about 5 metres high that might have been natural, or not.
There was a shout from further uphill, and a flurry of conversation. A man was on his knees scrabbling with his hands at the soft earth, and others in the shadows, ten of them altogether. They were collecting medicinal plants. They had walked in before dawn from their village 25 kilometres away, along one of the many paths over the mountains, and would work all day.
And so the wilderness revealed more of itself, suggesting what had made it so attractive over centuries to farmers and hunters – and, for a few months perhaps, to nomadic warriors. This place was famous for its medicinal plants. I saw a list later: there were thirty-nine of them. They were collecting one in particular, called chang-bo locally. Each of this party could harvest 2–3 kilos a day. What the little onion-like root was for and how it was prepared, though, no one had a clue. All they did was collect it and sell it.
Yu Wuho gestured at the surrounding forest: ‘This we call Genghis Khan’s Medical Treatment Place.’
Damp earth, teetering saplings and rampant bushes made an ever-changing ecosystem, so it was hard to tell natural from artificial. But if there had been a track, and the rocky pinnacle had been some sort of guard tower, perhaps this place had been a kind of pharmacy, where the sick and injured could come for special treatment with medicinal plants.
By mid-morning we were out of the woods, walking on carpets of grass, buttercups and blue gentians across an open ridge, where the saplings were small and scattered. On the crest were the remains of a wall, which had once, I supposed, marked an all-round lookout over wave upon wave of forested mountain. But a hilltop lookout was no base from which to watch army manoeuvres. I wanted to find the promised ‘platform’. We descended, and struck thorn bushes. We made a wary circuit, then the ground levelled out.
‘This is it,’ said Yu Wuho, ‘the Sitting Place of Genghis Khan. The Lord’s Place.’
There was to be no rock platform, I realized. It was of grass, or had been. I paced it out: the Sitting Place was about 250 metres long and 50 metres wide.
Well, no one would bother to sit there now. When the Yus were children, it was open and you could see stone equipment scattered across the grass, and you had a wonderful view down to the village. Now we were hemmed in by mono culture, and the rocks were buried. At the edge of the flat space, you could just see down the valley and imagine an immense parade ground, with tents and herds and formations of troops.
Back at the houses, I tried to make sense of what I had seen. It was all a slurry of raw material, artefacts and folklore carrying me back 50 years, 100 years, 800 years, but with nothing to anchor the talk to history. That left the legends, and the place itself – a secret valley with its medicinal plants, one of them perhaps considered powerful enough to save the life of an ailing conqueror.
I was lucky. But if you, reader
, go there, I’m afraid you will be too late. Those who remember what was once said about this place will be gone to villages and towns outside the valley. The paths will overgrow, the fields will vanish under saplings, the houses will fall, the blight of firs will claim the open spaces. Even if historians and archaeologists come, who will remember, who will show them where the Training Place, the Command Centre, the Medical Treatment Place and the Sitting Place once were?
For a few days in the summer of 1227 the fate of Eurasia hung in the balance. The murder of one emperor, the death of Genghis, the destruction of a whole culture – these are events of great significance. Unfortunately, they are wrapped in secrecy. It was the need for secrecy, foreseen by Genghis, imposed by his entourage, that allowed his aims to be fulfilled. Had news leaked out, all could have been lost, enemies heartened, conquests reversed, the half-formed Mongol empire strangled almost at birth, the whole course of Eurasian history turned in a different direction. What follows is a possible scenario based on the scanty information.
To review, in the second week of August 1227 Genghis is on the verge of the final conquest of Western Xia and has just occupied western Jin. This is to be a base from which to complete the conquest of all north China, which will give him an empire running from the Pacific almost to Baghdad. The work of a lifetime is about to pay off, if all goes well. The emperor of Western Xia is already on his way to capitulate. At this crucial moment, Genghis falls ill, perhaps with typhus caught from his troops. Historians generally agree that the illness struck some 100 kilometres south, in the county of Qing Shui, in today’s Gansu province; but there is room for doubt, because the county’s name is the same as that of the river that flows north to the Yellow River. Some claim that he died in Qing Shui county, a suggestion rejected by two scholars who have immersed themselves in the evidence, Xu Cheng and Yu Jun of Ningxia University.fn4 Their approach, based on historical sources and archaeological findings, supports the folk memories of the farmers in the Liupan Shan.