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

by John Man

  Wherever the illness struck, it’s serious; but no hint of its seriousness must leak out. So, on the first day of the last week of his life, Genghis is rushed in a closed cart into the hidden valley in the Liupan Shan, where secrecy can be guaranteed, and where he can be given remedies made from the forest’s medicinal plants.

  Nothing works. Death approaches.

  But for a few days, according to the major Chinese source, the Yuan Shi, the official history established by Genghis’s grandson Kublai, Genghis is still the strategist, planning for the future. His instructions were clear. In one version of these events, written by the Persian historian Rashid al-Din a couple of generations later, Genghis says: ‘Do not let my death be known. Do not weep or lament in any way, so that the enemy shall not know anything about it. But when the ruler of the Tanguts and the population leave the city at the appointed hour, annihilate them all.’

  And then, as Chinese sources record, Genghis lays out the strategy by which Jin must be defeated. It means taking the new capital, Kaifeng. To do that, the Mongols should first outflank the mighty fortress of Tongguan, which guarded the Yellow River some 400 kilometres upriver from Kaifeng. He knew what he was talking about: the Mongols had taken the fortress once before in 1216, only to lose it again when they retreated from Kaifeng. Both the fortress and Kaifeng itself were near Jin’s southern border with Song. Best therefore to get Song’s permission to march around Tongguan and approach Kaifeng from the south: ‘Since Jin and Song have been enemies for generations, Song will certainly agree.’ This would force the Jin to send reinforcements in a forced march from Tongguan, exhausting the troops, weakening the fortress, exposing Kaifeng. This was exactly the plan of campaign that Genghis’s successors used in their final defeat of Jin a few years later.

  Now, suddenly, his entourage is face to face with possible catastrophe, the consequences of which would be dire indeed. Li Xian, the emperor of Western Xia, on his way from Yinchuan, may well have no victor to surrender to. If he hears that Genghis is dying or dead, he will at once turn round, and consider how to save himself and his kingdom. His best chance would be to turn instantly to Jin. Western Xia and Jin had been allies before; true, Jin had recently rejected Li’s advances, but that was before the Mongols had taken the war into Jin territory. What would there be to stop him offering to kowtow to Jin, joining forces against a common enemy, destroying what had been achieved, and killing Genghis’s grand strategy for future conquest stone dead?

  There is only one possible course of action. Everything must go forward as planned. No hint of the truth must leak out. It is vital, therefore, that the Western Xia emperor arrive, capitulate, and then become the first of his treacherous people to die.

  Where is this to be played out?fn5 It so happens that there is a suitable site on open ground close by, which, I believe, had already been set up for an entirely different purpose.

  Between Guyuan and the Liupan Shan, the road passes over low terraced hills and through a line of baked-earth houses, which is about all there is to the village of Kaicheng. It was not always such a backwater. A sign in English and Chinese points up a track to the right: ‘Ancient Ruins of Kaicheng’.

  The vague shapes beneath the flowing wheat were once walls, making a square some 3–4 kilometres in circumference. In the thirteenth century, Genghis’s grandson, Kublai, built this into a provincial headquarters that must have rivalled Guyuan, 20 kilometres away. By 1300, it had a garrison of 10,000 troops. But in 1306 an earthquake destroyed it, killing 5,000. The survivors fled, and it vanished from sight and memory. Now Chinese archaeologists are working to reveal it once again.

  But why would Kublai build himself a headquarters in Kaicheng, when Guyuan was already there 20 kilometres away, with its walls and gatehouses? Possibly because Kaicheng was in effect a sacred site, chosen by his grandfather in the spring of 1227. There were sound reasons for Genghis’s choice: it was safely away from Guyuan’s intrusive inhabitants, within easy reach of the troops secluded in the Liupan Shan a day’s ride away, and out in the open, where a vast army could gather. Here, possibly, Genghis decreed a temporary palace where the Mongols could receive the embassy that came from Jin seeking peace. And then, by happy chance, this new HQ, with its tent-palaces and garrison, found a second use, as a base for the meeting with the emperor of Western Xia when he arrived to make his final capitulation, and meet his doom.

  This whole charade would have been carefully orchestrated. Sources agree that four things happened in quick succession:

  • the Tangut emperor submitted;

  • he came for an audience with Genghis;

  • Genghis had him killed;

  • and Genghis himself died.

  The order in which these things happened is unclear. What follows is only the most likely of several possible scenarios.

  Li Xian arrives at the tent-palace in Kaicheng and is greeted with a strange circumstance: during his audience with the khan, Genghis ‘kept the door closed and made Burkhan pay homage outside the tent’. And during the audience, The Secret History relates, Genghis ‘felt sick’ or – in de Rachewiltz’s translation – ‘felt revulsion within his heart’. This is odd. Surely the khan would not willingly deal with his vanquished foe in such a fashion, when by doing so he must have raised suspicions in the emperor’s mind, and in the minds of his entourage? There is one possible conclusion. Neither Genghis nor his entourage had any choice, because Genghis was simply not fit enough to hold an audience. Of course, the Tangut emperor was going to be killed anyway. But it was important that he make his submission and offer his gifts, completing the ritual of formal surrender. And it was important that everyone, Tangut and ordinary Mongols, believed Genghis was still in control. This extraordinary drama makes the best sense if we assume that behind the curtain Genghis is so near death that he cannot be seen.

  Li Xian, puzzled but compliant, lays out his offerings, the first being a set of golden Buddhas, followed by a museum-full of other gifts, each one in sets of nine, the most auspicious number: golden and silver bowls, boys, girls, geldings, camels and much more, all set out according to ‘colour and form’.

  Then Tolun saw to the execution. The killing of rulers, like the killing of all nobles, demanded the observance of a ritual long recognized by the Mongols. No blood was to be shed. Death could be by trampling or strangulation. However it was done, it was done in secret.

  Everything worked out perfectly, because after all, as Genghis tells Tolun in The Secret History, ‘We came here on account of the poisonous words of an enemy and with Our strength increased by Eternal Heaven, who gave him into Our hands, we took Our revenge.’

  The sources provide few details about the death. According to one Chinese history, Genghis died in the Year of the Pig (1227), on the twelfth day of the seventh lunar month: 25 August. But other accounts do not agree on the exact day. The Secret History, the most intimate source, is the least helpful. It says only that Genghis ‘ascended to Heaven’ – proof enough that his death and burial were to remain a state secret.

  So perhaps – who knows? – he was never in his royal tent during the surrender. Perhaps his words are an interpolation, designed to disinform. Perhaps he was back in the hidden valley, too ill to move; or actually dead, because after all he survived only a week after the onset of his illness. And perhaps only in the security of that valley could his grieving entourage make the arrangements to keep his death secret, and then prepare for the showdown in Kaicheng.

  The Tanguts fell easy prey to their conquerors. Yinchuan was looted, tiles torn from the roofs of the royal tombs, the people scattered, Genghis’s ruthless will meticulously fulfilled. What that meant is not recorded. Neither the Mongols nor any later Chinese dynasty would have mourned the disappearance of a rival empire. The Tanguts almost vanished from history, along with most of their records, and their script, and their language.fn6 Perhaps still hidden in some desert cave is a Tangut account of the carnage, recorded by a survivor. In the meantime,
you can imagine the destruction by visiting or checking online the strange, bare-earth tombs jutting from Yinchuan’s desolate gravel plain.

  The secrecy ensured that rumour conquered all. Stories multiplied that Genghis died besieging some city or other; or survived until the surrender of Western Xia. And later – decades later, centuries later – poets marked the great man’s passing, turning rumour and folk tales into verse. The few facts became hidden by a tangle of post-Genghis lore, much of it Buddhist. In one account, Genghis takes Gurbelchin, the Tangut emperor’s wife, who wounds Genghis and then drowns herself in the Yellow River; in another, Gurbelchin is a royal daughter, who castrates Genghis with a hidden knife. In a version told to the great Mongolist Owen Lattimore by his Mongol companion Arash in the 1930s, ‘Genghis cried out when he felt the cut, and people came in, but he only said to them: Take this girl away; I wish to sleep. He slept and from that sleep he has never wakened – but that was six hundred or seven hundred years ago, and would not Holy Genghis heal himself? When he is healed he will awake and save his people.’

  From this morass of Tibetan, Chinese, Buddhist and Mongolian lore, the only firm information to be gleaned is the enormity of the loss. Apparently, as time went by, people had been unwilling to accept their god-king’s death as natural, and turned it into a tragedy with their hero undone, like Samson, by a woman and a foreigner. Today, all Mongols know the tale of how the evil queen wounded the lord and then cast herself into the Yellow River, which they still call the Queen’s River.

  As a leader, Genghis was one of the greatest ever. Modern leadership theory gives an idea of his qualities.

  There are two dimensions to Genghis as leader: the particular and the general. He was, like his empire, unique, a character rooted in time and place. But he also had qualities that apply much more widely, making him in many ways a leader if not for all time then at least for many times.

  He was of his time in two ways:

  1. His belief in Heaven’s backing

  It’s a historical commonplace for rulers to claim divine support. But most limit the claim to their own people, nation or empire (as Chinese emperors did). Religious leaders have often aimed to spread their word universally, but world rule is reserved for world’s end. Yet Genghis himself perhaps believed, and his heirs certainly did, that Heaven really had given the world to them, and their job was to have everyone acknowledge this. With hindsight, it’s completely crazy. But since at the time no one, let alone a Mongol, had any idea of what the world was like and how impossible the vision was, the belief was a vital element in Genghis’s charismatic appeal.

  2. Focused ruthlessness

  Throughout the course of history there have been genocides, attempted genocides, massacres and outrages galore; but never anything like those unleashed by Genghis and his heirs. He achieved what others could only dream of: annihilation of those who opposed him. First in line were enemy clans and tribes; then many enemy cities. But, as we’ve seen, unlike many modern genocides, this was not racist. True, Mongols considered themselves the top nation among lesser breeds. But three factors limited the spirit of destruction. First, Genghis appreciated talent, from whatever ethnic background (more on this later). Second, his prime purpose was not total destruction but eternal rule, which is hard to achieve with devastated lands and alienated populations. Third, this meant that his aim was purely strategic – to force capitulation. Opposition meant death, but (vengeance apart) surrender meant life as part of Genghis’s Heaven-backed empire.

  These two important elements in his leadership are, I suggest, unique to him, and to his time. They would not work today, and certainly would not apply to any of the ways in which leadership is exercised in the modern world.

  Other traits do apply. Here is a quick survey of those elements of Genghis’s leadership that might be envied and imitated by leaders today.

  Genghis controlled his image – becoming in effect his own spin-doctor – by vetting the stories circulating in his lifetime and retold in The Secret History. He had a rare ability to accept criticism; he kept his word; he encouraged and rewarded loyalty; he shared his army’s hardships, insisting on his austere nomadic roots; unlike his compatriots, he saw the dangers of alcohol;fn7 he rejected luxury; he recognized his own limitations (for instance, although illiterate, he saw that government demanded literacy, and introduced a script); he gave clear rules and stuck to them; he was a realist, but also when necessary a risk-taker; he had no interest in gratuitous violence against individuals – there is no record of torture under Genghis (though his heirs sometimes disgraced themselves by using it).

  Genghis had a remarkable lack of ego, equating his interests with those of the state; he chose an heir (a challenge that many lesser bosses never face); he employed talent wherever he found it, never mind the ethnic background; he was magnanimous, even to enemies; he was meticulous in planning; he was a deep thinker, as his relationship with both Yelu Chucai and Changchun showed; he was tolerant of different religions; and finally – perhaps the most surprising trait in a world conqueror – he was never arrogant, displaying remarkable humility in the face of the immensity of the task which, for whatever incomprehensible reason, had been imposed upon him.

  To come at the matter from another direction, many of these traits are elements in what Daniel Goleman, one of the most successful of leadership theorists, calls ‘emotional intelligence’. Goleman lists eighteen so-called ‘competencies’ that are displayed by top leaders. Effective leaders, he says, display four of them; highly effective ones display six or more. There is no totally convincing way to compare present-day requirements with those needed 800 years ago, but Genghis can be said to have had fifteen of the eighteen (lacking only the modern ‘competencies’ of commitment to service, conflict management and teamwork). However you assess him, Genghis ranks as a leader of genius.

  * * *

  Leadership competencies

  Personal competencies

  Social competencies

  emotional self-awareness

  empathy

  accurate self-assessment

  organizational skills

  self-confidence

  commitment to service

  self-control

  inspiration

  integrity

  persuasiveness

  adaptability

  an interest in cultivating the abilities of others

  drive

  recognizing the need for change

  optimism

  conflict management teamwork

  Source: Goleman et al., The New Leaders.

  * * *

  What of Genghis’s body? The question has no final answer, because there is no grave. Instead there are two separate traditions, which underlie two competing claims by China and Mongolia, each determined to be the true heirs of Genghis.

  The tradition in China focuses mainly on Genghis’s accoutrements. It is in direct conflict with that of Mongolia, which deals mainly with his body, claiming that the corpse was brought back across the Gobi to the homeland of the Mongols and buried in a secret grave.

  But there is nothing certain about any of this. It was high summer. Bodies decay fast in August. Coupled with the need for secrecy, the return would need to be accomplished as quickly as possible. The cortège had 1,600 kilometres to cover, which for a cart travelling with care and attention would take some three weeks. The family might have drawn on Chinese expertise to preserve the body as much as possible, but the Mongols knew nothing of mummification. It would have been a hurried trip.

  The Secret History says nothing about the funeral cortège or the burial, jumping straight over the year following the death to the great meeting on the Kherlen which confirmed Ogedei as Genghis’s heir. It is inconceivable that such an emotional event as the transport and burial of their khan would somehow slip the minds of those who compiled The Secret History. The only possible explanation is that the whole matter was deliberately omitted. And the best explanation for such a t
aboo was firstly to preserve what had originally been a state secret, namely the death and progress of the cortège; and secondly to hide the knowledge of the burial site from all but the innermost circles.

  This in its turn allowed legend to flourish. Soon, as with the death, folklore began to fill the information gap with stories, one of which was that the route of the cortège was marked by slaughter. The story was related by two historians, the Arabic writer Rashid al-Din, and Marco Polo. Rashid says bluntly: ‘On the way they killed every living being they met.’ Marco Polo’s claim is indirect: ‘when Mangou Kaan [Mönkhe Khan, Genghis’s grandson] died, more than 20,000 persons, who chanced to meet the body on its way, were slain’.

  Countless histories since, both popular and academic, apply this to Genghis and take it as gospel, without further comment. But it doesn’t make sense. It is not in any of the Mongol or Chinese sources. Friar William of Rubruck, who was at Mönkhe’s court in Karakorum in 1253–5, doesn’t mention the story in his accurate and detailed account of his trip. Nor does Juvaini, who was in Karakorum at the same time as Friar William.

  Look first at the foundation of the story. Both Rashid and Marco were writing fifty years after the event. Rashid, though he had access to Mongol sources, did not speak Mongolian; he relied on the help of his master, Ghazan (ruled 1295–1304, five generations removed from Genghis), and the ambassador from the Mongol court in Beijing. And Marco did not attribute the murders specifically to Genghis’s cortège, only to ‘any emperor’ and specifically to Mönkhe (who died fourteen years before Marco arrived in China; he did not see any imperial funeral). What he wrote of them was hearsay.