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

by John Man

  The place he chose to excavate was the Almsgiver’s Wall, which we have to take into consideration because Kravitz and others were so eager to connect it to Genghis. It is, after all, an easy 130 kilometres from Avraga, 30 kilometres from Genghis’s probable birthplace near Binder, 90 kilometres from Khentii Khan, just on the frontier between mountain hideaways and rich grasslands.

  It is a beautiful site, up a side-valley just off the plain that sweeps northwards from Avraga into the Mongol heartland. A teetering mass of frost-torn boulders rises above slopes loosely scattered with firs. A natural tower of rock dominates the lower slopes, like a steeple. It is known as Genghis’s Tethering Post, as are several other such outcrops in the region. Most likely, they were created by the collapse of ice caps tens of thousands of years ago. Typically, they are on mountain tops, though this one is unusual in being on a lower slope.

  The site’s main feature is the wall, 3 kilometres in length, which runs for 500 metres across the bottom of the slope and then in a rough semicircle uphill and along the ridge at the top, incorporating some of the giant boulders. It is an im pressive example of dry-stone walling, 3 or 4 metres high, sheer on the outside, leaning back a few degrees for solidity against a sloping bank of lesser stones, making a bulwark roughly triangular in cross-section. The stones forming the outside edge are roughly dressed. Some could have been lifted by one man, most could be managed by two or three, but a few would have needed a team. It must have taken a small army to build, and surely had nothing to do with the Mongols. They did not do stone walls, at least not on any scale, as the excavations in Avraga show.

  What on earth was it for? It is not a fortress, for there are no gates, towers or defensive features, and attackers would have no trouble climbing in. It could hardly have been a town wall. Anyway, it’s on a hillside, mostly too steep for houses. According to one bizarre suggestion, it might have been a game reserve; but a wall backed on the inside by a slope of rubble would hardly keep in an aged cow.

  But it proved a terrific site for Kravitz and his team, with several extraordinary finds.

  One was a skeleton dressed in the rusty remains of iron armour. A small pot stood close to the left shoulder. There were no other grave-goods to help with identification. With more time, it would have been possible to date the bones. As it was, the ‘soldier’ was replaced under a wooden covering, which was sealed under an iron roof, with a sign claiming that this was a ‘Mongol 13th-century grave’.

  Nearby was a series of odd shapes made with stones, each formed of four curving lines about 4 metres long, compiled of stones averaging about 3–5 kilos. The lines of stones bent through 90 degrees, and came together at both ends in small stony heaps. Alongside one set of stones was a skull – that of a woman aged about twenty-five – and four small bones placed in two pairs at an acute angle. Of the few scholars who know of these finds, most explain them as underfloor heating. But that makes no sense. There is no sign of a source of heat, and the shapes are on a steep slope, and there is no evidence of any building, like foundations, or roof tiles, or post-holes. And what of the skull and the strange little bones? It is all a total mystery.

  Soon after, the fact that Genghis was on the agenda brought Kravitz’s dig to a sudden end. Top people became incensed that foreigners were meddling in Mongolia’s most sacred places, even though there was no proof that the Almsgiver’s Wall was sacred to the Mongols, certainly not Genghis. Kravitz’s team got their marching orders, as the press reported with some glee. They never returned. Kravitz himself was too overweight, unfit and old to mount another expedition. He died in 2012.

  I visited the site in 2009 and found it decaying, though largely untouched. I was with the old geographer Bazargur and his nephew, Badraa, both of whom had worked with Kravitz’s team. Wading through thick grass, our boots releasing the sharp scent of wormwood, we came to the main house. It was as if Kravitz’s people had made a panic-stricken exit the day before, not seven years previously. Photographs were still pinned to the wall, a half-rolled map on a table.

  I walked, scrambled and climbed around the wall. It’s impressive, but we shouldn’t get too carried away. This is no Stonehenge. At a very rough estimate, it consists of something like 50,000 tonnes of rock, which 500 men could build in a summer. Nor is it of top quality. The rubble on the inside does more than support; it pushes, so that in many places the whole wall has fallen. Like walls around many cemeteries all over the world, this one seemed to be a statement: ‘Ordinary folk keep out!’

  As for any connection with Genghis, there’s nothing for and lots against. Besides being Liao – pre-Mongol – it doesn’t fit with anything in history or tradition. Genghis’s burial was done secretly. The Almsgiver’s Wall is about as public a place as you could imagine. Nor does it fit with a 15-kilometre fence, or with a herd of horses galloping over a newly made grave. Its purpose remains a mystery.

  It seemed to me that the only way forward was to get more closely acquainted with Burkhan Khaldun, by which I mean Khentii Khan, the peak officially designated the focal point of the cult of Genghis.

  From a distance Khentii Khan seems quite accessible: not too high, only 200 kilometres from Ulaanbaatar, a day’s run by car. But the 30-kilometre approach road is over permafrost, which melts in spring, turning the track to mud. In summer, rain regularly makes it impassable. In 1992 the area was finally declared a National Park and nature left to take its course. The mountains crowd in, forcing the track to cross the Kherlen over a heavy-duty wooden bridge, built for government officials to make their occasional visits to the sacred slopes. Mountains rise only to about 2,500 metres, poking bare crests above the forest like the pates of tonsured monks. This is the domain of deer, moose, bear and wolf, the same species that inhabit the Siberian taiga stretching away northwards. The track to the mountain leads through bogs, over a steep ridge and across the shallow, stony Kherlen.

  Among recent visitors, the most helpful to me was the great Mongolist Igor de Rachewiltz, in the Department of Pacific and Asian History at the Australian National University, Canberra. He climbed the mountain in 1997, an experience he described in two unpublished papers. His team of ten people had three vehicles, with several horses hired in Möngönmört following on behind. ‘A horrible ride,’ he wrote to me later. ‘We got bogged several times and spent hours extricating ourselves.’ As they set up camp at the lower ovoo, a feast was prepared, while a shaman did his stuff – ‘with dancing, chanting, drumming, trance, the lot’. At the end of the feast, ‘we were informed by the shaman that the spirit of Genghis Khan had granted permission for all of us to climb the mountain in order to revere him’. It took 20 minutes to reach the first plateau, where Igor, like Schubert, found fragments of what he, like others, assumed had been Kamala’s temple.

  The next level seemed far more interesting than in Schubert’s description, because it really looked to Igor like a vast burial ground: ‘a flat, bare area a few hundred metres wide, the ground clearly pock-marked by ancient excavations, i.e. by holes dug and then refilled with earth, stone and debris’. Igor’s intriguing conclusion was that it seemed ‘plausible, and indeed most likely [that] here, on the south and southeastern side of the mountain . . . the Mongol emperors lie buried’.

  My first attempt to reach the site in 2002 was a near disaster, with many errors, but it provided an important insight. My guide, a former tank commander named Tumen, was not as fit as he might have been and had never been on the mountain, so the decisions were mine, unfortunately. By now, reader, the details of the approach will be familiar to you: bogs, mud, willow bushes, ruts. But it was all new to me. For reasons too embarrassing to list, I insisted that we leave the car and driver, got us lost and wandered into the wrong valley, stumbling for hours through clouds of flies and over firs felled by a forest fire. We camped in untouched wilderness, cooking noodles over a reluctant fire of damp deer-dung. It was hell. By nightfall I had realized my error.

  But the next morning, as we retraced our
steps, I saw something that was merely strange at the time, but would prove to be significant. In low-lying ground, where the willow bushes gave way to coarse grass, I stumbled on a collection of stones, all roughly fist-sized, forming an irregular blob about 1.5 metres across. Perhaps someone had been buried down here. But it seemed an odd place for a grave, away from the mountain, in the middle of a boggy slope, where no one had any reason to come; and an odd shape too, even assuming the effects of centuries of weather. The stones were suspiciously clear of grass. Wouldn’t a grave be overgrown? It seemed to me that they had more likely been washed together by some natural process. I took a picture, and put the puzzle to the back of my mind.

  Suddenly, now that the mist had cleared and we were away from the obscuring foothills, I saw our unmistakable and unclouded goal. Khentii Khan was a grey shoulder of rock rising clear above its surrounding forests, jutting out like a flexed muscle. In the right conditions, we would have been well on our way. But the conditions were not right. The western sky was being swallowed by a dark-purple cloud-bank, flowing towards us with throaty rumbles. Erdene, the driver, and his car had vanished, and we didn’t have mobiles since there was no service in this remote spot. The storm drove us into a rain-battered tent.

  Next morning, Erdene found us, after a series of typical Mongol adventures. He had fled the storm, got stuck, fallen asleep in his seat, been rescued by poachers who needed a lift back to their own vehicle, which was in a bog and had to be towed, and finally returned under pure blue skies to find us, bringing a freshly cooked marmot.

  This time, we stuck to the right track. Forty minutes later, the valley closed in, the track rose through trees and we reached its end. Beneath firs stood the enormous ovoo of tree-trunks mentioned by Schubert and Igor, littered with tangles of blue silk and flags. We were on a pilgrim route marked by shrines, a sort of Mongolian Stations of the Cross. A 20-minute climb through cool, sweet-smelling firs brought us to a flat area of mossy hummocks. In among the slender firs was another ovoo of fir-trunks, in front of which stood two enormous metal pots for sacrificial offerings and an altar, also of tree-trunks, covered with empty bottles and saucers for incense. This was obviously the spot where a building had once stood. A temple, presumably.

  I looked around for evidence. Right at the edge of the flat area, where footsteps had worn into the soft earth, were bits of tile. With a rush of excitement, I picked up a couple – two bits of grey-brown pottery, coarsely made, unglazed. The tiny impressions on the inner surface suggested the tiles had been moulded or dried on some sort of sacking – typical of Chinese-style roof tiles. They would reveal when the temple was built, if they could be dated.

  Kamala’s temple? If so, surely those who built it would not have got the wrong place, and Genghis’s tomb would be somewhere close. But it made no sense. If Kamala had genuinely wished to respect Genghis’s wishes, he would have kept the grave secret; in which case, would he really have drawn attention to it by setting workmen to dig the place flat, cutting trees, importing clay, making a kiln, baking tiles and ensuring regular observances?

  Again the path rose steeply through firs, twisting upwards over roots. It is not a hard climb, which is as it should be for a sacred mountain. The whole point of a sacred mountain is that it should be accessible – not too easy, of course, but not forbidding either. For anyone prepared to make the long approach with horses and a tent, Khentii Khan is no harder than a Pyrenean stage on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela, though without the cheer of a pilgrim hostel.

  After climbing for another half-hour, we emerged on to the second plateau, where a cool wind blew between stunted evergreens. Ahead and above loomed the bald shoulder of the summit. All around were the features mentioned by Igor – scores, perhaps hundreds, of irregular collections of stones, some of them just the right size for graves. There were also a few little ovoos, where pilgrims had thrown together loose rocks in passing. My mind had been set on graves by Igor’s words: ‘Ancient excavations . . . holes dug and then refilled . . . the Mongol emperors lie buried.’

  Except that I could not believe it.

  The suspicion had been planted in my mind by the ‘grave’ I had seen the day before, down in the boggy and trackless lowlands. It had seemed to me then that the features were probably natural. I felt the suspicion harden. The piles of rock were the same in both places: some roughly circular, but irregular as puddles, and of no standard size, ranging from 1 metre to 3 or 4 metres across. If the feature down below was not a grave, neither were the ones on the mountain.

  Later research supported the idea.fn3 This is a region of permafrost, in which only the top few feet of ground thaw in the summer. Soil of this type has a life of its own, because freezing soil expands, as ice does, in winter and contracts again in summer, with results that depend on the type of rock and soil, and the slope, and the amount of surface water. Natural forces act on the raw materials in strange and complex ways. From gravels, stones and rocks, periglacial environments produce a wonderful variety of polygons, circles, rings and mounds that look artificial, as if nature has indulged in Zen gardening on a massive scale (indeed, some of the first scientists in the Arctic thought they really were artificial). I became almost certain that the ‘graves’ on Khentii Khan are ‘stony earth circles’, made as frosts and slight differences in temperature and expansion push rocks into similarly sized groups. Wind and rain scoop away debris, leaving rock ‘puddles’ that look very much like rough graves.

  Was this a place for a khan to be buried in a secret grave? I couldn’t see it. It did not fit with grassland flattened by galloping horses and an overgrowth of forest. This plateau was hard for horses to reach en masse, and with the scantiest of tree-covering, and on a highway to the summit – as public a place as you could get within 1,000 square kilometres.

  Above, the high altar of this natural cathedral was suddenly lost in a cloud-bank, its edge rolling ominously downhill. Further research, on both the platform and the summit, had to wait.

  My next chance came in 2009, with four adventure tourists. After the now familiar approach up and down steep slopes, over streams and the Kherlen, and in and out of peat bogs, I was back on the platform with the ‘stony circles’, if that’s what they were. I needed evidence, which meant opening up a ‘grave’ or two. To anyone who saw these as graves, the idea would have been appalling, sacrilegious. But I had no qualms. It was obvious that every ‘circle’ was part of a stream of stones and small boulders moving downhill immeasurably slowly, and every stream a part of the process of erosion that had been going on for millennia.

  It took only a few minutes to unpack a couple of corpse-sized rock-puddles and to find, less than half a metre down, nothing but peat. After taking pictures, I set off again over rock and grass for the summit.

  An hour later, I was on a long, gentle approach to the tumulus described by Campbell, the ovoo of Schubert. It is indeed a dome so regular that it looks artificial. On its top was one large pimple and many smaller ones. A faint trail over the pink-tinged rocks led diagonally up the right-hand end. Beneath angry clouds, I climbed to the top, emerging by the large pimple. It was in fact an extremely solid and well-built ovoo, consisting of a dry-stone wall in a circle some 5 metres across and a metre high. Inside the low wall was a pile of stones from which rose a pole topped by a silver war-helmet and black horse-tails – replicas of Genghis’s war-standard – together with several bows, all swathed and padded in fluttering lengths of blue silk: Genghis-worship and Buddhism, interwined.

  The conditions were not good. From ragged cloud came salvoes of thunder and bursts of rain, driven by a bitter wind. My flock of tourists were scattered, and unfit, or aged. One had got lost completely, being found only much later, so time was short. I glanced round, saw 100 – or 200, I don’t know how many – smaller ovoos (made over the last century, apparently, for Campbell saw only two), took hurried pictures in a grim light, and left.

  Later, back in the tranquillity of home, I tu
rned at last to the matter of the tumulus, the giant ovoo, the cairn. Could it possibly be Genghis’s tomb? Let’s see what would be involved. The dome of granite rocks is about 250 by 200 by 30 metres – that’s a total weight of about 630,000 tonnes. With granite available all around in manageable chunks, the cairn could be built in a year by 2,000 men, if they had several hundred oxen to drag the rocks to the site in wagons. But wait. In Mongolia you can’t work outside in winter, which reduces the working year to five months. And the workforce and oxen need food, herds, tents, pastures and horses, all presumably down in the valley below. We must imagine lines of men and animals trooping up and down the mountain daily, perhaps with a core of them staying up near the summit.

  So yes, for a great power it would have been technically feasible. The cairn is about 360,000 cubic metres, which makes it a mere baby compared with the tomb of China’s First Emperor outside Lintong, near Xian (five times the volume), or with the Great Pyramid of Giza (over twice the volume). But these are not fair comparisons. Both Egypt and China could draw on vast populations for slave-labourers in the tens of thousands, working over flat landscapes, with time to spare. The Great Pyramid took perhaps twenty years to build, with a workforce of 100,000. In the First Emperor’s case, it took 40,000 men four years to collect the earth for his tomb-mound.fn4

  It would have been possible for Genghis’s heir, Ogedei, to set up a tent-city for a thousand or two, ferry in food in wagons by the hundred, and order them to spend a few years at the task. But the idea is totally at odds with both tradition and the sources. Mongols did not build mounds for royal graves, and the sources speak only of a secret grave in the Forbidden Precinct. It is hardly conceivable that such a vast project would have left no traces in official histories, or the earth, or literature, or folklore.