by John Man
fn3 Thomas Allsen, ‘Ever Closer Encounters’ (see Bibliography). He lists Italians, French, Flemings, Greeks, Germans, Scandinavians, Hungarians, Russians, Qipchaqs, Alans, Armenians, Georgians, Nestorians, Jews, Muslims, Ongguts, Khitans, Jürchens, Uighurs, Tibetans, Tanguts and Koreans. Specialists included administrators, clerics, merchants, shipwrights, musicians, goldsmiths, armourers, cooks, textile workers, scribes, translators, carpetmakers, architects, artists, stonemasons, printers, engineers and, of course, uncountable numbers of soldiers and servants.
fn4 Boyle, Successors, p. 5 (see Rashid al-Din in Bibliography).
fn5 For further details, see Allsen, Culture and Conquest.
fn6 There’s a model of it in the Gutenberg Museum, Mainz.
fn7 As always, academics dispute the nature of the evidence and the conclusions. I summarize the most widely accepted version. For details, see Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World who uses the translation by O. Dunn and J. E. Kelly in their edition of Columbus’s Diario.
26
HOW TO SURVIVE DEATH
LET US APPROACH the subject of this chapter as pilgrims from the north, crossing the Yellow River in mid-course. In this stretch, the river is a geographical oddity. Instead of flowing eastwards from the Tibetan highlands, it takes a huge diversion to the north, swinging in a vast loop before continuing on its way to the Pacific. The loop encloses a country-sized slab of semi-desert, sand, scrub, and ravines carved out by the sparse rain. This is the Ordos, which means ‘tent-palaces’ in old Mongolian, a reminder that it was once Mongolian territory before the arrival of Chinese roads and cities and mines. But it’s not all arid. If you drive south from the top of the Great Bend, through the sparkling new tower-blocks of Ordos City, the regional capital, you cross a savannah of scattered trees and pastures. In the distance appears a fir-covered hill, and above the firs you glimpse three pink-and-blue domes, topped by little pillars, like cherries on cakes. The road leads uphill through a small town and into a giant courtyard lined with gift shops. A long flight of stairs climbs to a gallery of exhibition rooms topped by white crenellations. By now you are panting, probably sweating. That’s as it should be. Pilgrims should suffer a little. Also, you are awed. You feel you are approaching something majestic. Ahead is a quadrangle of rough grass 100 metres across, and beyond lies the object of your journey: a long, pink, single-storey building, three squat pavilions linked by galleries and topped by blue-tiled roofs with upturned eves, which, like ballet skirts, circle the three pink-and-blue domes you saw from the countryside below.
You have arrived at the Mausoleum of Genghis Khan.
Here in the Lord’s Enclosure, to translate the Mongolian name, Genghis has undergone the final and strangest part of his metamorphosis from barbarian chief to demi-god. It is home to a religious sect that has evolved from historical roots, through legend, to create a community with a temple, rites and a belief-system that is beginning to show signs of a universal theology.
It started in 1227. Though buried obscurely in the mountains of Mongolia, Genghis had to be honoured, his possessions preserved, provision made for worship. His heir Ogedei decreed a solution that was original and appropriate for nomads. In the words of Sagang Tsetsen in the seventeenth century, ‘white tents were raised for the purpose of veneration’. Each tent would have had its own object of worship – Genghis, his first three wives, his horse, mare’s-milk bucket, bows, saddle and treasures. A clan – originally the Urianghai ‘of the Woods’ – was granted freedom from all other duties so that their 500 members could act as guardians in perpetuity, caring for the Lord’s possessions and supervising the rituals of veneration. In this way, Genghis would watch over his people for ever.
At first, the focal point of veneration was, of course, the grave-site on or near Burkhan Khaldun. But there was an impermanence about the arrangements, since the secret location was deliberately overgrown. Years passed. The tents, originally nine but later eight, moved from place to place as a travelling shrine, wandering back and forth across the Gobi, from the Altai Mountains of the west to the eastern grasslands, until they settled here, at this well-watered spot on the eastern edge of the Ordos, in the mid-fifteenth century. Folklore improvised an explanation for the shrine’s presence, until, with the passing of the generations, it seemed that this must have been the place where their Lord wished to be buried, though no one knew the exact spot. In the seventeenth century, the shrine acquired its present name – Edsen Khoroo,fn1 the Lord’s Enclosure.
The temple and its rituals were, and still are, controlled by the same group, now known as Darkhats (meaning ‘exempt from taxation’). Their claim, more folklore than history, is that their families are all descended from Genghis’s generals, two in particular: Boorchu (who as a teenager helped the future Genghis rescue his stolen horses) and Mukhali, viceroy of north China. In the words of one Darkhat, Surihu: ever since Genghis’s death, ‘we, the descendants of Boorchu, have been engaged in making offerings and guarding the mausoleum. And the duties have never been stopped. I am the thirty-ninth generation of Boorchu’s family’.fn2 The Darkhats who claim descent from Mukhali care for the war-standards – spears with shaggy circlets of yak-tail attached just below the point – and their ceremonies. Over the centuries these and other groups evolved ever more arcane and trivial tasks, such as caring for the horse-headed clappers, chanting, reading decrees, supervising liquor ceremonies, boiling sheep, carrying lanterns and butchering horses. These were all men, of course, and all the jobs were inherited from father to senior son.
From the early seventeenth century, shamanic elements gave way to Buddhist ones. Genghis became a reincarnation of the bodhisattva (or ‘Buddha-to-be’) Vajrapani, the Thunderbolt-bearer, who in Tibetan mythology fights demons to protect Buddhism. Rites settled into a series of thirty annual ceremonies, with four great seasonal observances, each with its songs, prayers and incantations, many beginning with words which, if the names were changed, could just as well be used by a priest invoking Christ: ‘Heaven-born Genghis Khan, Born by the will of sublime Heaven, Your body provided with heavenly rank and name, You who took overlordship of the world’s peoples . . .’ Attributes, possessions, actions, looks, wives, children, horses, pastures: all are invoked as a means of assuring the Lord’s blessing in the overcoming of obstacles, demons, illnesses, errors and discord.
Take one ceremony among many. This one happens once a year in front of the temple’s main ovoo, the sacred pile of rocks that stands nearby. It is held in memory of the Golden Pole to which Genghis tied his horse, a horse of pure white, such as the ones allowed to wander around the temple today. It is said that a thief took the horse and as a punishment was made to represent the Golden Pole, standing all night holding the horse with his feet buried in the ground. In the mausoleum’s ceremony, a man played the role of the thief. People threw loose change in front of him. Priests scattered milk, observed how it flowed and foretold how good the pastures would be, and how healthy the cattle. After the ceremony the man was released, gathered the cash and ran off, with people yelling ‘Stop thief!’ in ritual protest. That was fifty years ago. No man today stands out all night with his legs half buried. His place is taken by a real pole. Children and adults run back and forth between the pole and the ovoo, scattering milk on the pole.
The mausoleum and its web of ritual practice remained for Mongols a sort of cosa nostra, from which Chinese and other foreigners were excluded. Owen Lattimore, the great American Mongolist, was the first outsider to observe the Lord’s Enclosure and its ceremonies. He came in April 1935, in time for the spring festival. Arriving for this ‘Audience with Jenghis Khan’, as he called his vivid account, he found five tents (not eight) flanked by two dozen gers, ox-carts, tethered horses and lines of poorer tents belonging to traders and servants. Inside the main tent was a low, silver-plated table, which was the altar, and a silver-plated wooden chest, the ‘coffin’. This was supposed to contain the bones or ashes of Genghis himself, but Lattimore, with his exc
ellent Mongol, noticed an inscription in the silver which suggested it was Manchu, no more than 300 years old. He had his doubts about the other items as well, given the frequency of rebellions and bandit raids.
There followed many offerings of silk scarves, a ninefold prostration, the drinking of milk-wine from silver cups, and many advances and retreats, all followed by the offering of a sacrificial sheep. Then came a procession around the other four tents, and prayers in the final one. Lattimore noted how much of a Mongol business this was; the Buddhist lamas performed only an insignificant role, their main task being to blow curved Tibetan trumpets, producing a sound like ‘the splitting of gigantic trousers’. At the end of the ceremonies the following day, all five tents were lifted in their entirety on to carts drawn by two white camels and taken back to a walled enclosure nearby.
It was clear to Lattimore that the origins of the cult were back to front. Normally, you would expect a body, a burial, then the rituals. But there had been no body, this was no true mausoleum, the ‘relics’ were of dubious authenticity, and ‘as for the tradition that the body of Jenghis is at Ejen Horo [sic], or his ashes, this is neither clear nor specific’. Somehow the rituals, based on a combination of thirteenth-century court observances and even older ancestor-worship, seemed to have come first, the beliefs following along later as rationalizations. Perhaps only then did the ‘relics’ appear, to provide a physical focus for worship.
War, which Lattimore just managed to avoid, changed everything. So far, the only contest to possess the legacy of Genghis had been between shaman and Buddhist, a rivalry hidden by the slow-motion nature of the Buddhist takeover. Now the story shifts gear. Since the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese officials had been encouraging Chinese peasants to colonize traditional Mongol lands, turning pasture into farmland, forcing herders into marginal pastures. At this point, three new elements intruded: Japan, expanding into Inner Asia from its colony in Manchuria, challenged by two Chinese rivals, the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek and Mao’s Communists.
Japan sprang upon China rather as Genghis had done, but from the opposite side. In 1931–2 Manchuria became a Japanese puppet-state, Manchukuo, a prelude to expansion into Mongolia, China and Siberia. The first step was to take eastern and central Inner Mongolia, which acquired its own puppet-regime, the Mongolian Autonomous Government, complete with a revolutionary calendar which had as its founding date the year of Genghis’s birth. Held back briefly by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army, the Guomindang, Japanese troops advanced to the Yellow River in 1937 and remained in control for the next eight years.fn3
In the autumn of 1937 an unexpected guest arrived at the Lord’s Enclosure. He announced himself as a representative of the Royal Japanese Army based in Baotou, 100 kilometres to the north. Local officials were gathered. Demands were made. The officials were to declare themselves both against Chinese parties and for the Japanese; and to move the Eight White Tents and their contents into Japanese custody. The Japanese had realized that whoever ruled the Lord’s Enclosure held the key to Mongolia and this part of China; and that whoever ruled Mongol lands had a fine base from which to secure the rest of China and Siberia. Suddenly Genghis’s relics, Genghis’s very soul, had become the key to empire in Asia.
A tricky position for the provincial chief, Shakhe. The relics had been there for 700 years, give or take, and the local Mongols were guarding them ‘as if protecting their own eyes’. Besides, close by were Nationalist troops. Shakhe pointed out that if the mausoleum were moved there would be riots, which would not benefit the Japanese cause. The invaders saw the point, and backed off.
But the damage was done. Many Mongols in China turned to their own independence movement, while others approached the Nationalists for help in moving the relics to a place of safety, far from the reach of the enemy. The Guomindang government agreed, planning to move everything by truck and camel to the mountains south of Lanzhou on the Yellow River, 600 kilometres to the southwest. The area was chosen because it was safe, though the argument was also made that it was not far (well, only 150 kilometres) beyond the Liupan Mountains, where Genghis had spent his last summer.
On 17 May 1939, 200 Nationalist soldiers arrived unannounced at the mausoleum, to the astonishment of the confused locals, who blocked the way. A Nationalist official explained the need to protect the place against the ‘East Ocean devils’. Panic gave way to negotiations. The Nationalists promised that all expenses would be paid, that some of the Darkhats could go along, and that all the ceremonies would be allowed to continue. The news spread fast. Hundreds, then thousands, came, spending the night in lantern-lit ceremonies, weeping and praying as the tents were struck and the carts loaded. At dawn the train of vehicles moved off. Across a ‘sea of tears’, in the words of a journalist, the carts slowly pulled out, heading south at walking pace towards Yan’an, Shaanxi province, almost 400 kilometres away.
Yan’an was the HQ of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. By some unrecorded negotiation the Communists allowed the convoy, with its Nationalist contingent, to enter their territory. Because Genghis was, of course, a Chinese emperor and the whole mausoleum a Chinese relic, both sides in what would soon be a vicious civil war united in competing to praise Genghis as a symbol of Chinese resistance to the invader, seeing him not as the founder of the Mongol nation and empire, but as the founder of the Yuan dynasty. There was, therefore, a political subtext to this apparently altruistic gesture, based on the fact that Inner Mongolia was now part of China, and that its Mongolian people were officially Chinese. So the Mongols had better not forget that Genghis’s conquests were not conquests at all, but a little difficulty that led to the Chinese majority being ruled, for a short while, not by foreigners but by a Chinese minority – i.e. the Mongols.
So, in mid-June, the Communists did Genghis proud. Camel-carts gave way to an eight-car convoy, one vehicle for each tent, the lead car bearing the coffin, which was draped in yellow satin. A crowd of 20,000 watched the convoy draw up at a room designated as a funeral hall. Here a huge scroll proclaimed Genghis ‘The Giant of the World’. An arch hung with a sign – ‘Welcome to Genghis Khan’s coffin!’ – led to a shrine laid with wreaths, one from Mao himself. A dozen senior party and army officials paid tribute to the convoy in a four-hour ceremony, the high point of which was a ‘vehement and passionate’ funeral oration by Secretary General Cao Liru. ‘It praised Yuan Taizu [the Yuan dynasty’s first emperor] as the world’s hero’, and instantly linked him to the Communist Party’s cause, urging ‘Mongolian and Chinese people to unite and resist to the end!’fn4 Next day, the convoy moved on southwards, past another huge crowd of spectators. This was how to deal with a barbarian conqueror: confer upon him a retrospective change of nationality and turn him into a symbol of Chinese culture, fortitude and unity.
Three days later, the convoy again passed into Nationalist hands. In Xian, the Nationalists gave a reception that far outdid their rivals’. Here, 200,000 people packed the streets to greet the convoy. A cow and twenty-seven sheep were sacrificed in welcome. It was an astonishing display, given that this was the Chinese heartland, with few Mongols in evidence. Genghis had devastated the area. Yet ordinary people fell for his magic, because he had become a Chinese emperor, albeit posthumously. They were ancestor-worshippers, and Genghis was certainly a great ancestor, even if not theirs.
On 1 July, another 500 kilometres to the west, safe in the Xinglong Mountains south of Lanzhou, the convoy arrived at Dongshan Dafo Dian, the Buddhist temple that was to be the mausoleum’s home for the next ten years. It’s a glorious place, once hidden in towering forests, now opened by a winding road. A little river tumbles through a huddle of houses. Pagodas crown forested peaks. Daytrippers climb zigzag stairways to the temple, where they still remember Genghis. Inside, a golden statue of Genghis as a Buddhist deity is flanked by horsehair war-standards and a square tent. The original temple and its contents were destroyed by fire in 1968. It all dates from 1987. Nothing is authe
ntic but landscape and memory.
In 1949, as communist troops approached to wrap up the civil war, the Nationalists shepherded the mausoleum away again, 200 kilometres further west to the great sixteenth-century Tibetan monastery of Ta’er Si, where monks welcomed it with chants and prayers. A month later the Communists won anyway. The Nationalists fled to Taiwan. The Japanese were gone, along with their puppet-regimes in Manchuria and Mongolia. Heaven, it seemed, had granted a new mandate – to Mao.
For the next five years, the Communist Party had its hands full with land reforms and other such revolutionary matters. Inner Mongolia was in the control of its own Communist warlord, Ulanhu. Once, before the war, the Communists had agreed that minority areas could secede from China if they wished. Not any more; not in the new China. But the Communists did recognize the right to some local autonomy, and Ulanhu pushed Mongolian claims to the limit. In the new Mongolian Autonomous Region, Mongolians made up only 15 per cent of the population – in a region that had once been theirs alone! – but dominated its administration. As post-revolutionary life returned to a semblance of normality, officials turned to the mausoleum. For Mongols and Chinese alike, Genghis deserved some prestigious and enduring memorial, something better than a few tents. A brand-new mausoleum was commissioned, to be built on the original site.
In spring 1954, by truck and train, the hero’s bier and his relics returned to the Lord’s Enclosure in time for the laying of the foundation stone on 20 April. Ulanhu himself did the honours. On 15 May, an auspicious day, the day of the most important observance, with gers crowding the surrounding pastures and sacrificial sheep piled in mounds, a memorial rite marked the mausoleum’s renaissance.
In 1956 the new temple was complete, and remains largely unchanged today.
It seemed right, on my first visit in 2002, to enter as an ignorant outsider should enter any place of worship, with humility. I was with my Mongolian friend Jorigt. From one of the gift shops that lined the entrance courtyard we bought a length of blue silk – a khatag – a bottle of vodka and a brick of tea. We climbed the auspicious flight of ninety-nine steps – ninety-nine being the number of minor spirits subordinate to the overarching deity – through pines and cypresses to the temple’s gateway, with its white crenellations. Beyond was a huge grassed courtyard, spilling across to the temple itself, its central dome flanked by two domed wings. They couldn’t go too far wrong with a site like this. The temple is a jewel in a clasp of greenery, displayed on its hilltop like an offering to Blue Heaven. After all those sweaty stairs, and the entrance gateway – which acts like the iconostasis in an Orthodox church, concealing then revealing the mystery within – and the huge courtyard, you feel yourself drawn towards something greater than the merely mortal.