by The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire
According to the Korean Veritable Records for the year 1442, one Mongol khan looking back on the relations between the two allies wrote: “When our great ancestor Genghis Khan governed all the eight directions … there was none under heaven who would not obey. Korea among others was friendlier with us than any other nation, being as close as true brothers might be.”
With their mastery of the Mongolian language, their numerous Mongolian relatives, their long time spent at the Mongol court, and even their Mongolian names, the Korean kings appeared largely Mongolian to their overlords. Yet, speaking Korean, with numerous Korean relatives and Korean names, they still seemed Korean to their subjects. This ability to play both sides benefited Korea greatly, but in the end the schizophrenic life of the kings came at great personal cost to them and their families.
With her own Mongol detachment of guards close at hand and the mighty Mongol army never too far from Korea, the Mongol queen had an independent source of power that curtailed the options of her husband. Yet, as a foreign queen in a sometimes hostile environment, her powers had very definite limits and rarely reached far beyond the range of her own eyesight.
Mongol-Korean relations in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries centered on these queens, and the era is filled with colorful stories of arguments over seating and rituals, angry domestic fights, murders and mysterious deaths, unfaithful kings who preferred Korean women over their Mongol spouses, mothers-in-law placing curses on their daughters-in-law, and wanton Mongol queens who brazenly promoted with impunity a succession of handsome guards, ministers, and attendants as lovers. Secret letters and coded messages dashed back and forth between the Korean Mongol capitals. Envoys of the royals came and went, checking on rival accusations or to plead for mercy, and occasionally Mongol military units moved menacingly in an effort to quell another flare-up. Despite the drama, romance, and intrigue, Mongols and Koreans continued to live their awkward but mutually beneficial alliance; that relationship, however, had ended by the time the Mongol queen Noguk died during childbirth in 1365, during the reign of her anti-Yuan husband, King Gongmin. Soon both the Goreyo Dynasty of Korea and the Yuan Dynasty of China had run their historical course and were replaced by more vibrant ones.
Harmony between the male sky and the female earth continued to fall out of balance as the descendants of Genghis Khan violated virtually every important rule, law, and custom that he had given them. As the Yuan Dynasty deteriorated through the fourteenth century, the court recognized that its officials had abandoned much of their former way of life, including the equilibrium of male and female principles rooted in Mongolian culture and central to the spirituality taught by Genghis Khan.
The Mongol court sought to restore the needed balance through public rituals from a variety of religions. But with the removal of women from the government structure established by Genghis Khan, it was hard for the Mongols to synchronize the necessary male and female components. The last emperor became convinced of a novel way to redress the imbalance. He could imbibe female vitality into his body, making himself the right blend of masculine and feminine essences. If the emperor was perfectly balanced, then his government would be in harmony and the world would be set right.
The way to absorb the needed womanly qualities was through sexual relations performed in a variety of ritually specific ways. With help from loyal retainers, the emperor arranged to recruit a variety of young girls, mostly from the families of commoners, who were specially trained for his service in this urgent spiritual quest to rescue the empire. In 1354, as a way to improve the ritual quality of these diverse girls, sixteen were selected for a special troupe named the Divine Demon Dancing Girls.
The emperor selected ten of his male relatives to assist in these pressing matters of state. Just as Genghis Khan had used ten as the main unit of military organization, with ten squads of ten men each forming a company of one hundred, each of the emperor’s specially chosen men was instructed to perform ten times a night in the ritually prescribed sequence of acts. To assist in their work, the emperor had special rooms constructed to perform the rituals, each with appropriate instructive artwork to teach the occupants more precisely their duties and to encourage them in the performance.
The monks, either on their own or with the permission of the emperor, convinced some women of the royal household that they, too, needed an infusion of male essence by being initiated as nuns into the secret practices. A Ming Dynasty investigation later asserted: “The wives and concubines and other women in the palace committed adultery with outside ministers, or allowed monks to stay in the palace to be initiated into nunhood.” Their actions turned the Forbidden City into a “place full of obscenity.”
All the efforts were in vain; the Yuan Dynasty of the Mongols collapsed in 1368, the Year of the Monkey.
The Mongol royal family, however, did not assume any responsibility for the collapse of Khubilai Khan’s dynasty. Instead the Borijin survivors blamed the fall completely on a deceitful trick by the Chinese. According to the mythical account recorded in the Erdeni-yin Tobci, the expulsion of the Mongols from China began when a caravan of Kazakh carts appeared at the walls of the Forbidden City. The caravan leader handed a note to the guard stating that he was bringing tribute for the khan, but the sentry would not allow the carts to enter until the caravan leader made him “happy with jewels.”
Once through the massive gates and inside the Forbidden City, the merchants quickly set to unloading their immense tribute under the watchful eye of the Mongol guards. The first three sets of carts carried jewels and other valuable gifts. The next vehicles contained armor and weapons that they laid out as though intended for presentation as tribute. From the final carts, the visitors hauled out three large and mysterious objects coated in wax. The merchants explained to the watching guards that these objects were giant candles, and to prove their claim, they lit the wick on each of them. As the wax burned down, it melted the wax off the large metal objects. Once they were free of the wax, it became obvious that the wicks were actually fuses, and each of the large fake candles concealed a cannon. About the time the merchants finished unloading the carts, the fire reached the powder and fired the cannons with resounding noise.
The cannon burst served as a signal to a regiment of rebels concealed in the carts; they sprang out of hiding and rushed to put on the neatly arranged armor and take up the weapons. The boom of the cannon and the mêlée of the rebels woke the emperor, who just managed to escape with the royal jade seal hidden in the flowing sleeves of his imperial robe.
He did not have time to gather his Divine Demon Dancers, and thus the harmony of male and female in the Mongol Empire was abandoned.
7
The Rabbit Demon’s Revenge
EVEN AS THE EMPIRE OF GENGHIS KHAN COLLAPSED, MOST of the Mongols did not want to return home to Mongolia. Members of the Borijin clan in Russia and Persia intermarried with local elites, changed their religion and language as readily as their clothes, and forgot that they were Mongols in order to blend into the new social order.
Of the three major branches of the Borijin family ruling abroad, only the Chinese branch attempted to flee home when their rule collapsed, but most of their Mongol subjects stayed in China. According to the Mongol accounts, a dispersed population of 400,000 Mongols lived across China in 1368. Yet, only 60,000 managed to escape or were willing to flee with the court. The Borijin rulers, now neither Chinese nor Mongol, had so alienated their Mongol subjects and soldiers that at their final moment of expulsion from China by the newly rising and natively authentic Ming Dynasty, the majority of the Mongol commoners chose to stay in China. They preferred to serve China rather than return to Mongolia with the Borijin clan and its corrupt horde of foreign advisors, sexually permissive monks, alien guards, pampered astrologers, and nondenominational spiritual quacks.
Not knowing where to go in Mongolia, the royal refugees headed back to the Kherlen River, to the source of their myths at the foot of Mo
unt Burkhan Khaldun. The caravan stretched back across many miles, and it took many weeks before all the people and animals arrived. One cluster after another limped back. The camels carried large leather trunks and folded tents of colored silk and damask.
Although on horseback, the women wore their heavy Mongol-style jewelry, their flowing gowns of embroidered gold lined with cashmere, and their coats of tiger and leopard skin trimmed with sable. The children rode on carts pulled by lumbering oxen and yaks. The men wore their silk sashes tied extra tight against the hunger and the constant bouncing on horseback. The people and all they carried arrived coated with a thick layer of Gobi dust. The armor was bent, the lances twisted, the flags tattered, the horses thin.
The many Mongols who stayed behind in China or near the border during the Ming Dynasty continued to be a part of the Chinese historical record. Those who returned to the Mongolian Plateau, however, largely passed out of the recorded history of their neighbors. But the Mongols were now literate and relied upon their own written documents and chronicles to supplement their oral stories. Today we would know almost nothing of Mongolia during this era if it were not for two Mongolian texts written in the seventeenth century. The Altan Tobci, meaning the “Golden Summary,” was recorded around 1651 in a jumble of names, stories, and genealogies; about a decade later, it was followed by the Erdeni-yin Tobči, meaning the “Bejeweled Summary” or sometimes translated as the “Precious Summary.” The accounts were recorded separately, long after the events contained within them occurred, and the details, particularly dates, vary between the two versions. Yet they agree in the overall narrative of events and in the identity and actions of the major players.
The exodus from China was significant, but many of the refugee soldiers streaming into Mongolia were not even Mongol. They belonged to the European Ossetian and Turkic Kipchak soldiers originally brought as imperial guards for Khubilai Khan, who had feared his own Mongol warriors as well as the Chinese.
The Mongol herders, following their traditional way of life on the steppe, did not welcome these strange Mongols gladly. During their seven generations away from home, the royal family had not become Chinese; however, they no longer lived as Mongols. They had all the confidence and bravado of the original Mongols of Genghis Khan, but they had none of the skills, strengths, or stamina. They seemed to have abandoned the virtue of Mongol life and ignored the virtue of Chinese civilization, preferring instead to combine the worst of both. The only occupation they had learned was ruling, and after the death of Genghis Khan, they had not done that well. Once back in Mongolia, they found themselves marooned in a vast sea of grass with little knowledge of their own nomadic culture.
The returning refugees hardly recognized their fellow Mongols who had remained north of the Gobi and continued to follow the traditionally rugged and independent life of nomadic herders. Throughout the sojourn of the royal family and their retinue in China from 1211 until 1368, these Mongols never completely submitted to the rule of their Mongol relatives from the Chinese capital. These Mongol traditionalists remained loyal to the spirit of Genghis Khan by following leaders such as Arik Boke, Qaidu Khan, and Khutulun, but they rejected, or at least remained suspicious of, the Yuan Dynasty established by Khubilai Khan and operated to the exclusive benefit of his descendants for nearly a century.
The Mongols who had dismounted in China and lived there for more than a century had lost their ability to survive in the harsh conditions of Mongolia. For them, hunting was an elaborately ritualized sport, not a survival skill; it was best done with transport elephants, dancing girls for the long evenings, trained warriors to pursue the animals, beaters to drive the animals to where the royals waited with their bowmen at their side, and a cadre of chefs to concoct exotic delicacies from the game.
They did not know how to stalk a wild animal, much less skin the animals or tan the hides. They did not know how to shear the sheep or make clothes from the wool, because they had grown accustomed to wearing silk woven by anonymous workers in the far corners of their erstwhile empire. Each Mongol aristocrat in China had his own private herd, but they were for show and glory, like the ten thousand white horses of the Great Khan. Their century and a half in China had not acculturated them to any new skills; it had merely deprived them of their old ones from lack of use.
The returned Mongols and their foreign guard began eating up everything they could find without regard to season or weather. They slaughtered the animals indiscriminately, and they grazed them without concern for the survival of the pasture for another year. They chopped down the forests and fouled the landscape. They still had their passionate love of horses and tried to maintain their large herds even if sheep, goats, cows, and yaks proved more efficient at converting grass into meat.
Within only a few years, the returning Mongols ate up their homeland, destroyed the pasture, and burned the wood. To survive, they had to move ever farther north into the Siberian forests, west on the mountains and plains around the Altai, or back toward the south, to China from whence they came. The north was colder, harsher, and held fewer resources. The west was still inhabited by the steppe tribes that had not settled in China, and they maintained all the vigor and hostility of the old Mongols.
Though the Ming had chased them from the capital city, the Mongols did not consider themselves to have been overthrown. They had merely lost some territory. The newly emerging Ming Dynasty now controlled the agricultural parts of China, essentially the areas occupied by the dominant Han ethnic group. In victory they changed the name of the Mongol capital to Peiping, meaning “the North Is Pacified,” but many areas still lay beyond their reach. The Ming forces did not take Sichuan until 1371 and Yunnan until 1382. Other areas such as Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, eastern Turkestan, and Tibet remained permanently beyond the effective control of the Ming, leaving them with a far smaller China than the Mongols had held. Backed by the loyalty of many of these other areas, the Mongols still considered themselves to be the legitimate, though temporarily exiled, rulers of all China. They controlled vast but empty territories, with few subjects, no cities, and only minor trade routes connecting China with the forest tribes of Siberia.
Even when the Ming soldiers hunted down the Mongol khans and killed the last ruling descendant of Khubilai Khan in 1388, the Mongols found other members of the Borijin clan to claim the office. Because of the continuing respect for the memory of Arik Boke Khan as the defender of Mongol values against the Chinese administration of his brother Khubilai, some of Arik Boke’s descendants now came to the fore to claim the office. In thirteenth century, Arik Boke had wanted to keep the imperial capital in Mongolia, and now his distant heirs resurrected that possibility. They no longer had the option of locating their capital in another country, since they had lost all the territory that Genghis Khan’s army had conquered, from the Pacific to the Mediterranean and from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean. Now 150 years after the founding of the nation in 1206, they found themselves right back on the high, dry, cold Mongolian Plateau where Genghis Khan had started, and they were about to lose that. More precisely, they were about to lose their power over their ancestral territory and to become prisoners in their own homeland.
The Mongol Empire ended abruptly on a snowy day in 1399 when the sex-crazed spirit of a rabbit jumped on Elbeg Khan and captured his soul. Some observers may point to a more gradual decline of the empire from other causes, such as the outbreak of plague earlier in the century or the triumph of the Ming rebels in 1368, but the Buddhist chroniclers clearly saw the role of the rabbit as an intimate but secret protector of Genghis Khan’s clan.
The rise of the Borijin family stemmed from another snowy day two centuries earlier, around the year 1159, the Year of the Earth Rabbit. Genghis Khan’s father was out hunting a rabbit, and the rabbit lured the hunter on a path past a patch of freshly deposited urine. The yellow splash pattern of the urine in the fresh snow indicated that it had been made by a woman. The hunter decided to let the rabbit survive
and turned instead to hunt the woman; he found her, kidnapped her, and with her produced Genghis Khan and the Mongol royal family.
Normally the rabbit stood as a symbol of cowardice within the animal kingdom since it is so easily frightened, but having had its life spared, the rabbit became a secret guardian of the family through its rise to power. Genghis Khan founded the Mongol Empire in the Fire Rabbit Year of 1206, and in the animal cycle of years, the rabbit returned every twelve years. Each time it brought some special encounter with the Mongol khans.
Hunting always carried a close association with marriage and sexuality, and generally only men hunted. A boy’s first kill symbolized his marriage to a daughter of the forest, and to mark this loss of virginity, older men smeared fat from the animal onto the boy’s flesh. Genghis Khan personally performed the ceremony on his grandsons Khubilai and Mongke after their first kill in 1224 near the Ili River on the frontier between the Naiman and the Uighur territory. The boys were eleven and nine years old, respectively, and had killed a rabbit and an antelope. In keeping with the theme of hunting as marriage, men had to refrain from sexual relations with their wives prior to embarking on a hunt.
Somewhere along the way, the Borijin clan forgot about its relationship with the rabbit and the debt owed to the animal as the source of the family’s power. When the Yellow (Earth) Rabbit Year returned in 1399, the Mongol ruler, Elbeg Khan, again met the rabbit at the edge of the forest, but this time the encounter produced a much more gruesome result. Elbeg Khan had had no luck that day and was anxious not to return to camp without some game. Although the white rabbit was in the white snow, Elbeg Khan saw it. He carefully pulled an arrow from his quiver, fixed it in his bow, aimed, and shot the rabbit.