Jack Weatherford

by The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire

  Esen reunited not only the Mongolian Plateau but also most of the Silk Route—modern Inner Mongolia (south of the Gobi), part of Manchuria, and some territory south of the Yellow River near the Gansu Corridor. In 1449 he achieved his most important victory over the Chinese and captured the Ming emperor. For the first time in nearly a century since the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongols posed a real threat to China. From their last effort to rule China, the Mongols understood that it was far easier to conquer China than to control it, and this time they made no effort to occupy or run the country. Esen used the emperor by taking him on raids of Chinese cities in order to persuade them to surrender or at least create fear of fighting the Mongols and thereby possibly injuring their emperor. This tactic did not work for long, and eventually Esen released the bedraggled and discredited emperor, knowing that his return to Beijing would keep the Ming officials busy fighting one another and leave the Mongols in peace for a while.

  Esen had united the Mongols and defeated the Muslim ruler and the Ming emperor, but in the most important confrontation of his career, he could not overcome the determined will of his grandmother. Samur supported her grandson throughout his conquests and as he drove out the warlords and the old guards. Early in his career as taishi, he seemed to share her desire to reunite the Oirat and Mongol people under Borijin rule. He had been successful in liberating the Borijin family and the Mongols from foreign rule, but they continued to quarrel among themselves. In hopes of uniting the people, Esen sought to further integrate the ruling families of the two tribes with a marriage between his sister and the new khan.

  The plan seemed to work, and Esen’s sister produced a son. With a Borijin Mongol father and a Choros Oirat mother, the infant son seemed the perfect heir, but in a miscalculated move, the khan decided to name another son his heir. As the khan became increasingly independent, Esen grew bitter and ever more skeptical that his grandmother’s Borijin clan had the wherewithal to rule, even when given the opportunity. Esen struck him down and replaced him with another Borijin as his puppet. Again, Esen sought to unite the two families and their respective tribes. This time, he arranged a marriage between his daughter and the son of the new puppet khan. If she could produce a son, he would be a Borijin and be Esen’s grandson.

  Suddenly, for some unexplained reason, the strategy fell apart; Esen turned violently against his grandmother’s clan and all the members. They had failed him too many times and turned against him even when he tried to save them. He decided that Mongolia would be better off without the royal family. Instead of returning the Borijin family to power, he decided to exterminate it.

  To initiate the plan to rid himself of all the descendants of Genghis Khan, Esen erected two large adjoining gers under the pretext of sponsoring a feast and celebration. Under one of the gers, his men dug a deep hole and covered it over with a felt carpet. In the other, Esen waited to greet each of the nobles of the royal family. On the clever pretext of offering maximum respect to each guest, Esen ordered that they be brought into the feast one at a time beginning with the lowest-ranking individual and escorted by two members of Esen’s entourage. As each man entered, Esen stepped forward with a bowl to offer him a drink. At this moment all of Esen’s men began to sing very loudly in honor of the man while his two escorts strangled him, dragged his body into the adjoining tent, and threw it into the pit beneath the felt carpet.

  The awaiting dignitaries outside the tent suspected nothing since the loud singing drowned out any screams or cries of the victims. The khan and most of his court met their death that night. Only the khan’s son, who was also Esen’s son-in-law, managed to avoid the trap when his servant warned him that he saw blood seeping from beneath the tent walls. Although he escaped a dramatic chase by Esen’s men, someone killed him soon thereafter. From this gathering and the accompanying campaign, it is said that, by 1452, Esen had killed forty-four nobles, thirty-three lesser nobles, and sixty-one military officers from the Borijin clan and its allies. After this bloody campaign a new saying arose that “nobles die when gathering, dogs die during drought,” and was often repeated as either a threat or a warning to the powerful.

  Samur’s whole life had been devoted to restoring the Borijin monarchy, and now she and her grandson were divided. Although already an ancient lady, she prepared for one more battle before she could die, and this time her enemy was her grandson. He had killed nearly every male relative she had and almost destroyed the chance of restoring her clan to power. The struggle between grandmother and grandson came down to a fight to save the one last infant boy born to the Borijin clan.

  Esen’s young and recently widowed daughter was about to give birth. If the baby turned out to be a boy, he would be Samur’s final hope of having a Borijin descendant who might possibly grow up to be khan. A son, Samur’s great-great-grandchild, could hold a direct claim to the throne as the legitimate descendant of Genghis Khan and the heir to his father and grandfather. It was a thin thread of hope, but Samur had successfully prevailed in equally desperate circumstances in the past.

  Samur and the child’s mother, though many years apart in age, shared a common experience of becoming a young widow trapped in a set of political machinations over which each had little control. More than anyone else at the time, the two women seemed to keep clearly in mind the good of the larger nation rather than just their own careers or that of any individual person. Acting together across those generations, they not only saved the baby, they set in motion a long series of events by which women would play the dominant role for most of the coming half century; these women would eventually put the nation back on the proper path of unity and cooperation. But that journey would be a long and harsh one.

  Inevitably, Esen learned of the pregnancy, and he moved quickly. He planned to force his daughter into a new marriage, after which her Borijin baby would be killed at birth. Samur helped her great-granddaughter escape and hide, and the young widow successfully gave birth to a boy. She named her baby Bayan Mongke, meaning “Prosperous Eternity.”

  Esen, the boy’s grandfather, sent out a party of men to find his daughter and her infant to see what sex it was. He issued harsh orders to the men. “If it is a girl, comb her hair,” he instructed them. “If it is a boy, comb his throat.”

  The mother recognized the execution party as it approached, and immediately discerned its purpose. Knowing that the men would first examine the boy’s genitals, the mother showed no fear and held the baby out in front of her in the customary Mongol way of holding a child to urinate. With her fingers hidden inside his clothes, she pulled back his testicles and held back his penis in a way that obscured the male genitals while he urinated. After watching the child urinate, the leader of the assassination party felt satisfied without the need for a more direct examination. “It is a girl,” the leader reported back to Esen.

  Esen remained suspicious of his grandmother and his daughter. Knowing that the boy remained in danger, Samur had the baby brought to her own ger. She was still a queen, the daughter of a Great Khan, the descendant of Genghis Khan, and the wife and mother of khans. Even her own grandson would not violate the sanctity of her ger.

  In place of the boy, they substituted the infant daughter of a serving woman. This time, when the inspector returned to the mother’s ger and opened the baby’s clothing, he carefully examined the genitalia to make sure that there could be no deception or mistake. Again, he reported back to Esen that his grandchild was definitely a girl.

  Such a trick may have temporarily preserved the boy’s life, but word of the deception quickly spread across the steppe, and in fulfillment of his worst suspicions, Esen learned the truth. Samur might be able to shelter and protect the boy for a while, but at her age she could not personally stand guard over him every moment of every day. Esen repeatedly tried to locate the boy and kidnap him through trickery without harming Samur.

  Esen wrote to his grandmother and pleaded with her to surrender the baby to his men. She mocked her grands
on for being afraid of an infant, his own grandson. “Do you already begin to fear,” she angrily wrote back to Esen, “that the boy when he grows up will take vengeance on you?”

  On one occasion, she hid him inside an overturned pot over which she heaped dried dung. The intended fate of the heir became clear when the soldiers found another baby boy that they thought might be the child they wanted. After stripping him naked to ensure that this child was truly male, they wrapped a cord around his neck in order to strangle him without spilling any blood. At the last moment, the soldiers realized he was not Bayan Mongke and spared him but continued their hunt.

  After three years of struggle and deceit, Samur knew that such defiance and clever ruses could not continue successfully for long, and now, probably somewhere in her eighties, she might, at any moment, be incapacitated or die, thereby leaving the child to face a nearly certain death. She also realized that her grandson Esen had become increasingly desperate and unpredictable in the bitter rage that he felt toward her clan. He had already broken so many ancient laws in the last few years and killed so many descendants of Genghis Khan that he might even strike directly at her.

  In her final act of service to her nation and clan, Samur decided to send the three-year-old baby far away from the area controlled by her grandson and entrust him to loyal Mongols for safekeeping. Such a plan posed grave danger. Even if the child survived the escape and the long journey, who could be certain what fate might await him on the other side of the Mongol nation?

  A group of men loyal to the family of Genghis Khan, or at least seeing a route to future honor and riches, agreed to spirit away the boy under the leadership of a commander who had entered Esen’s service at age thirteen but felt unappreciated for his many military achievements.

  After hearing of the flight, Esen became angry but sensed the excellent opportunity to finally capture the child. He sent out a new squad, and soon the pursuers overtook the men fleeing with the infant. In a free-for-all skirmish over control of Bayan Mongke, the two sides began shooting at one another. In an effort to protect the baby or to confuse the pursuers, the men carrying him tied him tightly in his cradle and hid him.

  For whoever captured him, the infant heir constituted a valuable trophy for which many different factions would pay dearly. Esen’s men surmised precisely what had happened, and they began scouring the area for the hidden child. Realizing that the pursuers were closing in on the hiding place, one of Samur’s men raced his horse directly at the spot. Esen’s men saw him and also headed in the same direction. They were too close for the rescuer to dismount and pick up the infant. He had only one chance to swoop by the hiding place, bend down without stopping, and hook the child with the end of his bow. The bow caught on the cradle, and with one powerful lunge of his arm, he tossed the cradle high into the air, above and out in front of the horse. As the cradle fell back toward the earth, the man caught it perfectly and securely. Without breaking speed, he managed to outrun Esen’s men.

  The escapees traveled for weeks, deep into Mongol territory. There they entrusted the boy to the care of a sympathetic family loyal to Samur and her family, but the hearth of the Borijin clan would not be relit quickly. Esen still held power, but somehow his grandmother’s public defeat of him had turned the tide of an increasingly frustrated nation of followers, and they rose up in revolt in 1454.

  In the ensuing battle, Esen’s enemies seized his family and herds while he fled virtually without supporters. Thousands of his followers hungered for revenge against him for killing some beloved member of the family. The opportunity for that retribution fell by chance to Bagho, a man whose father Esen had murdered.

  Bagho caught up with the khan, killed him, and dragged his body up into a tree on Kugei Khan Mountain. Here he left it for the world to see. The hanging body replicated in grisly detail the origin myth of Esen’s Choros clan that states they descended from a mythical boy found dangling from the Mother Tree of life like a piece of fruit. The clear political statement for those left behind was that legitimate power of the office of Great Khan belonged exclusively to the Borijin clan.

  The grandmother Samur and her grandson Esen died about the same time. She ended her days with this one small victory and with the faint possibility that it might grow into something much larger—that maybe her dreams of a united Mongolia under the Borijin clan could be fulfilled after her death. Like all of us at the final moment, Samur had no way to foretell if her life’s work would have a permanent effect or simply wash away in the tide of coming events.

  8

  Daughter of the Yellow Dragon

  MANDUHAI WAS BORN IN 1448, THE STRONGEST AND most imperial of all the zodiac years, and the only one with a sign designated for a supernatural being: the Yellow Dragon. According to some records at the time of her birth, her parents lived well south of the Gobi, possibly near the oasis of Hami in modern Xinjiang; according to another tradition, she was born on the Tumed Plain in the vicinity of what later became the city of Hohhot, the capital of today’s Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. In either case, she grew up in relatively arid zones of what is now northern China, and this area and type of environment remained sentimentally important to her throughout her life.

  By the mid-fifteenth century, the clan system created and imposed by Genghis Khan had totally deteriorated, but a new one had not yet emerged. The Mongols had returned to the political chaos that preceded their unification in 1206. Clusters of formerly unaffiliated families formed expedient amalgamations that sometimes took an ancient name or sometimes a new one. An individual’s tribal or lineage allegiance might change several times during a lifetime, and even if the group remained the same, the name could be altered.

  Manduhai was a member of one such clan conglomerate, the Choros, which included members of the defunct Onggud and Kara Kitai as well as the still surviving Uighurs, Oirat, and Uriyanghai. The Choros clan had recently ascended to unprecedented power under the leadership of Esen, and Manduhai was born at the height of his power, just before he launched his campaign to exterminate the Borijin. Soon after Manduhai’s birth, around 1451, Esen appointed her father, Chororsbasi-Temur, as chingsang, an office somewhat like prime minister, of his newly united Oirat-Mongol nation. Despite this grand title, Chororsbasi-Temur and his family continued to live the pastoral life of Mongol nomads.

  The Choros clan occupied part of the former Onggud territory that had been ruled by Alaqai Beki and then annexed by Khubilai Khan’s Yuan Dynasty. Soon after the fall of the dynasty in 1368, however, soldiers of the new Ming Dynasty burned the Onggud cities and killed or chased away the people. The Onggud nearly lost their tradition of literacy, and the royal family no longer functioned with enough independent power to make its own marriages. The Onggud returned to the countryside as herders while trying to maintain some meager trade that echoed pathetically the lucrative trading empire they had once commanded along the Silk Route. They had declined from the ranks of an ancient Turkic nation under the queen Alaqai Beki to being just one more of the many poor Mongol tribes struggling to survive in the ruins of a glorious, but lost, empire. It was as though the empire and cities had never even existed.

  The Uighur still held a geographic base in the oases of China’s western deserts, and although significantly diminished in importance, they survived as an ethnic group. By the time that Manduhai’s father assumed responsibility for the region, the Onggud name was no longer used; the people were lumped together under a variety of other ethnic names, including Oirat and Uighur.

  Manduhai’s clan recognized a special spiritual relationship with their founding Mother Tree common to many of the Turkic tribes; the Choros, like the Uighurs, acknowledged no mythological father. For the Mongols, the primary mythological dyad consisted of the Earth Mother and the Sky Father. For Manduhai’s clan, the primary spiritual pair consisted of mother and son, symbolized by the tree and her offspring or the mother wolf who raised an orphan boy.

  Manduhai probably had some kinship co
nnection to Samur Gunj, but its importance would be difficult to calculate. Manduhai was only six years old when her father, although he had been appointed by Esen, joined the resistance to Esen and particularly to the policy of exterminating the Borijin. It is not possible to determine if her father and Samur Gunj were actually allied conspirators in their opposition or merely found themselves as common enemies of Esen.

  By the time Manduhai was old enough to be aware of what was happening around her, the momentary unity and vitality of the Esen era had ended. Despite her father’s role in overthrowing Esen, neither her father nor any of the other rebels could maintain control of the miniature empire Esen had assembled. Without Esen, the system collapsed back into near anarchy on the steppe.

  Even the Mongol chroniclers could not keep up with the comings and goings of episodic claimants to the office of khan. For some years, no khan was mentioned, and then two young boys in succession appeared as khans with the backing of their respective mothers and other unknown players. Both boys, and apparently their mothers as well, were soon killed by rival factions. As with horses lost in a race, there was much dust and hectic movement, but no clear winner. Moreover, it did not matter who held the office because there was no united nation to rule.