by Joshua Fogel
Braving the great heat, the Mongol units crossed Xixia terrain and emerged on the Gobi Desert, and then they headed due north for Mount Burqan, the source of the Onon and Kherlen rivers. They marched quietly. A coffin was laid out among the troops, borne aloft by a dozen or more soldiers. Although everyone knew that the remains of someone important were in the coffin, no one thought they could be Chinggis’s.
Just before this unit set out, they killed every one of the villagers who had seen them on the march. Young, old, male, and female, all met the same fate. Rumors of this spread rapidly, and soon no one appeared where this unit marched. Even when they cut through a village, it was completely emptied out.
The troops bearing Chinggis’s remains reached the Borjigin camp at the end of the ninth month. At the entrance to the camp, Tolui announced to all the troops for the first time that Chinggis had died. The evening the units broke up and pitched camp nearby, but other than the sound of horses’ hoofs and soldiers’ feet, not a human voice was heard. Chinggis’s coffin was placed inside Börte’s camp, and only the highest officers served at its side throughout the night. Under the night sky like a thick carpet studded with countless stars, the Borjigin camp did not, as it had in the past, bring numerous people together to spend a quiet night with innumerable troop tents spread out.
The day after Chinggis’s coffin was placed before Börte’s yurt, it was moved to the tent of Yisüi, then in succession, day by day, to Yisügen’s, to Jin Princess Hadun’s, and then to the tents of some dozen or more important concubines. Finally, it was placed in Chinggis’s own yurt.
At the announcement of his death, people from all the settlements on the Mongolian plateau gathered, and they kept coming for two or three months. As a result, the Borjigin settlement was filled with men and women of all ages for a long period of mourning. After half a year’s time, Chinggis’s remains were buried in a corner of the great forest in the mountains by Mount Burqan. On the day of his interment, a fierce wind lashed the whole area of Mount Burqan, and the woods surrounding his grave made a rumbling sound as they shook in the wind. For a time, the funeral ceremony had to be postponed.
The woods in which Chinggis was buried grew luxuriantly over the next two or three years, becoming a dense forest. Before two or three decades had passed, no one could say any longer with any surety where Chinggis’s grave was located. He lived for sixty-five years, and his rule lasted for twenty-two.
Author’s Afterword (1960)
IN 1924 A BOOK BEARING the long and ponderous title Chingisu Kan wa Minamoto no Yoshitsune nari (Chinggis Khan was Minamoto no Yoshitsune)1 was published and then immediately reprinted eleven times in the same month, fast becoming a best-seller for that year. The author was a man by the name of Oyabe Zen’ichirō (1867–1941). In the spring of the following year, a dozen or more scholars took up their pens to contest the ideas laid out in this best-seller in the journal Chūō shidan put out by the National History Institute. The eminent scholars Kindaichi Kyōsuke (1882–1971), Ōmori Kingorō (1867–1937), Fujisawa Morihiko (1886–1967), Miyake Setsurei (1860–1945), and Torii Ryūzō (1870–1953) were among them.2 This number of Chūō shidan appeared as a special supplement, and judging from the fact that the words “Chinggis Khan was not Yoshitsune” were on its cover, it was clearly dedicated to attacking the book Chingisu Kan wa Minamoto no Yoshitsune nari.
I was only in middle school at the time and knew nothing either of this book or of the scholars’ responses to it. When I entered senior high school in Kanazawa, I had a friend who passionately argued that Chinggis Khan was indeed Minamoto no Yoshitsune (1159–89). During these years, then, Oyabe Zen’ichirō’s best-seller was still holding its own and evidently was being read by a certain portion of Japanese youth.
I got my hands on a copy of the book in college and, interested in what it was actually all about, I tried reading it but found it extremely tedious. That said, though, aside from what I may have learned in middle school, it was this book and the scholarly rebuttal in Chūō shidan, which I later obtained, that sparked my own interest in the great Mongolian hero Chinggis Khan.
Late in the war years, I bought a copy at an Osaka bookstore of Chingisu Kan jitsuroku (The veritable record of Chinggis Khan), known to me as a famous work compiled by Professor Naka Michiyo (1851–1908).3 It was a lovely book with a deep blue cover, but shortly after the war I parted with this and another book at a used bookshop.
In 1950 or 1951 I came across the same work in a used bookstore in the Kanda section of Tokyo and purchased it.4 The deep blue color of the cover on this copy was utterly faded, and the words in the title were defaced to the point of illegibility. It had been published by Chikuma shobō in 1943 and seemed no more damaged than was usual at that time. I could only imagine that it had barely survived a fire during the war.
Chingisu Kan jitsuroku was a historical text secretly kept by the Mongol Yuan dynasty, as its original title, Yuanchao mishi (Secret history of the Mongols), indicates. It was originally written in Mongolian using the Uyghur script, but in the early years of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) it was rewritten into Chinese characters; at the time the translators used Chinese characters as phonograms and rendered Mongolian words by sound. Beside each Chinese character, Naka added Japanese syllabaries, and he included as well an outline of the text in literary Chinese.
This work is like a Mongolian version of the Kojiki (Record of ancient matters), the quasi-mythical history of ancient Japan. When both historians and biographers discuss this or that fact about the life of Chinggis Khan, this is the one text they can never ignore. Particularly for the era of Chinggis’s youth and young adulthood, there is no other source.
It was only when I got my hands on it a second time that I read the book. I was completely smitten by the lively account of the development of the Mongolian people in the form of epic poetry and the high tone. More interesting to me at that time than writing about Chinggis Khan was to be able to write about how the Mongols grew to such enormous strength and rose to such great prominence, like a mighty river. And the title of my novel would, I thought, have to be Aoki ōkami (The blue wolf), for the opening of the Secret History of the Mongols recounts how the progenitor of the Mongolian people, by a decree of heaven, was born when a blue wolf crossed a vast and beautiful lake in the west and mated with a pale doe. On the cover of my thin university notebook, I wrote the title “Aoki ōkami” and was preparing to write the book. In any event, I have been ready with this title for a long time.
Since then, little by little, my bookshelves have filled up with books and pamphlets related to the Mongols. These include: the journal Mōko gakuhō (Mongolian studies, July 1940–April 1941) put out by the Mongolian Studies Institute; Gakujutsu hōkoku (Scholarly reports, 1909) published by the Research Department of the East Asian Association; Mōko kanshūhō no kenkyū (Studies on the customary law of the Mongols, 1935) by Valentin Aleksandrovich Riazanovskii and translated by the East Asian Economic Research Association of the South Manchurian Railway Company; and many similar works that appeared at the time of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.5 Whenever I happened upon such works, I bought them. As I look back now, many were of no utility whatsoever in writing this book.
In writing about Chinggis Khan, though, I knew there were books that I would have to read, and I began collecting them once I had decided to write on him in earnest. Among others, these included the following Japanese translations: Constantin d’Ohsson (1779–1851), Mōko shi (History of the Mongols);6 Boris Iakovlevich Vladimirtsov (1884–1931), Mōko shakai seido shi (History of Mongolian social institutions);7 Owen Lattimore (1900–89), Nōgyō Shina to yūboku minzoku (Agricultural China and nomadic peoples);8 and Grigorii Nikolaevich Potanin (1835–1920), Seihoku no Mōko no dōwa to densetsu (Tales and myths of northwestern Mongolia).9 I had these in hand about a year before starting to publish Aoki ōkami serially in the journal Bungei shunjū.
Although I was initially taken with the desire to depi
ct the rise of the Mongolian people, I focused more closely on the lone personality of Chinggis as I became aware that the rise of the Mongols was due largely to the singular efforts of this extraordinary figure. Had Chinggis never appeared in this world, Asian history would certainly have been altogether different. Napoleon once reputedly said: “My life is not nearly so grand as that of Chinggis Khan.” It was he who turned the impoverished Mongolian people, scattered all across the Mongolian plateau and constantly involved in small battles between settlements, into descendants of the blue wolf. Only with his appearance were the Mongols reborn as a thoroughly different and exceptional people.
Once I had decided to write about Chinggis, though, I had no interest in writing some sort of heroic tale of a man who in a single generation built an immense state straddling Europe and Asia. Nor, for that matter, did I want to write a history of the military campaigns of Chinggis Khan, the invader of unprecedented brutality. Of course, in writing about the years of his life, I would certainly have to touch on these topics, but what I wished most to depict was the secret of the origins of his overwhelming—indeed, unfathomable—desire to conquer. The circumstances were completely different from, for example, Hitler’s ambitions to dominate the world. The states surrounding the Mongolian plateau were themselves totally unknown entities to Chinggis in size, topography, and ethnic sensibilities. It was like groping in the dark when he came upon them.
Before he had fully subjugated the great state of Jin (ruled by the Jurchens in north China), he sent troops against the Xixia and Uyghurs, ultimately entered the realm of the Islamic states farther west, and from the Caspian Sea dispatched an army as far as Russia. The desire to conquer must have emerged from the determination of one man alone, but this is not the sort of subject that can easily be resolved by saying it was all due to the will to dominate with which one person was born. I, of course, do not know the answer to such things, and it is precisely because we do not know that I thought I might write in such a way as to fill the gaps in our knowledge.
Thus, my desire to write about this historical figure arose out of the difficulties I encountered in trying to understand him. When it is difficult to comprehend anything and everything, then no desire to write ever arises in the first place, but by the same token, when everything is known about a person, that too is unlikely to lead to any such wish. The reason I thought I might write about the life of Chinggis Khan was that, while I understood something about the man, there remained unsatisfying points that I did not comprehend: the root of his ambition to conquer and the mysteries surrounding it.
Among the biographies and creative works about Chinggis that I have looked over are the following works: a play by Kōda Rohan (1867–1947) and a novel by Ozaki Shirō (1894–1964), both entitled Chingisu Kan;10 Ralph Fox (1900–37), Genghis Khan;11 Yanagida Izumi (1894–1969), Sōnen Temujin (Temüjin in the prime of life);12 Michael Prawdin (1894–1971), Tschingis-Chan, der Sturm aus Asien;13 Harold Lamb (1892–1962), Genghis Khan, the Emperor of All Men;14 and Marcel Brion (1895–1984), La vie des Huns.15
All of these works depict Chinggis through his middle years, based on the account given in the Secret History of the Mongols. I too had no other text from which to draw. To put it more precisely, no matter how one goes about writing, the image created of Chinggis in these years never measures up to the Secret History. My sense was that there was nothing we could add to the portrayal in that source. But, inasmuch as I was writing a biographical novel about Chinggis, I had to write about him in this period. As many biographers of Chinggis have undoubtedly felt, I had no choice but to base my Chinggis of that time on the Secret History, although I realized that I was writing a work of fiction.
Together with the Secret History, the old text known as the Menggu yuanliu (Origins of the Mongols) is regarded as peerless in Mongolian literature. The latter work contains numerous ancient tales of the Mongols, and its author, Ssanang Ssetsen (mid-seventeenth century), was a descendant of Chinggis, as well as a historian, military man, and prince of a Mongolian settlement. Using his exquisite imagination, he composed a history of the Mongolian people from the inception of their state until the middle of the seventeenth century. Originally “True Draft History of the Origins of the Khans,” the title was changed to its present form on orders of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–96) of the Qing dynasty. One further text worth noting is the Mongolian chronicle, Altan Tobči. It contains ancient Mongolian traditions as well as religious stories, and thus should be arrayed next to the Secret History and the Menggu yuanliu.
We have a Japanese translation of the Menggu yuanliu by Gō Minoru (1904–89) and of the Altan Tobči by Kobayashi Takashirō (1904–87).16 The historical facts recounted in both works are confused, sometimes according with depictions given in the Secret History and sometimes twisted. These are, however, all we have for the Mongolian people, and as long as we continue to ignore them, we will remain trapped in a realm of fuzziness. Therefore, I have kept these two works, together with the Secret History, always at my side.
Chinggis unified the settlements on the Mongolian plateau, became sovereign over them all, and conquered the state of Jin, but afterward when he invaded Central Asia, we have no accounts concerning the conquering Mongol armies aside from those by men living in the Western lands that were invaded. I used the aforementioned renowned works by d’Ohsson and Vladimirtsov, which were written using these other texts, and I only had a chance to peruse the latter’s Chingis-Khan as I was working on the final portions of my own Aoki ōkami.17 I perforce used these works to trace the movements of the Mongol armies, and thus to surmise the activities of Chinggis and others.
Two extremely welcome texts that provide information on Chinggis’s movements while resident in Central Asia are Zhanran jushi ji (Works of a retired scholar at ease) by Yelü Chucai (1190–1244) and Changchun zhenren xiyou ji (Account of travels to the west by Daoist master Changchun).18 At Chinggis’s summons, Changchun (1148–1227) traveled to the great khan’s tents in the Hindukush to explain the methods of achieving long life. Yelü Chucai was a close advisor to Chinggis and was always by his side; after the great khan’s death, he served his son Ögedei, making significant achievements as political, economic, and cultural advisor for the Yuan dynasty.
In addition to being accounts of Mongol history, these two works contain materials from the Chinese side that are highly salutary to biographers of Chinggis Khan. The meeting between the famous Daoist master Changchun and the great mass murderer Chinggis would be interesting in and of itself, but in the exchanges between them recounted in the Changchun zhenren xiyou ji, we find invaluable information on Chinggis the man.
The most problematic element for me in writing Aoki ōkami was the place names on the Mongolian plateau. In the Secret History, names of mountains and rivers crop up in inordinate abundance, and I couldn’t even imagine where many of them were located. They are, of course, different from their present names, making investigation all but impossible. Chinggis was born in a place in the foothills of Mount Burqan where his people pitched their camp from his birth through his youth. But which mountain is this Mount Burqan? Even today we do not know with certainty, nor for that matter do we know where he was buried.
Given this situation, I have little idea about the mountains and rivers. By chance, though, I once received a four-volume work bearing the title Introduction to China, compiled by about a dozen French missionaries, from the Isseidō Bookstore in the Kanda section of Tokyo.19 It was published in Paris early in the eighteenth century. It includes numerous woodblock-printed maps and has the names of everything from the tributaries of small rivers to hillocks in the middle of the desert assiduously transcribed in the section labeled “Tartary.” When I tried to find the names of places, mountains, and rivers in the Secret History, I was able to locate the majority of them in the roughly twenty old maps in this collection.
Chinggis died in the borderland between Jin and Xixia terrain. His last words were instructions to pr
oceed with an invasion of Jin and to keep his passing a secret for a certain period of time. The dying words of Takeda Shingen (1521–73) were orders to his men to plant their military banner at Seta the next day and keep his death a secret for three years.20 As heroic figures and warriors, the two men were on a totally different scale, but their dying wishes were nonetheless similar. One died en route to the capital in Kyoto, the other died with the pacification of the great state of Jin before his eyes. The Japanese warrior and the Mongol invader differed in that, while soon after Shingen’s death the Takeda house perished, in Chinggis’s case his extraordinary sons and grandsons persevered in his will, lived out his ambitions 100 percent, and wrote numerous pages in the history of Eurasia.
NOTES
None of the information given in these notes can be found in Inoue Yasushi’s text. I have added it here as explanatory material for the interested reader or specialist.—JF
1. (Tokyo: Fuzanbō, 1924).
2. Kindaichi was a scholar of Japanese linguistics generally and the Ainu language in particular; Ōmori of Japanese medical history; Fujisawa of ethnography and mythology; Miyake was one of the most widely published and read cultural critics of his long life; and Torii was a pioneer anthropologist.