In Search of Genghis Khan

by Tim Severin

  The blatant plagiarism did not bother me. It was much more important that there was a genuine local interest in launching some sort of expedition on horses across Mongolia. I still did not know who Ariunbold was working with, and I was sceptical about anyone’s capacity to ride over 6000 miles across Eurasia. The distance was 40 per cent longer even than my original scheme to follow Ch’ang Ch’un. But all this did not matter. Here was the most wonderful opportunity for me to travel freely inside Mongolia, not just as an outsider following his own programme, but in the company of Mongols who were committed to rediscovering their own history. It was an opening that no Westerner had ever been offered before. I was quite ready to shelve the Ch’ang Ch’un journey and concentrate instead on the unique chance to participate in the traditional lifestyle of Mongol herdsmen and to test their age-old method of long-distance travel. If Ariunbold and his companions could demonstrate to me on their ride inside Mongolia that they had the ability, diplomacy and tenacity to continue right through to France, then my advice might help them to achieve that huge ambition. Meanwhile I would ride along with them, and be glad to assist them in any way I could.

  Ariunbold was explaining that he and his friends were eager to organise the venture and had been granted a small amount of official backing by the local Silk Roads committee, but they lacked any expertise. Would I care to join them when they began their ride the following spring? I agreed.

  Eight months later, in May, I was to find myself back in Mongolia, but this time in the saddle and riding alongside a taciturn, hard-bitten Mongol horse herdsman who must surely have been no different from the original riders of Genghis Khan. Short and very burly, Dampildorj had the classic high cheekbones of the Mongol, and his close-cropped head was so perfectly round that mentally I nicknamed him ‘Bullet Head’. He seemed impervious to the hammering, jarring trot of the small horses we rode, and sat in the wooden saddle, or rather stood in its short stirrups, for hour after hour as if on self-levelling suspension. Taught to ride before he could walk properly, his legs were like steel springs and he was much more at ease on a horse than on the ground. Indeed, when he dismounted he was so stiff and bow-legged as he stumped forward on his thick-soled felt boots with their turned-up toes that he looked like a wind-up toy, an unavoidable impression enhanced by his thick wrap-around gown known as a del with its broad sash of orange silk, and his dainty hat like a doll’s headgear covered in blue silk and shaped like the dome of a mosque. Dampildorj was one of half a dozen herdsmen that Ariunbold and his colleagues had hired to lead the expedition on its first endeavour - a ride into the Mongolian wilderness to reach the very spot which, according to legend, Genghis Khan had ordered all Mongols to revere for eternity. It was here that Genghis Khan had lived as a young outlaw and gathered around him the tribal heroes who would one day set out to conquer the world.

  Genghis Khan came from a people whose origins are still unclear. Their language is sometimes placed in the same linguistic category as Turkish and Manchu, but even that classification is hotly contested. Some scholars claim that the Mongols were descendants of the ferocious warrior tribes the Chinese called the Hsiung-nu, and who, according to other specialists, were the same as the Huns who invaded Europe under Attila in the 5th century. But whatever the exact affiliation, the cultural pattern of these steppe peoples was well established. As early as 400 BC the Chinese were writing about the nomad tribes who roamed their north-western border, raised cattle, lived in felt tents, and had no writing. The scanty archaeological record shows that this lifestyle extended back at least as far as 1000 BC. But the shifting alliances of the tribes is never permanent or stationary for long enough to detect a definite heritage for the Mongols. Central Asian kingdoms rose and fell under peoples with strange-sounding names, like the Juan-Juan, Toba, Uighurs, Jurchens, and the Khitans, who in turn spawned the Kara khitai or ‘Black khitai’ and who gave Europeans their word for China as ‘Cathay’. Some of these peoples spoke versions of Mongol, others used archaic forms of Turkish. A few were pure nomads, but most built themselves capitals in the well-favoured valleys of the interior or at the foot of the great mountain ranges. All this time the Mongols remained an obscure, half-glimpsed people on the edges of these civilisations. Indeed, as late as the 12th century the Mongols were, strictly speaking, only one tribe among a loose collection of tribes which the Chinese called indifferently the Meng Wu or Ta-ta, and mistrusted acutely as they had a habit of raiding the Chinese frontier and carrying off children whom, it was rumoured, they needed for breeding purposes. Nor did all the Mongols live by cattle-herding on the grasslands of the steppe, as is commonly thought. Some dwelt in the forests of southern Siberia as hunter-gatherers, and there the Orianghai, a part-Mongol, part-Turkic people, were said to attach the varnished bones of animals to their feet and skim across the frozen surface of ice and snow so fast that they could catch birds. It was Genghis Khan who imposed unity on all this confusion. When he was powerful enough, he overrode the tribal distinctions and decreed that henceforth all the related peoples should think of themselves as Mongols. And when he began his rise to power, he had an even simpler definition of the people he intended to govern. He was, he said, ‘the ruler of all those who live in felt tents.’

  The horses which we were riding would certainly have been familiar to Genghis Khan and his army quartermasters. No larger than a New Forest pony (by Western definition many Mongol horses are small enough to be classified as ponies. But Mongols strongly resent their horses being called ponies), each animal had a thick neck, a big, clumsy-looking head, and a gawky frame. No Western horse-dealer would have looked twice at them, yet they had the reputation of being the toughest horses in existence. It was said that they could survive hostile conditions which would kill any other breed. Legend had it that they managed to find food for themselves when other horses starved to death, and that they thrived in sub-arctic temperatures where other horses perished of exposure. It was also the boast that they were closely related to the original Wild Horse of the steppes named after the Russian explorer Colonel Nicholas Prjevalski, who travelled in Mongolia in the 1870s and 1880s and discovered the Wild Horse in 1881. No one knows for sure if any Wild Horses exist nowadays outside zoos, and it seems extremely unlikely. But the last time a small herd of Prjevalski Horse was seen in the wild, they were running free in south-west Mongolia close to the Chinese border. Dampildorj had confidently told me that any horse which showed a black eel-stripe in the hair down the spine or had zebra-like bars on its legs was part Wild Horse. What is certain is that Mongolian horses similar to the ones that we rode had carried Genghis Khan’s mounted armies to victory in their blitzkrieg campaigns of conquest at the beginning of the 13th century, when the Mongol cavalry had overturned the established world order. In battle after battle the Mongol flying column took their enemies by surprise, suddenly appearing, as if by magic, mounted on their shaggy animals after they had ridden across deserts or mountains that the enemy had thought to be impassable, or had covered distances at such speed that their opponents were caught off-guard.

  I was also learning that Genghis Khan himself, far from being a taboo subject in Mongolia, was now a national obsession. His name and image, after years of enforced obscurity, were everywhere - on hoardings, stamps, calendars, posters, as the name of a brand of Mongolian vodka. Some of the herdsmen riding with me wore little cap buttons with his portrait, and when a Mongolian newspaper had asked its readers to suggest a name for the glossy new hotel being built in Ulaan Baatar, the overwhelming response was that it should be called, in its Mongolian spelling, the Chinggis Khan Hotel. (1)

  By any standards the Great Mongol was one of the most extraordinary men who ever lived. He was an untutored orphan who came from a tribal society that lived in utter obscurity, and yet he conquered far more territory than Alexander the Great. Illiterate, alleged to be subject to fits, probably an alcoholic, his main imperial heritage was to endure under his immediate family for more than a century, while minor frag
ments were to survive very much longer. The last ruler in Europe still claiming to be descended from Genghis Khan was a khan of the Crimea deposed by the Russians in 1783, and in Central Asia the ruler of Khiva was making the same boast when the Russians forced him too to abdicate in 1920. Elsewhere Genghis Khan’s legacy can still be seen and felt. The Great Wall of China was modified and rebuilt from the 15th century onwards, into the form we see now, chiefly as a reflex to the terrifying Mongol invasions he unleashed. In Central Asia there are once-fabled cities like Bukhara still in comparative decline because they never recovered from the Mongol attack he directed at them so brilliantly and so devastatingly. Yet while the outside world has grown accustomed to using Genghis Khan’s name as a synonym for destruction, war and cruelty, inside Mongolia I was beginning to find that Genghis Khan was being accorded the status of a national hero, even a god.

  I knew that I was at a crucial moment in modern Mongol history. The forbidden land of the past half-century had suddenly been thrown open to foreign view, and simultaneously the Mongols themselves were being given unparalleled freedom. The Soviet army was withdrawing its divisions from Mongol soil, the ruling Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party had decided to imitate Soviet perestroika and glasnost by relaxing the iron grip of central government, and ordinary Mongols were responding by trying to find their true national identity. A huge upwelling of nostalgia for Mongolian origins and traditions was taking place, and my own quest for the survival of the nomad world described by the medieval European travellers could scarcely have been better timed. I was not the only seeker after Mongolia’s medieval traditions. Genghis Khan and his era represented a source of pride to all Mongols, and they had a very real justification, because if one looks at the record from their point of view there is an astonishing fact. The entire Mongol nation led by Genghis Khan had numbered no more than 2 million people, and his army is calculated to have been 130,000 strong. Yet this insignificant collection of clansmen, living in one of the most isolated and difficult environments in the world, suddenly rose under his leadership to become acknowledged overlords to more than half the known world. How did this happen? Was Genghis Khan himself entirely responsible, or did the abilities and character of his people play the major role? By riding with their descendants I was hoping to find an answer, just as Dampildorj and the ordinary Mongol arats or herdsmen on their horses around me wished to celebrate their greatest ancestor and make him a symbol for their own hopes for the future. We were, all of us, searching for Genghis Khan.

  2 - Heartland

  With 5000 miles of sensitive frontier, and landlocked between the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, Mongolia is the fifth largest country in Asia by area. At more than 604,000 square miles (1,565,000 square kilometres) the country is more than twice the size of Turkey, four times that of Japan. Yet it is so overshadowed in its international location that it is a common misconception that Mongolia is simply another Soviet republic, or perhaps just another part of China. Indeed, in the 19th century, when Mongolia was little more than a neglected Chinese dependency, Europeans took to using the same dismissive distinction used by the Chinese themselves between ‘Outer’ or Distant Mongolia - which is modern Mongolia - and ‘Inner’ or Nearer Mongolia, which was at least closer to the Celestial Throne as far as the Chinese were concerned, though they still considered it shudderingly uncouth and remote.

  Geographers were scarcely more complimentary when they placed Mongolia at the centre of what they called ‘the Dead Heart of Asia’. In their classification Mongolia is a cold desert. Bleak, harsh and empty, it is a land so distant from the ocean’s moderating effect on climate that all life is dominated by extreme continental influences. The growing season is barely four months long, and across more than half the country the bedrock is permanently congealed. In winter the temperatures fall to minus 35 degrees centigrade and remain below freezing point until March. In consequence some species of rodents and hooved animals add a month to the normal gestation period, while the furry marmot (of whom we shall hear more later) does not shed its winter coat until July and promptly begins growing a new winter coat. In December the smaller rivers have become solid ice, right to the bottom, and the heavy masses of very cold air ponding in the lowlands mean that it is often warmer on the high mountain ranges than in the valleys, where temperatures have been recorded at minus 55 degrees. Statistically Ulaan Baatar on the banks of the Tula river in the central north of Mongolia finishes up with an average annual temperature of 3 degrees below zero.

  Summer can be just as intimidating, with its wild swings of the day-to-day weather. Charles Bawden, who as recently as 1968 became the first writer in English to publish a history of modern Mongolia, (1) cites a Russian geographer’s description of a fifteen-hour period in the capital in June 1942. A calm, warm and sunny evening was suddenly interrupted by a 60-mile-an-hour gale that brought dust, fog and nine-tenths cloud cover. This tempest lasted just one hour. Then the sky cleared, the wind ceased and the stars came out. Between 1 and 2 am there were heavy showers of rain, and the following morning the sky was once again clouded over. By 9 am there was fog, driving snow and a temperature of 1 degree.

  Seven hundred years earlier the first of the European pioneers to write about Mongolia, a Franciscan friar named John of Plano Carpini, experienced the harshness of the Mongolian summer at first hand as his Mongol guides made forced marches across the steppe in order to get to Mongolia in time for Carpini to observe the coronation of Genghis Khan’s grandson as Khakhan or Great Khan. Carpini was not cut out to be a long-distance rider. He was 60 years old and overweight, fell in on the first leg of the transcontinental journey and suffered agonies as he was jolted about on the uncomfortable Mongol ponies, complaining that he was frequently given the worst of the remounts. But his observations were very acute. (2) ‘The weather there is astonishingly irregular,’ Carpini reported in his Description of the-Mongols Whom We Call Tartars:

  In the middle of summer when other places are normally enjoying very great heat, there is fierce thunder and lightning which cause the death of many men, and at the same time there are very heavy falls of snow. There are also hurricanes of bitterly cold wind so violent that at times men can ride on horseback only with great effort. (3)

  When at last they reached the imperial camp he and his companions had to crouch on the ground and lie ‘prostrate on account of the force of the wind, and we could scarcely see owing to the great clouds of dust’. Between the election of the Khakhan and his actual coronation ceremony, a massive hailstorm raged. The sudden melting of the immense quantities of hail produced a flash flood which drowned 160 men as well as washing away many dwellings and destroying much property. ‘To conclude briefly about this country’, he informed his readers, ‘it is large but otherwise - as we saw it with our own eyes during the five and a half months we travelled about it - it is more wretched than I can possibly say.’

  Mongolia’s distance from the sea also means there is very little air humidity. So although the winters are intensely cold, there is comparatively little snow, usually less than 3 feet deep. The native horses, as foreign visitors as far back as Carpini have been fascinated to note, have learned how to scrape away the snow with their hooves to get at their pasture. The pickings are very meagre - a few mouthfuls of dead and deep-frozen vegetation - but this is enough to sustain them. Natural selection means that only the fittest animals survive, and no Mongol herdsman would think of bringing his horse-herd into shelter just to escape the rigours of a normal sub-zero winter. His main fear is that a late blizzard in spring will bring a thick snowfall at a time when the horses are at their weakest after months of semi-starvation and unable to clear the snow with their hooves. With that catastrophe the animals die in their thousands.

  With so little air humidity to produce clouds, Mongolia’s otherwise hostile climate is partly improved by an unusual amount of sunshine. Mongolia enjoys as much as 500 hours more sunny weather every year than other regions
on a similar latitude such as Switzerland or the mountain states of the United States. This abundance of sunshine and the bright clear skies had a profound effect on the psychology of the Mongols of Genghis Khan’s era. To them the immense blue vault of their sky was Tengri, the Supreme God, whom the tribal medicine men, the shamans, worshipped. Tengri was the unification of all the hundreds of lesser gods and spirits who inhabited the earth, waters, winds and mountains, and to this day sky blue is still the Mongols’ good-luck colour. More ominous, it was all-mighty Tengri who authorised Genghis Khan to go out and conquer all the world.

  The combination of Mongolia’s crystal air, the huge vistas and the unrelenting distances has also influenced the way country Mongols think. Genghis Khan’s given title seems to have meant ‘Oceanic Ruler’, and in their broad horizon-to-horizon landscape the Mongol herdsmen are still prone to use images more suited to the sea. Trying to point out to eager Mongol herdsmen the obstacles to riding all the way to Europe, it dawned on me that some of them imagined that their rolling grasslands must surely extend for ever, right to the shores of the Atlantic. They had no concept of the barriers of huge rivers like the Volga, great cities, or modern motorways. To them a Mongol could ride anywhere and do anything, provided his horses were well cared for. And at the end of his ride, the herdsmen assured me with total sincerity, even if a Mongol had reached the furthest point of Europe, he could turn loose his horses and, unaided, his animals would find their own way back to Mongolia. Like homing pigeons they would seek their path back to the pasturelands of their own country because a Mongol horse would be happy only in Mongolia. Had not this happened recently, they said, when a number of Mongol horses were sent to North Vietnam? They had run away from their new masters and walked back home.