In Search of Genghis Khan

by Tim Severin

  Samga’s family would not let us go until Paul had taken their photographs, and they lined up beaming, with Samga now wearing Tuva national costume as well and holding a Tuva baby in swaddling clothes. Paul had been as favourably impressed as I had been with Samga’s bona fides, and asked one final question. What advice would she give the younger generation? The shamaness answered without hesitation. ‘I would tell them, Respect nature which is all about you! Look after the rivers and streams because they supply the water you drink! Look after the sky and the air which gives you heat! And take care of the land because it feeds you!’ It occurred to me that the doctrine of a Tuva shamaness was timeless.

  16 - The Eternal Icon

  I did not want to infer too much from Samga’s performance as a shamaness. I had not come to Bayan Olgei as an expert on shamanism, only with background knowledge of what the earlier travellers in Mongolia had to say about the beliefs of the people. Yet the authenticity of her behaviour had made an impression on me. And there was one other curious item I was to discover two months later when I was back at home. Before she began her seance, the Old Woman had stated that two factors interfered with her shaman’s power - bright light and the presence of electricity. While we were packed together with her family in the little ger, I had used a miniature camera to film her as she went through the shaman ritual. Although there was a semi-gloom in the tent, I had no portable lights, so there was neither bright light nor the electricity to power them, and Samga would not have been disturbed. But the small camera did use electricity, and that I had not told Samga. The camera was powered by six AA size batteries and, unknown to me, the camera had earlier developed a minor electrical fault. A condenser had failed and the miniature drive motor was transmitting a high frequency spark that was being recorded on the film soundtrack as a crackle like the sound of frying bacon. When I eventually came to process the film and check the result, I found that this sound of electrical interference occurred consistently in the material that I had filmed before and after my visit to Samga. But in the intervening time, when the shamaness was in front of the camera, the sound was noticeably muted. The electric interference was still there, but it was less pronounced. The immediate conclusion was that either this was another coincidence like the story of the missing spectacles in Doc’s apartment, or in some odd way Samga really did suppress electricity near her.

  My main purpose in coming to Mongolia had been to see how much of the traditional way of life survived, and I had not been disappointed. Almost a month had passed since Paul and I had ridden out of the gates of the lamasery of Erdenzu with our Mongol companions and the herd of 100 remounts and circled around the stone tortoise of Karakorum in honour of the memory of the empire founded by Genghis Khan. In that time we had seen the Hangay massif flourishing in its summer glory in contrast to our earlier experience of the half-frozen Hentei, met with Kazakh eagle hunters, talked with a shamaness, stumbled across the Black Death, and witnessed the revival of religion spearheaded by 70-year-old lamas who had escaped the great purges of the Thirties. After our interview with Samga, I returned to Ulaan Baatar with Paul and Doc and we tried to find out how Ariunbold, Bayar and Delger were getting on. But there was no news. No one we spoke to had heard anything, and the riders must still have been toiling across the arid lowlands, because it took them far longer to reach Bayan Olgei than the original optimistic forecasts. Not until January the following year did word eventually reach me back at home that they had showed up in Bayan Olgei some time in September - and that they had been obliged to have shoes fitted to their horses, against their earlier ideas. Of course when they got to Bayan Olgei, they discovered that there were only Kazakhs to look after the animals. Setting aside their prejudices about the horse-eating Kazakhs, they had left the gift horses there for the winter. So at least they had learned one lesson of expedition-making: they should trust the goodwill and cooperation of the people they met. But whether Gerel was prepared to rejoin Ariunbold, and whether the two of them with Bayar and Delger would continue onwards the following year across the Altai and enter Kazakhstan on the next stage of the long road to Paris was not known, and prospects looked increasingly doubtful as civil and economic chaos enveloped the territories of the Soviet Union which they would have to cross.

  In Mongolia, too, there was much that was undecided and problematical. Mongolia itself was facing a chill wind of change. That summer Paul and I rode in the countryside was the last in which the country basked in the old certainties. The snug days of Soviet coaching and economic assistance had drawn to a close. Troops and munitions were not the only contribution which Moscow intended to remove from Mongolian soil. Soviet economic aid was slashed as the government in Moscow tackled more serious priorities closer to home. Very little aid was available to go to Mongolia, which had once received more Soviet assistance per capita than even Cuba, the most conspicuous and favoured godchild of the Eastern bloc. To make matters worse for the Mongols, the Soviet government was demanding repayment of huge amounts of earlier aid, which was now classified as loans not grants, and which Mongolia was patently unable to repay. The immediate penalty was a sudden cutback in the amount of cheap fuel which had been shipped regularly into Mongolia from the USSR, and on which Mongolia depended utterly. The entire transport system of Mongolia fell into paralysis, and the distribution network on which the country - and especially the capital - relied, ceased to flow. So arose the incongruous situation where a country with more head of livestock - whether counted by sheep or cattle or horses or goats - than people could not supply the population of its capital with meat. Vegetables, of course, were not to be had. Doc wrote to me to say that the citizens of Ulaan Baatar were issued ration cards. By mid-winter mutton had vanished from the state food stores, and small portions of camel flesh were being peddled on the black market. Flour had become virtually unobtainable and was being illegally hoarded. Reports appeared in the Western press telling how housewives in Ulaan Baatar were carefully sweeping the stairs of their apartment blocks to wipe up traces of spilled flour that would be tell-tale signs of their black-market stockpiles. Suddenly, in an overwhelmingly agricultural country, there was a real threat of famine. The government sent an appeal to Japan for humanitarian aid, and meanwhile doled out bottles of arkhi instead of food. These grim reports of life in the capital emphasised the good sense of our friendly Mr Gombo, the somon official who had been determined to improve the lot of the arats locally so that they could stay in the countryside and lead a decent life there, rather than have to move to an already overcrowded and overstretched Ulaan Baatar.

  In times of confusion, uncertainty and stress the ordinary Mongol has always clung even more staunchly to the memory of Genghis Khan. The rumour Prjevalski heard in the 1870s that Genghis Khan would rise again was a reaction by the people of Inner Mongolia to centuries of Chinese domination. They believed that Genghis Khan was physically present, in the flesh, in his tomb in the Ordos where lay ‘the figure of a man apparently asleep, although no mortal can account for this phenomenon’. Similarly in 1911, when the Mongols of Outer Mongolia rebelled against their Chinese overlords, there was the hope that Genghis Khan would come again. Nor has it mattered to the Mongols in times of turmoil if the memory of Genghis Khan was invoked by foreigners. The ‘Mad Baron’ Ungern-Sternberg claimed that he was the reincarnation of Genghis Khan, even though he was a white-skinned Balt, and he won the support of many of the leading lamas who then ruled in Urga. A generation later a historical novel appeared in France with the title The Blue Standard of the Blue Mongols. The book portrayed the world of Genghis Khan as peopled by knights and ladies where feats of derring-do were performed by Mongols with superhuman talents. Though the novel was undiluted romance and written by a foreigner, it was hugely popular when translated into Mongol and distributed among a people whose daily lives were so austere and whose fairy stories and folk wisdom still drew heavily on the alleged sayings and deeds of Genghis Khan.

  Genghis Khan, I had found, w
as still the Mongols’ unshakable symbol of a glorious past and a common identity. And one reason for his unchanging status had to be found in the ancestor worship which has flourished in Mongolia as long as records exist. Rubruck noticed it everywhere he travelled, and ancestor worship became interleaved with the belief in reincarnation, the central tenet of lamaism. The possibility of the regeneration of political leaders was taken seriously at least until the beginning of this century. When the eighth Khutukhtu died, the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party felt obliged to announce that the line of Khutukhtu Reincarnations had finally come to an end. To convince the pious country folk they concocted a false legend that said an eighth Khutukhtu would be the last. No such finality has ever been applied to the memory of Genghis Khan - rather the reverse. When his commemoration as the Great Ancestor was discouraged in Mongolia itself, it was kept alive elsewhere. Of all the nations adjacent to Mongolia, the Chinese had most to rue that he had ever lived. Yet, when it suited them, they adapted their previous policy which had sought to emasculate the Mongol military threat by turning Mongols away from their traditional loyalties, and restored the icon of Genghis Khan for their own purposes. In 1939 the Kuomintang government removed his supposed ‘relics’ from their resting place in the Ordos, and took them for safety to Kansu province. Ten years later they moved them again, further west for additional security. When the relics eventually fell into the hands of the Chinese communists, they publicly put them back in the Genghis Khan sanctuary and promoted the building as a place of pilgrimage for the Mongols of Inner Mongolia. Ironically, it was the Chinese who would not let Genghis Khan rest.

  The real gauge of Genghis Khan’s abiding appeal to the Mongols is how his cult has survived the seventy years of official disapproval under Soviet-inspired communist rule. Propaganda and modernisation have failed to expunge his memory or diminish his importance, even though the entire social and economic fabric of the country was transformed. The achievements of Soviet intervention are remarkable. Soviet advisers, Soviet technology and Soviet training have redefined the backward, lacklustre country that Prjevalski and Beatrix Bulstrode saw. Beatrix Bulstrode came up with the eccentric theory that Mongols seldom washed because they believed that too much association with water in this life meant they would be born again as fish in the next, but the ‘dirty Mongols’ whose lack of hygiene revolted her, scarcely exist. Every evening after we made camp, the herdsmen who rode with us headed of, with soap and towel to wash in the nearest stream. The raging syphilis, which affected as much as 90 per cent of all Mongols at the end of the 19th century, has been virtually eradicated with Soviet medical help, though tuberculosis remains a problem. Literacy has soared. In 1928 only 9 per cent of the male Mongols could read and write, and less than half of 1 per cent of all women. Books, teachers, methods and materials were imported wholesale from the Soviet Union, and basic adult literacy is to all intents and purposes total. Set against such vast strides in health and education, the impoverishment of a language and the near-loss of a native script seems a small price to pay. Soviet intervention has reversed the ebb tide of hopelessness and apathy which was draining away Mongolia’s very existence and threatened, in the words of the historian Charles Bawden, to reduce the Mongols ‘to the level of the bushmen of South Africa - mere interesting remnants of a lost civilisation and otherwise of no account’.

  Soviet protection was also the geographical salvation of ‘Outer Mongolia’. From long before the time of Ch’ang Ch’un Mongolia’s natural overlord was China with its huge, industrious and expanding population. Beijing is far closer than Moscow. It was a Chinese army which razed Karakorum, and it was a Chinese-based dynasty, the Manchu, which reduced the Mongolian nobility, the noyans, to the state of vassals. In the past fifty years China would have spilled over Mongolia, as she has done into Tibet, but for the deterrent Soviet presence there. Ethnically and culturally, it was against all natural laws that Russia rather than China should dominate Mongolia, but that contradiction has meant that Mongolia survived, partially russified but at least with space to breathe. By contrast, the Chinese part of the old Mongol world, the misleadingly named Mongolian Autonomous Region which is essentially the old Inner Mongolia, has little trace of genuine Mongol autonomy. It is estimated that by 1954 Chinese settlers already outnumbered native Mongols three to one, and the Chinese immigration has gone on ever since. Chinese settlers have moved in and occupied any territory that can be made arable, and pushed the Mongol herdsmen to the marginal lands where the Mongol arats have become ranchers rather than semi-nomads. Culturally, as Mongols in their own Republic will tell you wistfully, much has survived in Inner Mongolia that has been lost in their own country, particularly language, folklore and custom. But that survival has largely been the result of neglect by the Chinese authorities, who were not prepared to apply the same amount of resources as the Russians in their sphere of influence. So the Mongols of Inner Mongolia subsist, living under pressures far greater than their more independent cousins across the border. Understandably, some of them aspire to leave Inner Mongolia and migrate to Mongolia itself. It is precisely the same yearning that Prjevalski found a century earlier, and still the name of Genghis Khan is invoked as the common link.

  The real cost of Soviet patronage in Mongolia itself, however, has been the sterilisation of Mongol leadership. Just as the Mongol princes in Manchu times were obliged to travel to Peking to pay tribute and stay at the Chinese court, to learn Chinese ways and probably amass a debt to Chinese merchants as well, so the past three generations of Mongol leaders have been supplicants at the Soviet court. In Moscow, and to a lesser extent at Irkutsk in Siberia, where Mongols are encouraged to attend university, the chosen leaders of Mongolia have been reduced to the role of sleepwalkers following the Soviet dream. There is a conspicuous parallel between the complaints that outsiders aimed at the rule of the lamas in the late 19th century, and the situation revealed when the first Westerners began to travel in the modern Mongolia of the People’s Revolutionary Party. The earlier visitors noted that lamaism was an imported faith - like Soviet communism - and that it had flourished in such isolation that it had lost touch with reality. The lama leadership, like their communist successors, was opposed to the introduction of liberal education or new scientific teaching. Lamas taught that the earth was flat, just as in 1990 the Party theorists in Ulaan Baatar were still preaching the ‘all-conquering theory of Marx-Leninism’, to cite the country’s Constitution. For thirty years the Chairman of the Mongolian Praesidium, with his personality cult and his pretensions to infallibility on political thought, came closer in character and function to the priest-king who also surrounded himself with a vast state hierarchy and spent the people’s taxes on monumental works such as the estimated quarter million roubles lavished on a new temple to give thanks for the healing of his sight, which was itself a fallacy.

  Set against such aberrations, the nostalgia for Genghis Khan seems at least harmless, if somewhat contradictory. More sophisticated Mongols appreciate the awkward fact that the hero figure of the Mongols is a man viewed by the outside world as a symbol of destruction and mayhem. The popular idol of Mongolia is the rest of the world’s arch-villain, and such thoughtful Mongols take pains to emphasize Genghis Khan’s national role and gloss over his record as the great conqueror. They praise his statesmanship, his vision, the laws that he promulgated, and remember his folk wisdom. Very rarely, if ever, do they refer to any of his deeds outside the present boundaries of Mongolia. But Genghis Khan the warrior is difficult to separate from Genghis Khan the statesman and lawgiver, and had it not been for his military conquests history would have paid little attention to a tribal chief who united the Mongol people but never led them beyond the confines of their Central Asian homeland.

  It has been a very long time since the Mongols nomadised to the same extent as in the days of Genghis Khan. First the Manchu authorities ordered the Mongol princes to keep their people in defined areas. Then the lamaseries acquired such
an onerous proportion of the country’s lands and flocks that pure nomadism was impossible even if many of the arats had not been tied as serfs to the lamaseries themselves. Yet in the time of Genghis Khan the long-distance, large-scale migrations had been exceptional. In the heartland of Mongolia, in the well-favoured regions of the Hentei and Hangay, the herdsmen would not have needed to shift their animals between cold-season and hot-weather pastures any further than the modern arat now moves between summer and winter grazing according to the directives of the work brigade he serves. He may change the location of his ger only twice a year, where his father and grandfather shifted camp four or six times to follow the pasture. But I had seen how the essential elements of nomad life remained the same: the lack of a permanent home, the portability and simplicity of possessions, wealth calculated almost entirely in numbers of livestock, a certain attitude to the values of herding life with its sense of freedom, individual responsibility and the self-sufficiency of family units scattered widely across the vast land.

  Among the arats I had found qualities that I had expected: the hardiness and endurance, and the hospitality. The ordinary Mongol herdsman still lives in a harsh and demanding environment that demands his perseverance and physical stamina and gives little in return. For many years the West’s leading expert on Mongolia was the scholar-traveller Owen Lattimore who coined the neat phrase that ‘the poor nomad is the pure nomad’. His judgement can be applied to the arats of modern Mongolia. The country is too poor to have overcome the basic limitations of herding life in the Dead Heart of Asia, and the arat is the exponent of what is in many ways a medieval lifestyle. He and his family now dress in factory-made boots and clothes, eat off cheap importer’ crockery and use plastic products all the time. But the clothes and the crockery are little different from chinaware and cloth that his forebears purchased from the caravans out of China, and the felt tent he lives in, the saddle he uses day after day, the ropes of rawhide and twisted hair, the crude metal bits he fits in his horses’ mouth are home-made and scarcely changed from their medieval patterns. His most prized possessions - the pink-topped snuff bottle of jade, ornate knife and steel, the fancy brocade jacket - still come from Chinese sources, just as they have always done.