THE WORLD CONQUEROR WHO SELLS BEER FOR A LIVING AND OTHER THOUGHTS ON CHINGGIS KHAN by Matthew Davis
There came into the world a blue-grey wolf whose destiny was Heaven’s will.
–The Secret History of the Mongols
My favorite Mongolian commercial opens with a regal Chinggis Khan shouting for a sip of airag, fermented mare’s milk. The Great Khan’s attendants, whose eyes glisten with fear at the prospect of incurring Chinggis’s wrath, realize no airag remains and so pour another thick, milky-white substance into a jewel-studded silver bowl. Chinggis sips, remnants of the drink dotting his moustache and beard, and after he swallows, he grimaces and bangs his fist on the arm of his throne. “This is not airag,” he shouts. His attendants recoil, as this is clearly among their final moments. But wait, Chinggis takes another sip, licks the white drippings from his moustache, and asks in a more cheerful, curious tone what he has drunk. A brave attendant, sensing a possible reprieve, inches forward and says in a quavering voice: “Heinz Mayonnaise.”
The Great Khan loves it, and so will you.
There is no greater figure in Mongolia than Chinggis Khan. His life, his aura, his very name permeates much in modern Mongolia. There is a Chinggis Hotel, a Chinggis Brew Pub, numerous Chinggis restaurants, Chinggis vodka, celebrations of Chinggis’s 840th birthday, Chinggis Internet cafés. Chinggis, Chinggis, Chinggis. His name develops into a mantra after a while, and you almost feel as if the man has been born again, resurrected in name if not in spirit.
The biological, cultural and political legacy of Chinggis Khan is astounding. Sixteen million men alive today can claim direct descent from the Great Khan. That’s one-half of one percent of the world’s male population. Within the borders of what was his empire, that number leaps to eight percent. At the pinnacle of the empire he began, Mongol influence spread from Korea to Hungary, from Russia down to Vietnam, the largest contiguous land empire in human history. Quite literally, the world we live in today would be dramatically different had Chinggis Khan never been born. Yet the influence he wields on a world stage is nothing compared to his influence within the borders of Mongolia, where the man holds a mythic, quasi god-like appeal to the 2.7 million Mongolians now living in the country he created.
Not a bad legacy for a boy whose father was killed when he was eight, and whose family was left to fend for themselves on the harsh steppe of eastern Mongolia.
* * *
“He emerged clutching a blood clot the size of a knucklebone die in his right hand.” That’s how the writer of the Secret History of the Mongols–a hagiographic, folkloric text written by Mongolian nobility shortly after the death of Chinggis Khan–describes the birth of the great Mongolian leader atop this small hill in northeastern Mongolia. The hill is a slight bump on the ubiquitous steppe grass that unfurls over the land like an emerald carpet. Below, the S-shaped Onon River weaves its way towards Russia, and gers, the circular, tent-like structures that are a Mongolian’s traditional home, dot the horizon like white freckles on the land. It is drizzling, and water drips slowly from the branches of Siberian pine. All around is silence so deep, I can hear the whoosh of a raven as it flaps its wings above the trees.
After three years of living in Mongolia I am leaving the country in two weeks. As my final trip, I want to visit the lands associated with Chinggis Khan. His presence has been everywhere in the years I have lived here: in portraiture at the Teacher’s College I worked for in the countryside, on billboards in Ulaanbaatar that extol him as “Man of the Millennium,” and on the lips of Mongolians whose chests puff a bit larger when they talk about the man who founded their country. I am on this hill in late August 2003 because I am curious about the land that has produced Mongolia’s seminal figure.
At the apex of the hill is a waist-high stone commemorating Chinggis Khan’s birth. Beetchik, the traditional Mongolian script that Chinggis Khan ordered created, is inscribed on the stone, and part of the inscription reads that Chinggis was born here in 1162, though that date is disputed, and his name was not originally Chinggis Khan. Yesugei, Chinggis’s father, was a respected and successful warrior of the steppe, and at the time of Chinggis’s birth, he captured a Tartar chief named Temujin Uge. When Yesugei’s wife Hogelun gave birth to a son, the couple named the child Temujin, after the prisoner, a custom befitting Mongolian tradition at the time, but also befitting who this young child would become. Temujin stems from temul, to be inspired.
The tribes that populated present-day eastern Mongolia were a scattered, uncohesive collection of militarized families. War was the order of the day; a nomad’s two most important possessions his arrows and horse. Yesugei’s family was considered fortunate. Not only were they respected members of their own clan, but, in his youth, Yesugei had forged an alliance with a powerful neighboring warrior named Toghrul, a relationship that put Yesugei–and thus Temujin– on the upper tier of the malleable steppe hierarchy.
There is not much known about Chinggis Khan’s youth. Presumably, he spent his days among the rivers and forests that surround this area. He hunted birds and marmots with the arrows his father taught him to shoot; learned to ride a horse the same time he learned to walk; played with the three brothers, one sister and two half-brothers that soon followed his own birth.
Most of what we do know about Chinggis Khan is chronicled in The Secret History, a book written in the mid-13th century, when the Mongolian Empire was still expanding and the memory of Chinggis still fresh. The text connects Chinggis Khan’s lineage with the Khans and Kings of Mongolia’s past, ultimately beginning with a blue-grey wolf and his “fallow deer” of a wife; it narrates Chinggis’s rise to power and his battles against the Northern Chin and the Sultan of Samarkand; and finally, through documenting Chinggis’s actions and words, The Secret History strives to establish a morality that the newly created Mongolian Empire can follow.
It is a text not well-known in the United States but it is the book I have carried with me to Dadal, the small town within walking distance from Chinggis Khan’s birthplace. Dadal lies close to the Russian border, its pine forests a hint of what develops on a larger scale further north. A singular dirt road cuts through the southern end and passes buildings hewn from the surrounding pine: the government building, the post office, and a bar. Looking to get out of the steady rain, I walk into the bar and am greeted by two young barmaids.
“Hello,” one of them says behind a rough wood counter. She is short and round with a beautiful circular face lit up by flashy red lipstick and gaudy eye liner. Her hair is styled in layers, and three silver earrings encircle her left lobe. She doesn’t look like a countryside woman, but here she is, working at a bar 350 kilometers east from Ulaanbaatar.
“Where you from?” she asks in halting English.
“America,” I answer in Mongolian. “But I live in the City.”
“Ah, you know Mongolian,” the other woman behind the bar says. She is taller and thinner than her co-worker. She looks younger, but there is a huskiness to her voice reminiscent of too many cigarettes and shots of whisky.
I order a can of Korean beer and walk to the back of the bar to look around. Posters of Mongolian pop stars and wrestlers cover the walls. Somehow, a poster of a blond woman provocatively drinking from a bottle of Miller Lite, with the 2000 Monday Night Football schedule printed in small type below, has made it on the wall as well. The booths and tables are all empty now in the afternoon, and the smell is of stale cigarettes and spilt beer.
I take a seat at one of the creaky wooden stools at the bar. The two girls are dancing as they wash dishes, and I ask them what they do for a living. As I expected, they are students in the capital who are back home for the summer holiday. They are cousins, and they are so damn bored with the countryside.
“But it’s very pretty,” I say.
“But there is nothing to do,” bemoans the tall one.
“You have lots of fresh air.”
She doesn’t respond. I realize I’m not going to convince her that Dadal is the place to be when you’re 20 and single, and I really don’t believe that anyway.
“Why are you here?” the round one asks.
“To see Chinggis Khan’s birthplace,” I say.
“Do Americans know about Chinggis Khan?” This is probably the second most common question I hear from Mongolians. The first is “What do you think of our country?” Both questions are a form of a status barometer. They are questions meant to ascertain what “Mongolia” and “Chinggis” mean to the foreigner sharing food or drink with them. They are certainly questions of pride and curiosity; but they are also questions of hope. Hopefully you will like our country and know our Chinggis Khan. Often, the question of what Americans know about Chinggis will be substituted simply by “What do Americans know about Mongolia?” Even these two women, women who are dancing by themselves to Mongolian hip-hop, women who lament their presence in the countryside, women who seem to have no desired connections with the past, are curious of how far Chinggis Khan extends into my psyche.
“Americans know a little,” I say. “But not very much.”
“What do you know?”
“We know he made lots of wars. And that his grandson was Khublai Khan.”
“Is that all?” she asks, a little disappointed.
“For most Americans? Yes.”
She is thoughtful for a moment, maybe taking in my answer, and then the tall woman speaks: “Do you want to drink what Chinggis Khan and his men drank?”
“Yeah, sure,” I say, not quite positive what she means or how this will end.
She turns a spigot and clear liquid comes pouring out of a plastic bottle. She places a teacup in front of me and asks me to drink.
“What is it?” I ask, sniffing the cup suspiciously.
“Shimeen airag.” It is milk vodka, a homemade Mongolian vodka that is much tastier, in my opinion, than the vodka that is bottled and sold in stores. “We have the best shimeen airag in the country,” she continues. “The water is fresh and comes from the soul of Chinggis Khan.”
As I sip from the teacup of shimeen airag, I think about what I read in The Secret History, how this clear drink that looks like water has played a role in Chinggis Khan’s history. On a festive, warm summer night in 1177, with the men from Yesugei’s clan drunk or passed out from too much shimeen airag, and the Onon River sparkling and gurgling under a red midnight moon, Temujin, age 15, kills his second human.
His first murder is the reason why he is here, locked in a cangue while Yesugei’s clan celebrates the Day of the Red Moon Holiday. Seven years before, when Yesugei was returning home after dropping his son off at the encampment of his future father-in-law, he was murdered by a group of Tartars who poisoned a drink they had given him on the open steppe. The clan decides it cannot support Yesugei’s wife and six children. They literally move to better pastures, leaving Hogelun and the six children to fend for themselves on the unforgiving Mongolian steppe.
The fish, marmots and birds that Temujin and his brothers once shot for sport they now shoot for survival, and the family, led by Hogelun, manages to survive for several years. Yet as the boys grow into young men, positions of authority and leadership must be established, and when Temujin is 15, his half-brother Begter makes a claim to this authority when he hordes his kill and steals a bird Temujin himself had shot. Temujin, understanding the theft is an attempt for power, elicits the help of his brother Khasar, and the two boys murder their half-brother by shooting arrows into his back and chest.
In The Secret History, Chinggis Khan is not beyond reproach, and the person usually scolding him is his mother. And she does so now, throwing curses on her son for the murder and comparing him to twelve different animals who destroy without thinking, my favorite comparison being “like the falcon who foolishly dives at its own shadow.” But it is not simply Hogelun who punishes and laments her sons’s actions. Yesugei’s old clan learns about the murder, and the head of the clan realizes the boy Temujin has grown into a young man with a violent streak. Fearful that he might exact revenge for their desertion seven years ago, the clan captures Temujin and has him now locked in his cangue, under the protection of a small boy.
While the clan sleeps off its excesses, Temujin dashes the head of his young guard with his cangue and jumps into the Onon River, using the cangue as a flotation device. He escapes to the forest where his family has been living for seven years. Yet as he enters the trees around Dadal, he knows that this life is no longer livable. He is too dangerous; word will spread that Yesugei’s son, Temujin, has become a man, and those looking to harm him will seek him out. He approaches his father’s old ally, Toghrul, and asks for help. The neighboring warrior takes Temujin and his family into his camp, provides him with a wife, and extends the same friendship to Temujin as he extended to Yesugei.
* * *
The eastern part of Mongolia is one of the few areas of the country where minority, or non-Khalkha Mongolians, live. To be Khalkha Mongol is to be a Chinggis Khan Mongol, a designation that elicits pride and causes a form of ethnocentrism that most Mongolians would deny exists. The different ethnicities is partly why, before Chinggis Khan, “Mongolia” had been more a collection of warring tribes than a cohesive country, a formidable political state.
The diversity of Eastern Mongolia is also why I am sitting with a group of ethnographers that have walked out of the mist and into the bar. The three men are around my age–in their mid-20s–and they work at the State Pedagogical University, the primary teacher training university in Mongolia. They have been in Dadal for several days to conduct field research on the Buriat who live in the area. One of the men reminds me of what a Mongolian Indiana Jones might look like. He has a brimmed hat pushed back on his head, and a sharp, striking, handsome face adorned with a thin moustache and glasses. I am interested in their work and ask whether they can join me for dinner later that night.
“I wish we could,” Indiana Jones says in good English. “But we need to go to Bender tonight. Our teacher and another student are waiting in the car for us.” He points outside the door, where two women are waiting in a jeep with their arms folded across their chests. “They’re not too happy we stopped,” he continues, “but we have time for a drink.”
The man asks the round-faced woman to pour a little jug of shimeen airag. The other barmaid has turned her attention to the tallest of the three men. They are both leaning across the counter, gently massaging each other’s fingertips. The man runs his hand through her hair and pulls on her ear lobe. They eventually go to the back of the bar and close a curtain for privacy.
“So, what brings you to Mongolia?” the third man asks. He is short and young-looking, very earnest in his speech and demeanor.
“I live in Mongolia,” I say. “I have now for three years.”
“Oh, sain baina,” he says. “How do you like our country?”
“Maaash goe baina,” I say with my thumb up.
“Good,” says the one with glasses. “I am glad you like it so much.” He pours us all a round of the shimeen airag and we toast Mongolia. Shimeen airag is deceptive. It tastes harmless, like coconut juice. But some more shots like this and we’ll be singing songs together.
“Za,” the man with the glasses says. “You are here to see Chinggis Khan, no?”
“Yes, I am,” I say.
“Ah, our Chinggis Khan,” the other man says and lifts another glass of the vodka. “Dare weet, manai Mongold cholotoi baisan,” he says. The ‘dare weet’ is an expression an American friend has just clued me in on. It means olden times or many years ago. My friend and I have bastardized the expression and used it to mean “old-school.” As in: “Man, that shirt is dare weet.” or “That Kung-Fu movie is some dare weet shit.” But hearing the expression in its original meaning is beautiful and sublime. The man is saying that Mongolia was very strong in years past.
“And now?” I ask, curious as to what his response will be.
He shrugs his shoulders with his hands palms up as if to say, “You know the answer.” Then he says, “But we are all from the family of Chinggis Khan.”
Chinggis Khan wasn’t always so popular, however. Once it becomes known that Temujin is allied with Toghrul, his enemies know where and how to find him. One such enemy is the Merkids, a tribe whose origins are west from Dadal, and the tribe that Hogelun belongs to. Hogelun had been forced to marry Yesugei. He had seen her riding by on a horse, fallen in love with her beauty, and captured her in broad daylight. The Merkids, hearing the news that Temujin has taken a wife, revenge the capture of Hogelun by stealing Temujin’s young wife, Borte.
An enraged Temujin leads a devastating attack on the Merkids. It is his first military endeavor against another Mongol tribe, his first military attack in charge of troops. After he has recovered Borte, Temujin gives a speech to his soldiers: “We’ve torn out the hearts of the Merkid warriors. We’ve emptied their beds and killed all their sons. We’ve captured the rest of their women.” The dramatic show of force ripples across the steppe. Mongolians begin to regard Temujin with a kind of awe, a benevolence and hope that he can unite the warring tribes; shamans spread stories of a heavenly mandate surrounding the young man.
But Temujin is not the only one with designs on steppe supremacy. An ambitious childhood friend named Jamuka seeks to unite the Mongol tribes under his own leadership, and Mongolians must decide who to follow: Jamuka, the more aristocratic of the two men, or Temujin, a fatherless outcast with no clan. Though the majority of Mongols follow Jamuka, those who stay with Temujin proclaim him Khan, or King. His name is now Chinggis Khan, a name rooted in the word chin, strong, and also close in meaning to chono, wolf, identifying Temujin as a link to the Mongols’ first ancestor, the blue-grey wolf.
The first battle between Chinggis Khan and Jamuka takes place in 1187, when Chinggis is 25 years old. It is a disaster for the young Chinggis. Jamuka routes Chinggis and his army, forcing him to retreat. Chinggis leaves Mongolia and leaves the historical record for almost ten years. No one knows where he is; no one knows what he does. Some speculate he is a prisoner or slave. Others that he is biding time in northern China. All that is clear is that both Chinggis Khan and his protector Toghrul have been banished from Mongolia.
* * *
We’ve ended up singing. We began with Mongolian songs that I hummed because I didn’t know the words, and we’re now on Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday.” The roles are reversed so that I’m singing much more loudly than the Mongolians, who are content to add “yesterday” at the end of each verse. The song is strangely popular in the country, played and sung in discos both in the capital and countryside; I even taught it to 18-year-old herders’ children who wanted to learn it.
It’s an easy song to sing, with a tune that makes bad singers like myself sound somewhat symphonic. But the words are what strike me the most. It is a song about longing for a peaceful past in a chaotic present, of something lost. For many Mongolians I have met, a sense of loss runs deep, and singing “Yesterday” in Dadal makes me wonder if the song’s popularity is more than just its melody, more than the growing pervasiveness of Western culture. When the Mongolian Empire folded back on itself and dissolved, the country became part of China, then, after a brief ten-year period of independence, was swallowed up by the Soviet Union. It is only now, since 1991, that Mongolia has had any real sovereignty since the late 1600s, and it is looking to its past, in particular, its glorious past of Chinggis Khan, for a sense of identity, a sense of what is Mongolian.
This heightened awareness of Chinggis Khan has been made more dramatic by the fact that he was ostensibly wiped out during communism. During Mongolia’s 70-year socialist period, mention of Chinggis Khan’s name was omitted from text books; all images of the leader were banned; public discourse about him prohibited. The communists controlled the market on personality culting, and a nationalistic icon who could rally Mongolians against the communist system was one personality better to live without. But with the fall of communism in 1991, Mongolians rediscovered Chinggis Khan. Forty thousand people gathered at Ulaanbaatar’s main square on a gray day to celebrate his first birthday after the transition. Pop singers sang songs in his honor; an actor dressed up as the Great Khan, his white beard and goatee flowing. (He was too small, however. By all accounts, Chinggis Khan was a giant of a man.) Today, whether he would approve or not, Chinggis Khan has embraced capitalism, or, rather, Mongolians have embraced him in their capitalist ventures. Not only is it impossible to walk a block in Ulaanbaatar without seeing the leader’s name or likeness, but many Mongolians returned to the steppe immediately after the transition as way to return to their roots. They bought animals and gers and herding equipment, not so much because they knew how to herd, but because that is what Mongolians did, what Chinggis Khan and his family did. And it is many of these same people that have flooded back into Ulaanbaatar the past five years, once they realized herding was not for them, that there was more opportunity in the City.
“Yesterday” is interrupted by a car door slamming shut, and in walks the young men’s teacher, visibly upset at the delay. She yells at the men and points in the direction of the car. She stomps back outside, and the car door slams again.
“Well,” the man with glasses says after a laugh. “I guess we should be leaving.”
We all walk outside, and I help them pack their stuff in the back of the jeep. The two lovers are giving each other last-minute kisses and fondles, and I am shaking hands with the other men, wishing them good luck on their trip to Bender. The two women and myself stand in the middle of the road and wave as the jeep speeds away, its tires flipping mud and dirt into the air.
“Where are you staying?” the tall one asks, when the jeep is far ahead.
“Gurvaan Nuur,” I say and point down a bit to where my resort camp is.
“How do you feel?” the round one asks with a smile.
“Good,” I say. “A little drunk, but okay.”
She laughs. “Yeah, this shimeen airag is dangerous. You can drink, drink and drink, then all of a sudden, you fall down.” She exaggerates the falling down part, stumbling on her feet and swaying her arms in perfect imitation of a drunkard.
“Well,” I say. “I should probably get going too.”
We say our goodbyes, and I walk towards Gurvaan Nuur. There is a soft rain falling, like the gentle mist used to water vegetables at grocery stores. And I don’t know if it is the vodka or the mist or the diffused sunlight that is coming through the low gray clouds that are boxing in the horizon, but I get shivers as I walk back. Everything seems alive and breathing, and it is easy to see how living in this land could incite Mongolia’s shamanistic beliefs that spirits exist in the simplest forms of nature: in the brook rolling alongside of me; in the pine forest off in the distance; and in the thick green grass that swallows my sandals as I walk. And for a moment, the slightest of moments, when all these elements converge and I am walking in the silence, the thought comes to me slow and steady, like it’s gaining momentum and rolling from my subconscious to my conscious, that maybe, here, on this grass, Chinggis Khan walked, his feet going first left and then right, first left and then right.
* * *
Gurvaan Nuur is the Mongolian equivalent of the Poconos. Nestled in the forest close to Dadal, its grounds are adjacent to a swampy lake, and its cozy log cabins are spaced in a wide half-circle whose opening is framed by a road and wood fence. Despite the absence of foreign clientele, a nice crowd has developed over the weekend. Shirtless Mongolian men sunbathe in the rare sun, hyper children run around their fathers and mothers, and women play ping-pong beneath the thick limbs of a large pine tree. The resort has served three square meals a day, hosted basketball competitions, and even organized a dance in the cafeteria one night.
The biggest attraction, though, is the large statue of Chinggis Khan on the northern edge of the grounds. A slab of rock that stretches at least 25 feet into the air, the statue depicts Chinggis Khan outlined in black from his knees up. The artist drew the leader with no accoutrements, no accessories. He wears a del, the robe-like garment of the steppe, and he stands with his left hand on his hip, his eyes slanted upwards in a defiant, almost sinister expression. The piece is simply a larger-than-life Chinggis Khan staring at the sky.
The larger-than-life image of Chinggis Khan that is exhibited here in Dadal is simply echoing The Secret History. The text makes no mention of Chinggis Khan’s historical absence. He is defeated by Jamuka, and then suddenly reappears in the Year of the Dog, on a blustery spring day in 1196. The cries of war and the stampede of horse hooves echo in Northern China. The Chin are attacking Tartar strongholds, and among the leaders of the attack is Chinggis Khan. As Chinggis is fighting the Tartars, the Jurkin, a southern Mongolian tribe, use his absence to plunder his camps and slaughter almost everyone who has been left behind. When Chinggis learns of the attack, he needs no other impetus for war. He marches his troops against the Jurkin and annihilates the army and its leaders.
The war against the Jurkin marks Chinggis’s return to the Mongolian homeland. During his absence, the Mongolian tribes have continued their unceasing civil wars, as tribal leaders position themselves for power. Yet when news of Chinggis Khan’s arrival spreads across the steppe, the warring tribes turn their attention to the feared Chinggis Khan and form a coalition to defeat him. The Secret History describes the ensuing battle between Chinggis and this Coalition in cosmic terms. Two of the Coalition leaders are shamans, and as the armies prepare for battle, the two men raise a tempest in the hopes of literally blowing back Chinggis Khan’s army. But the weather turns, doubles back on itself, and forces the Coalition’s own army to retreat from the impending storm and Chinggis’s men. For many Mongolians, Tinker, God of the Sky, has chosen sides and taken care of her favorite son. (Though, I can’t help wonder if the fickle Mongolian spring weather also played a role.)
In any event, Chinggis Khan now controls most of the land and tribes in eastern Mongolia. He might have stopped there, but further west, in the land of present-day Central Mongolia, on the banks of the Orkon River, a wide, clear, lazy river where previous Central Asian empires have made their home, and where, ultimately, Chinggis Khan’s descendants will make theirs, is a powerful, sedentary tribe called the Naimans. Unlike the Eastern Mongolian tribes, the Naimans are a literate, deftly organized civilization with strong political structures. Still trying to consolidate his own power in Eastern Mongolia, Chinggis holds reservations about fighting the Naimans. The Naiman King has just died, however, and the family squabbles and inner strife that ensue propels Chinggis to attack.
On the eve of war, as Chinggis’s men are sleeping on the open steppe, their bellies full of boiled mutton and airag, Toghrul, Chinggis’s long-time protector and ally, quietly leaves the field of battle. An enemy of Chinggis Khan’s has convinced Toghrul that Chinggis will desert his old ally once the war begins. Against his better instincts, Toghrul retreats, which forces Chinggis Khan to retreat, as without Toghrul’s troops, Chinggis has no chance for victory.
As he returns east towards his birthland, his enemies, seeing a weakened Chinggis Khan, decide it is time for one final attack. Knowing his dwindled army cannot fight, Chinggis moves fast across the steppe with his enemies in hot pursuit, eventually stopping at a swampy area in southeast Mongolia called Balajuna. Chinggis’s pursuers give up their chase. They believe Chinggis is finished. He has no real power; only 19 men; and he is stationed in a backwater of the country. His son Ogedei has been shot through the neck, though he will survive. His old friends and allies have turned on him. And for the third time in his life, Chinggis Khan is written off by other Mongolian leaders.
But Chinggis uses the muddy banks of Balajuna to regain his and his army’s strength. Though it numbers only 19, the army is now composed of Chinggis’s most loyal men, men from different ethnic groups and religions, men from Chinggis’s youth and current campaigns. They capture a wild horse, share a meal, and drink together from the muddy waters of Lake Balajuna. The pact these men form has become known as the Balajuna Covenant, and from it will spring the military campaigns that will conquer the world.
Chinggis lets his scattered followers across the steppe know he plans to continue fighting. When he has assembled an adequate army, Chinggis surprises his old ally Toghrul, whose camp is enjoying a feast at the time. The rout lasts only three days, and a victorious Chinggis Khan once again marches west to face the Naimans.
The Naimans’ one distinct advantage over Chinggis is pure numbers. So Chinggis devises a strategy that he hopes will delude the Naimans into thinking he has arrived with a much greater force. At night, Chinggis sends small platoons around the perimeter of the Naiman camp. He orders his men to burn blazing fires to create the impression of a much larger army. The plan works, as the Naimans, fearing they are surrounded by tens of thousands of men, flee into the Khangai Mountains. Chinggis and his men pursue, kill and capture the Naimans who do not fall from the steep precipices in their attempts to escape.
Now the undisputed leader of Mongolia, Chinggis Khan returns to the source of the Onon River, the river where he had fished and hunted, the river where he had bathed as a small child. In 1206, an Ikh Hural, or Great Meeting, officially proclaims him Mongolia’s Great Khan.
* * *
Though Chinggis Khan’s coronation as Great Khan was not in Dadal, the statue commemorating the great leader was erected here in 1962. The statue represents the only lapse in communist Mongolia’s anti-Chinggis propaganda. The lapse was not a suddenly benevolent look at the leader of the Mongols, but, rather, a strategic move on the expansive chessboard of international politics, a game in which for the past 400 years, Mongolia has found itself in the role of pawn. Nineteen sixty-two was Chinggis Khan’s 800th birthday, and the Chinese government announced plans to build a statue to the great Mongolian leader in Inner Mongolia, the northern part of China that today contains more Mongolians than Mongolia itself. The Soviet Union, then at odds with China, decided their enemy should not outdo their satellite state. The statue was commissioned and created within a year, and no sooner was it finished when the fallout began.
The politician who organized the statue’s construction was stripped of his power, and the artist who created it was thrown in jail. Eventually, the artist was exiled to a northern province of Mongolia, and only after twenty years did the Mongolian government absolve him. The artist took the directorship of a museum in Mongolia’s second-largest city, and just a few years later, in 1985, he was axed to death. The mystery remains unsolved.
Given its history, it is amazing the statue still stands. I am staring at its size and commenting to myself how odd it looks surrounded by all this nature. It is almost as if, in the wilderness surrounding Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, a large statue of the leader loomed in the forest. As I stare, a young couple walks up and asks me to take their picture. They stand below the heavenly gaze of Chinggis, their arms locked solid at their sides, their shoulders pulled back in sharp form. The statue is so immense, I cannot fit both the couple and Chinggis within the frame. So, I take two photos. In one, the Khan’s head is missing. In the other, the couple’s legs.
If the story of Chinggis Khan ended with his coronation in 1206, I wonder if the statue at Gurvaan Nuur would have been built. If Chinggis Khan’s empire had mirrored the many empires created and destroyed on the Central Asian steppe, I wonder if his reputation as a ferocious warrior, a blood-thirsty tyrant, a despotic demagogue would be entrenched in the world’s psyche. Of course, we will never know. What we do know is that after decades of war, Mongolia was drained. Its livestock economy was ruined; its ability to sustain itself damaged. The new Mongolian state needed resources, and it was going to get them the best way it knew how: warfare.
The Eurasian conquests that created the world’s image of Chinggis Khan and the feared Mongol race were initially made for supplies. After attacking the Tangut tribe to the south, Chinggis decides to head further south and attack China. The Chinese wars are Chinggis Khan’s first against fortified cities, and if the wars in Mongolia exemplified his leadership qualities, then these wars exhibit his military genius. Chinggis often feigned retreat from a city’s walls to lure his enemy from their fortifications. The opposing armies pursue thinking they have Chinggis on the run, only to see the Mongolian army swoop around on their small, fast, powerful horses and encircle them. It is also during the Chinese campaigns that Chinggis Khan deservedly acquires his ruthless reputation. Upon entering a city, he extends clemency to those who will follow him, but to those who choose not to, torture, rape, enslavement, death–sometimes all four–awaits them. The actual cities fare no better. In 1215, Chinggis Khan’s attack on Beijing causes the city to burn for an entire month.
With Northern China–an area that extends south towards present-day Nanking–under his control, Chinggis Khan seems content with the largest empire a Mongol Khan has ever known. But to the west, across the Altai Mountains, is a powerful Muslim empire controlled by Sultan Muhammad of Khwarazm. At the very least, emissaries, goods, and the official news of China’s conquest must be sent to the Sultan. As a caravan of Mongol traders enters the Sultan’s borders, the Sultan Muhammad has them arrested for espionage, a crime which they were undoubtedly guilty of, but a common crime of the era and not one worthy of the executions that ensue.
The Secret History says that Chinggis Khan does not want this war, but he feels fate has given him no other choice. He rallies his troops and heads west, giving each town and city he passes two choices: Join his forces or face complete destruction. The carnage of the western campaigns is brutal. Chinggis and his men kill every male inhabitant of a city unless they find use for him; they rape and enslave all the women. In 1220, the majestic city of Samarkand falls in a mere ten days. In one day alone, 30,000 of the Sultan’s troops are slaughtered. But Chinggis uses more than just force. His experience at Balajuna, when he forged an alliance between Christians, Muslims and Buddhists, between warriors and traders, has taught him the importance of popular rule. He recognizes the Sultan’s unpopularity among the Muslim clergy whom he has persecuted, and Chinggis convinces the Muslim clerics to join him. Once they do, the people follow, and the war is over.
With the west conquered, Chinggis returns to Mongolia. The troops he leaves behind will eventually overrun all of Central Asia and poke its arrows into Europe. In decades, Mongol rule will stretch from the Pacific Ocean to the Black Sea, from Siberia down to the Hindu Kush Mountains, an expanse of land that no country had matched before and no country has since.
Chinggis, however, will not see his empire stretch to these borders. While on a hunting expedition in 1226, the Great Khan, who learned to ride a horse when he was two, falls off and dies from internal injuries a year later. Of course, this is the official version. Other stories tell of a death by malaria, still others that a woman, upset by the murder of her husband, slices of Chinggis’s penis while having sex. Regardless, Chinggis Khan is dead, and as his body moves through Mongolia and back towards Dadal, Mongolian troops kill every living thing they see: man, woman, and animal. They want the location of Chinggis Khan’s burial site kept secret, and it has remained so for close to 800 years.
* * *
The driver I have hired is sneaking passengers into the jeep for the return trip to the provincial center. I don’t complain, because regardless of whether there are 12 passengers in the back or two, I have the front seat to myself. We are pulling away from Gurvaan Nuur, and as we pass the large statue of Chinggis Khan, the driver points and gives me a thumbs up.
It is not difficult to understand why Mongolians revere their leader. In many ways, he was a man ahead of his times. He understood the power of religion and markets and was tolerant of all religions and supportive of international trade. He was a charismatic leader and administrator, able to coalesce a previously nomadic culture into a powerful nation. He grasped the importance of the written word, and, though illiterate himself, ordered the creation of the first Mongolian script, the script that would be used to write The Secret History. Perhaps most importantly for Mongolians, however, Chinggis defined what it meant and means to be Mongolian. And that is why his name is so often used today to sell products. If Chinggis Khan, the ultimate Mongol, likes Heinz Mayonnaise, then maybe I will too.
Chinggis Khan’s most popular legacy is probably his grandson Khublai’s reign of the Chinese Yuan Dynasty, a reign made famous by the travels of Marco Polo. Yet while his descendants plunged into the extravagancies and cultures of China, Persia, Russia and elsewhere, Chinggis Khan was always a man of the steppe. His friends were those from his youth, his culture that of nomads, his thinking influenced by the land I see around me as we leave Dadal. Passing the statue, it is impossible not to speculate on what Chinggis Khan would think of modern Mongolia, and according to my fellow passengers, he might get that chance.
As our car bounces along the steppe, and the scratchy sound of Mongolian throat singing plays on the stereo, and the sun sends religious shafts of light through the sporadic clouds, an older woman sitting directly behind me asks me a question.
It sounds like she is talking about Chinggis Khan’s birth, so I tell her that yes, I went to visit the hill he was born on. But I’ve misunderstood.
“No, no,” she says. “A couple of years ago, Chinggis Khan was born again.”
The music is turned down as I question the validity of the statement.
“Again?” I ask.
“Teemee, teem, teem,” she says emphatically. “Again.”
I am thinking of the billboards, Internet cafés and hotels in Ulaanbaatar that bear his name, the metaphorical reincarnation of his spirit. But then I turn to the driver and to the passengers in the backseat. Everyone in the car is solemnly nodding their heads in agreement.
“What, like from a woman?” I ask, using my arms to indicate pregnancy. The old woman nods. The serious rumor is that a child was born in 2000 that is the next Chinggis Khan. The people say they’ve seen signs in the sky.
Matthew Davis’s work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and Worldview Magazine.