Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (3 page)

Amidst so much political rhetoric, pseudoscience, and scholarly imagination, the truth of Genghis Khan remained buried, seemingly lost to posterity. His homeland and the area where he rose to power remained closed to the outside world by the Communists of the twentieth century, who kept it as tightly sealed as the warriors had done during the prior centuries. The original Mongolian documents, the so-called
Secret History of the Mongols,
were not only secret but had disappeared, faded into the depths of history even more mysteriously than Genghis Khan’s tomb.

In the twentieth century, two developments gave the unexpected opportunity to solve some of the mysteries and correct part of the record about Genghis Khan. The first development was the deciphering of manuscripts containing the valuable lost history of Genghis Khan. Despite the prejudice and ignorance regarding the Mongols, scholars throughout the centuries had reported occasional encounters with the fabled Mongol text on the life of Genghis Khan. Like some rare animal or precious bird thought to have been extinct, the rumored sightings provoked more skepticism than scholarship. Finally, in the nineteenth century, a copy of the document written in Chinese characters was found in Beijing. Scholars easily read the characters, but the words made no sense because they had been recorded in a code that used Chinese characters to represent Mongolian sounds of the thirteenth century. The scholars could read only a small Chinese language summary that accompanied each chapter; these offered tantalizing hints at the story in the text, but otherwise the document remained inexplicable. Because of the mystery surrounding the document, scholars referred to it as
The Secret History of the Mongols,
the name by which it has continued to be known.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, the deciphering of the
Secret History
remained mortally dangerous in Mongolia. Communist authorities kept the book beyond the hands of common people and scholars for fear that they might be improperly influenced by the antiquated, unscientific, and nonsocialist perspective of the text. But an underground scholarly movement grew around the
Secret History
. In nomadic camps across the steppe, the whispered story of the newfound history spread from person to person, from camp to camp. At last, they had a history that told their story from the Mongol perspective. The Mongols had been much more than barbarians who harassed the superior civilizations around them. For the Mongol nomads, the revelations of the
Secret History
seemed to come from Genghis Khan himself, who had returned to his people to offer them hope and inspiration. After more than seven centuries of silence, they could, at last, hear his words again.

Despite official Communist repression, the Mongol people seemed determined that they would not lose these words again. For a brief moment, the liberalization of political life following the death of Stalin in 1953 and the admission of Mongolia to the United Nations in 1961 emboldened the Mongol people, and they felt free to reexplore their history. The country prepared a small series of stamps in 1962 to commemorate the eight hundredth anniversary of the birth of Genghis Khan. Tomor-ochir, the second highest ranking member of the government, authorized the erection of a concrete monument to mark the birthplace of Genghis Khan near the Onon River, and he sponsored a conference of scholars to assess the good and the bad aspects of the Mongol Empire in history. Both the stamp and the simple line drawing on the monument portrayed the image of the missing
sulde
of Genghis Khan, the horsehair Spirit Banner with which he conquered and the resting place of his soul.

Still, after nearly eight centuries, the
sulde
carried such a deep emotional meaning to both the Mongols and to some of the people they had conquered that the Russians treated its mere display on a stamp as an act of nationalist revival and potential aggression. The Soviets reacted with irrational anger to the fear that their satellite state might pursue an independent path or, worse yet, side with Mongolia’s other neighbor, China, the Soviet Union’s erstwhile ally turned enemy. In Mongolia, the Communist authorities suppressed the stamps and the scholars. For his traitorous crime of showing what party officials labeled as “tendencies directed at idealizing the role of Genghis Khan,” the authorities removed Tomor-ochir from office, banished him to internal exile, and finally hacked him to death with an ax. After purging their own party, the Communists focused attention on the work of Mongolian scholars, whom the party branded as
anti-party elements, Chinese spies, saboteurs,
or
pests
. In the antinationalist campaign that followed, authorities dragged the archaeologist Perlee off to prison, where they kept him in extremely harsh conditions merely for having been Tomor-ochir’s teacher and for secretly researching the history of the Mongol Empire. Teachers, historians, artists, poets, and singers stood in danger if they had any association with the history of Genghis Khan’s era. The authorities secretly executed some of them. Other scholars lost their jobs, and together with their families were expelled from their homes in the harsh Mongolian climate. They were also denied medical care, and many were marched off into internal exile at various locations in the vast open expanse of Mongolia.

During this purge, the Spirit Banner of Genghis Khan disappeared completely, and was possibly destroyed by the Soviets as punishment of the Mongolian people. But despite this brutal repression, or perhaps because of it, numerous Mongol scholars independently set out to study the
Secret History,
putting their lives at risk, in search of a true understanding of their maligned and distorted past.

Outside of Mongolia, scholars in many countries, notably Russia, Germany, France, and Hungary, worked to decipher the text and translate it into modern languages. Without access to the resources within Mongolia itself, they labored under extremely difficult conditions. In the 1970s, one chapter at a time appeared in Mongolian and English under the careful supervision and analysis of Igor de Rachewiltz, a devoted Australian scholar of the ancient Mongol language. During the same time, American scholar Francis Woodman Cleaves independently prepared a separate, meticulous translation that Harvard University Press published in 1982. It would take far more than deciphering the code and translating the documents, however, to make them comprehensible. Even in translation the texts remained difficult to comprehend because they had obviously been written for a closed group within the Mongol royal family, and they assumed a deep knowledge not only of the culture of thirteenth-century Mongols but also of the geography of their land. The historical context and biographical meaning of the manuscripts remained nearly inaccessible without a detailed, on-the-ground analysis of where the events transpired.

The second major development occurred unexpectedly in 1990 when Communism collapsed and the Soviet occupation of Mongolia ended. The Soviet army retreated, the planes flew away, and the tanks withdrew. The Mongol world of Inner Asia was, at last, opened to outsiders. Gradually a few people ventured into the protected area. Mongol hunters snuck in to poach the game-filled valleys, herders came to graze their animals along the edges of the area, occasional adventurers trekked in. In the 1990s, several teams of technologically sophisticated foreigners came in search of the tombs of Genghis Khan and his family; although they made many fascinating finds, their ultimate goal eluded them.

My research began as a study of the role of tribal people in the history of world commerce and the Silk Route connecting China, the Middle East, and Europe. I traveled to archaeological sites, libraries, and meetings with scholars across the route from the Forbidden City in Beijing through central Asia to the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Beginning in 1990 with the first trip into Buryatia, the Mongol district of Siberia, I pursued the trail of the Mongols through Russia, China, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, and Turkmenistan. I devoted one summer to following the ancient migration path of the Turkic tribes as they spread out from their original home in Mongolia as far as Bosnia on the Mediterranean. Then I encircled the old empire by the approximate sea route of Marco Polo from South China to Vietnam, through the Strait of Malacca to India, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, and on to Venice.

The extensive travel produced a lot of information but not as much understanding as I had hoped. Despite this lack, I thought that my research was nearly finished when I arrived in Mongolia in 1998 to finalize the project with some background on the area of Genghis Khan’s youth in what, I assumed, would be a final, brief excursion. That trip turned into another five years of far more intensive research than I could have imagined. I found Mongolians to be delirious at their freedom from centuries of foreign rule, and much of the excitement centered on honoring the memory of their founding father, Genghis Khan. Despite the rapid commercialization of his name on vodka bottles, chocolate bars, and cigarettes, as well as the release of songs in his honor, as a historical person he was still missing. Not only was his soul missing from the monastery, but his true face was still missing from their history as much as from ours. Who was he?

Through no credit or skill of my own, I arrived in Mongolia at a time when it suddenly seemed possible to answer those questions. For the first time in nearly eight centuries, the forbidden zone of his childhood and burial was open at the same time that the coded text of the
Secret History
had finally been deciphered. No single scholar could complete the task, but working together with a team from different backgrounds, we could begin to find the answers.

As a cultural anthropologist, I worked closely with the archaeologist Dr. Kh. Lkhagvasuren, who had access to much of the information collected by his professor and mentor Dr. Kh. Perlee, the most prominent archaeologist of twentieth-century Mongolia. Gradually, through Lkhagvasuren, I met other researchers who had spent many years working secretly and, almost always, alone on studies they could never write down or publish. Professor O. Purev, a Communist Party member, had used his position as an official researcher of party history to study the shamanist practices of the Mongols and to use that as a guide to interpreting the hidden meanings in the
Secret History
. Colonel Kh. Shagdar of the Mongolian army took advantage of his station in Moscow to compare the military strategies and victories of Genghis Khan as described in the
Secret History
with those in Russian military archives. A Mongolian political scientist, D. Bold-Erdene, analyzed the political techniques Genghis Khan used in getting and acquiring power. The most extensive and detailed studies of all had been made by the geographer O. Sukhbaatar, who had covered over a million kilometers across Mongolia in search of the history of Genghis Khan.

Our team began working together. We compared the most important primary and secondary texts from a dozen languages with the accounts in the
Secret History
. We hunched over maps and debated the precise meaning of different documents and much older analyses. Not surprisingly, we found vast discrepancies and numerous contradictions that were difficult to reconcile. I soon saw that Sukhbaatar was a literalist, an extreme empiricist for whom every statement in the
Secret History
was true, and he had taken the job of proving it with scientific evidence. But Purev thought nothing in the history should be taken at its literal meaning. According to him, Genghis Khan was the most powerful shaman in history, and the text was a manuscript of mysteries that chronicled, in symbolic ways, his rise to that position. If it could be unlocked, it would again provide a shaman’s blueprint for conquering and controlling the world.

From the beginning of our combined work, it was apparent that we could not sift through the competing ideas and interpretations without finding the places where the events happened. The ultimate test of each text’s veracity would come when it lay spread out on the ground at the place where the events allegedly happened. Books can lie, but places never do. One quick and exhausting overview of the main sites answered some questions but presented many more. We realized that not only did we have to find the right place, but to understand the events there, we had to be there in the right weather conditions. We returned repeatedly to the same places in different seasons of the year. The sites lay scattered across a landscape of thousands of square miles, but the most significant area for our research lay in the mysterious and inaccessible area that had been closed since the time of Genghis Khan’s death. Because of the nomadic life of Genghis Khan, our own work became a peripatetic project, a sort of archaeology of movement rather than just place.

Satellite images showed a Mongolian landscape void of roads yet crisscrossed with thousands of trails leading in seemingly every direction over the steppe, across the Gobi, and through the mountains; yet they all stopped at the edge of the
Ikh Khorig,
the closed zone. Entry into the homeland of Genghis Khan required crossing the buffer zone that had been occupied and fortified by the Soviets to keep everyone out. When they fled Mongolia, the Soviets left behind a surreal landscape of artillery craters strewn with the metal carcasses of tanks, wrecked trucks, cannibalized airplanes, spent artillery shells, and unexploded duds. Strange vapors filled the air and peculiar fogs came and went. Twisted metal sculptures rose several stories high, strange remnants from structures of unknown purpose. Collapsed buildings, which once housed secret electronic equipment, now squatted empty among lifeless dunes of oil-drenched sand. Equipment from old weapons programs lay abandoned across the scarred steppe. Dark and mysterious ponds of unidentified chemicals shimmered eerily in the bright sun. Blackened debris of unknown origin floated in the stagnant liquid, and animal bones, dried carcasses, swatches of fur, and clumps of feathers littered the edges of the ponds. Beyond this twentieth-century graveyard of horrors lay—in the sharpest imaginable contrast—the undisturbed, closed homeland of Genghis Khan: several hundred square miles of pristine forest, mountains, river valleys, and steppes.