The Bloody White Baron (9 page)

When Ungern arrived, Mongolia had been independent for just two years, and was still fighting to secure itself. After three centuries of Chinese rule a small coterie of nobles, combined with the theocratic power of the Buddhist temples, had come together to free the country
from Chinese control, and proudly proclaimed Mongolia free, strong and Buddhist.

The revolution had been a painful affair. In China, the Qing dynasty was finally collapsing after a drawn-out agony of more than a century during which China's rulers had proven woefully unprepared to deal with Western guns, opium or ideas. The few Chinese remaining in Mongolia, mostly officials and merchants, had no stomach for a fight, especially in the name of a foreign dynasty. There were just over a hundred Chinese troops in Urga facing four thousand Mongolian soldiers and perhaps a thousand Russians. The worst fighting had been in the west, around the city of Khobdo, where Mongol forces stormed the Chinese compounds and slaughtered the garrison. Other resistance leaders led small bands against the Chinese elsewhere in the country; one of the most successful was formed by Togtokh, a Mongolian prince and long-standing opponent of the Chinese, who headed a group of warriors equipped with Russian rifles.

The Qing themselves were not Chinese but Manchu. A nomadic and warlike group of northern clans unified under the charismatic leadership of Nurhaci, much as the Mongols had been under Genghis Khan, they had conquered China in 1644, driving out the reigning Ming dynasty. The Mongol leaders loathed the Ming, who were descended from the leaders of the original Chinese rebellion against the Mongols, and were only too happy to see the Qing take the throne, swiftly sealing deals whereby the leaders of each Mongol clan effectively accepted Manchu rule. (So happy, in fact, that the southern Mongol tribes of modern Inner Mongolia acknowledged the first Qing emperor as the ‘great khan' in 1636, eight years before the final conquest of China, although it took another sixty years for the northern Mongols to accept Qing leadership.) The early Qing emperors took wives from among the Mongols, particularly those who could prove direct descent from Genghis, in order both to strengthen their ties to Mongolia and bolster their claim to be the true heirs of the Mongol Yuan dynasty, and so the legitimate rulers of China. They also spread rumours that they had discovered the legendary Great Seal of Genghis Khan, legitimising their reign through prophecy.
⁹

The greatest challenge to the Qing came from the Zunghar kingdom of western Mongolia, led by the powerful and charismatic leader Galdan Khan, who also made claims to legitimacy through descent
from Genghis. Its power was destroyed by a century of Qing campaigns, combined with outbreaks of smallpox which killed 40 per cent of the population. Continued Mongolian resistance resulted in the Chinese adopting a policy of genocide in the 1750s, effected by starvation tactics and an imperial order ‘to take the young and strong and massacre them'. Siberian governors reported refugees' stories of Manchu troops massacring entire settlements. Roughly one hundred and eighty thousand people were killed, and the survivors fled to join the Kazakhs and Buriats in Russia. ‘For several thousand
li
[around 600 miles],' reported one historian, ‘there was not one single Zungharian tent'.
¹⁰

Despite the devastation wrought by the Qing in the west, many Mongolians were content to live under Manchu rule. The Manchu were determined to keep their original homelands in the north free from corrupting Chinese influence, and so banned all settlement in both Manchuria and northern Mongolia. They issued a series of decrees in the nineteenth century which forbade Mongols from learning the Chinese language, taking Chinese names, adopting Chinese clothing and habits, or even eating Chinese food. Population pressures resulted in widespread settlement by Han Chinese in southern Mongolia, which had effectively been absorbed into China by the beginning of the twentieth century and today is the modern-day province of Inner Mongolia. The breakdown of the non-settlement policy, combined with incompetent administration and the stranglehold that Chinese traders had on the Mongolian economy, kindled anti-Qing feelings among the Mongols. By 1911 demonstrations, rebellions and attacks on Qing officials were becoming increasingly common. Debt and natural disaster drove a growing number of former nomads into a pitiful life as beggars on the edge of the towns.

The communist regime was later to claim the 1911 rebellion as a precursor to Mongolia's glorious Marxist uprising. That the Mongols had petitioned Russia for support in their revolution made good communist propaganda, and it has been called Asia's first modern revolution. In truth there was very little modern about it. Democratic ideals were current among a tiny fraction of the Mongolian population, mostly those lucky few who had worked or been educated in Russia or China and who had picked up ideas from reformers there. The instigators of the petition to Moscow comprised a small circle of young hereditary nobles, determined to regain some measure of their ancient
power. The heads of each Mongol tribe had been obliged, under the Qing, to visit Peking to make obeisance to the emperor, and any who failed to do so were forced to pay tribute in sheep to his representatives in Mongolia.

This rankled the nobles, whose ancestral memories of the mighty Yuan dynasty of Genghis Khan were still vivid. Back then the ‘proper' order of things had been established and the Chinese had paid tribute to the Mongols, not the other way round. Life had at least been tolerable so long as the Qing had maintained their distinctly Manchu, nomadic identity, but resentment against them increased as they became more Sinicised. The Manchu language, which bore some similarity to Mongolian, had been almost completely abandoned by the Qing except for ceremonial purposes and they had become virtually indistinguishable from the Han Chinese. Even their hairstyles were identical, for the Han had been forced to adopt the pigtail among several other Manchu customs.

The rebellion mustered considerable popular support, not so much from any great liking for the nobles as from distaste for the Chinese. In order to placate dissenters at home and defend against Russian expansionism, the Chinese authorities had begun allowing much greater colonisation in Mongolia. They stationed two regiments in Inner Mongolia in 1906 and began the construction of a railway to compete directly with the Russian line. Over twenty thousand square miles of land had been taken away from the Mongols for the Chinese settlers to farm, and three hundred and fifty thousand Chinese settlers had moved into Inner Mongolia.

All these measures were resented by the Mongols, especially Chinese colonisation. The Mongolians, still almost entirely herders and nomads, valued their land and their space more than anything else, and saw urban life as essentially soft, fit only for beggars and monks. The Chinese merchants and bankers were resented most of all; the Mongols, increasingly impoverished by colonisation and Qing taxation, were forced to buy on credit, often at crippling rates of interest. Chinese merchants were the main target of the outbreaks of violence during the revolution; over three hundred of them were murdered and their debt records burned in ceremonial pyres on the streets.

Anti-Chinese feelings were even more intense in Inner Mongolia, where the call for Mongolian independence was eagerly taken up by
the eight Mongol clans there, all of whom were suffering badly from Chinese expansionism. One of the largest groups was the Chahars - so prominent, in fact, that one province, which encompassed much of modern Inner Mongolia, was named after them. They held territory around the Chinese city of Chengde and were particularly fierce in their opposition to Chinese rule, but Han settlers outnumbered them by a ratio of nearly 19 to 1 and many Mongols were driven over the border into northern Mongolia or Russia.

The superior attitude of the Chinese towards the Mongolians didn't help matters. In the Chinese suburb of Urga, Maimaichen, the people lived in wooden buildings instead of gers and kept their distance from the Mongolian city. Mongolia was the edge of the Chinese Empire, and the colonists harboured the usual prejudices against the natives. Themselves stereotyped by the British and Japanese as lazy, backward, cruel and ignorant, the Han Chinese applied their own sets of prejudices to the northern barbarians. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese accounts consistently portray the Mongols as scurrilous, lazy and drunken - sometimes accurately, especially in respect of the town-dwelling Mongols they encountered most often - and this attitude seems to have carried over into everyday dealings between the two groupings.

The Mongolian reputation for cruelty, insensibility and stupidity, a legacy of the ruthless conquests of the hordes, still survived in both Asia and Europe. Chinese popular dramas featured Mongolian henchmen, often Oddjob to Japanese Blofeld, who habitually threatened the hero or heroine with sadistic torture.
¹¹
A later but telling example comes from the Second World War, where one French doctor, witnessing the execution of a Mongolian prisoner, a member of a German repression unit (perhaps lent by the Japanese; perhaps drafted by the Russians, then captured and drafted again
¹²
) spoke of how ‘he had no thoughts at all about what was happening to him. He had died as an animal does'.
¹³
Medically speaking, Down's syndrome children were ‘mongoloid', a term originally intended to reference not only their epicanthic eyes, but also their diminished mental capacity. Western visitors remarked upon the Mongolians' ‘remarkable naivety' or ‘child-like attitudes'. The Chinese mocked them as dumb, smelly barbarians, and took remorseless advantage of their (quite genuine) gullibility in matters of trade. One Briton commentated sniffily, ‘
Ch'ou
Ta-tzu
(“foul Tartars”) is a Chinese term of contempt hundreds of years old, and the justice of this approach in the mouth of a race whose notions of sanitation are still rudimentary, is not at first apparent. At Urga a comparison is possible, and it is in favour of the Chinese.'
¹⁴
In many ways the situation paralleled American and Amerindian relations in the nineteenth century; an expansionist colonising power against a nomadic and defensive group of natives.

The difference here was that, thanks to the collapse of the Qing and the aid of Russia, the natives stood a good chance of winning. This didn't make the Chinese happy. To be beaten by Western devils was hard enough on national pride; to be beaten by a bunch of northern barbarians, even if their ancestors had had delusions of grandeur, was too much to take. For added insult, the ceremonial trappings and nomenclature adopted by the new Mongolian court mimicked the customs of the Chinese emperors; not only an unprecedented impertinence but a clear sign, in the language of dynastic mandate understood by both courts, of an assertion of sovereignty over Mongolia and all the previous Mongolian territories of the Chinese Empire.

The new ruler of Mongolia, de facto head of the rebellion, was the Bogd Khan (Holy Emperor), the head of Mongolian Buddhism and a figure of great importance in Ungern's later life. Previously he had been known as the Bogd Gegen (Holy Shining One). He was the third most important ‘Yellow Hat' in the Gelugpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, below only the Dalai and Panchen Lamas. Like the Dalai Lama, he was a living bodhisattva, one who had chosen upon reaching enlightenment not to achieve the blissful state of nirvana but rather to reincarnate himself constantly in order to help enlighten other souls. These figures were often known as ‘living Buddhas' to Westerners, and by the Tibetan term
trulku
among Mongolians.