The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China

by John Man

  Does the grave exist? Does the secret knowledge of the burial site exist? To neither of these questions is there an answer. Perhaps only those who know it know that they know it. Perhaps they just think they know it. Perhaps they are certain they don’t know it. Perhaps, in the terms famously defined by Donald Rumsfeld, the grave is a known unknown.

  Actually, the search is not just for one grave but for a whole necropolis, a Mongolian Valley of the Kings, where Genghis’s family and heirs, including Kublai, lie buried. Tomb-raiders assume the khans must be accompanied by wives, concubines, slaves, horses and Eternal Heaven knows what else of gold, jewellery, costumes and weapons.

  It is a matter of huge potential significance. If the grave exists, and if it were ever found, it would create a frenzy in archaeology, scholarship, cashflow and – since China claims Genghis as its own – international relations. Occasional efforts are made by the Mongolian government to assert control over the search; a hard task, since regulation would mean spending money and limiting tourism. And the tensions are wound ever tighter by those who argue that the search itself is a sacrilege, that what was intended to be secret should remain secret, and that anyway foreigners should be excluded from something so intimately connected with the nation’s roots. And all these passions swirl around a site the very existence of which, let alone its position, is a mystery.

  The Yuan Shi, the history of the Yuan dynasty, records how imperial burials were made. When the retinue reached the place of burial, ‘the earth removed to dig the pit was made into lumps which were disposed in order. Once the coffin had been lowered, [the pit] was filled and covered in the order [of the lumps]. If there was earth in excess, it was carried to other places far away.’ A European observer, Friar John of Plano Carpini, who visited Karakorum in the 1240s, wrote, ‘They fill up the pit . . . and place over it the grass as it was before, so that the place should be impossible to find afterwards.’

  If this was the case with Genghis, where did it happen?

  The Yuan Shi seems to offer help by saying that the site was in the ‘Qi Lian Gu’ (), which sounds promising, since gŭ means ‘valley’. Many attempts have been made to see this as the transcription of a Mongolian name, with no success. In fact, the phrase means only ‘raise imperial carriage [or hearse] valley’, i.e. the valley where the emperor’s funeral carriage was raised for burial.fn1

  The only near-contemporary record is infuriatingly vague. In 1232 and 1235–6 – within a decade of Genghis’s death – the Song court sent two embassies to Genghis’s successor. The two ambassadors, Peng Daya and Xuting, claimed they saw where the conqueror was buried. ‘Mongolian graves have no tumuli,’ Peng reported. ‘Horses are allowed to trample the area until it is as flat as its surroundings. Only at Temujin’s grave-site have posts [or arrows] been erected in a circle of 30 li and horsemen set on guard.’ His colleague added: ‘I saw that Temujin’s grave was to one side of the River Lu-gou (), surrounded by mountains and rivers. According to tradition, Temujin was born here and for that reason was also buried here, but I do not know whether this is true.’

  The two eyewitness accounts raise many questions. Did they actually see the enclosure and the guards? How did they know the dimensions? Was the circle 30 li (15 kilometres) across or in circumference? How do a 15-kilometre circle and trampling horses and a river fit with a mountain burial? And, most tantalizing of all, what was the Lu-gou River? Some major rivers had Chinese as well as Mongol names, and this was one of several versions of the Chinese name for the Kherlen. But Genghis was born on the Onon, not the Kherlen; and anyway, Xuting himself admits to uncertainty.

  My guess is that these two diplomats asked to see Genghis’s grave, without realizing that they were asking for something that could not possibly be granted. The site of the grave was to be kept secret, closely guarded until such a time as no one would be able to identify its position. On the other hand, it would be bad form to deny such officials their request outright. So they ride for a few days to the Khentii Mountains. They are taken roughly to the right area, get the name of the river wrong, pick up some distorted information – official disinformation, perhaps – see a few distant horsemen and are told that to enter the sacred site is taboo; not that there would be anything to see anyway, because it was all trodden flat and covered with saplings.

  Soon even soft information like this began to slip away into hearsay and rumour. Marco Polo, writing fifty years later, said that ‘all the great kings descended from the line of Genghis Khan are taken for burial to a great mountain called Altai’. The same name crops up again almost four centuries later in Sagang’s History. He writes that the corpse was buried ‘between the shady side of the Altai and the sunny side of the Khentii mountains’. Both descriptions are so vague as to be almost useless.

  It is hardly possible to doubt that the burial is somewhere in his homeland, in what is today the mountainous Khentii province. Many sources mention Burkhan Khaldun as the site of what is called the Great Forbidden Precinct (Mongolian: khorig, a prohibition or prohibited area, often a burial place). There were many khorigs, but the ‘Great’ one was where Genghis and many of his descendants were buried. The Persian historian Rashid al-Din says that when Kublai’s heir, his grandson Temur, became khan he put his brother Kamala in charge of ‘the great ghoruq [khorig] of Chingiz-Khan, which they call Burkhan-Qaldun and where the great ordos [palace-tents] of Chingiz-Khan are still situated . . . There are four great ordos and five others, nine in all, and no one is admitted to them. They have made portraits of them there and constantly burn perfumes and incense. Kamala too has built himself a temple there.’ In due course, nine tents would become eight, which became a travelling shrine, the Eight White Tents, drifting back and forth across Mongol lands until finally settling south of Ordos City in Inner Mongolia, where they were transformed into today’s Genghis Khan Mausoleum.

  So almost a century after Genghis’s death, his burial ground was marked with tents, a temple and much ceremony. It was all private, but it should have left some traces – presumably on Burkhan Khaldun itself.

  This raises a question: which mountain is Burkhan Khaldun? Most Mongolians think they know – it is the mountain in the Khentii range known as Khentii Khan. So sure are they that they have been worshipping on the mountain for some 300 years. It doesn’t matter to them that the grave itself remains secret because they commune with his spirit.

  But that leaves researchers with a problem. Though almost everyone assumes that Burkhan Khaldun is today’s Khentii Khan, no source confirms it. And there are things about the idea that just don’t fit. The closer you look, the more problematical it becomes. We will see some of the problems close up, on the mountain itself. But there are also problems in the sources, in particular The Secret History. It leaves no doubt as to the importance of the mountain. It is mentioned in reverential tones dozens of times. Yet in one incident, when young Genghis escapes from the Merkit, he rides off from his campsite and hides on Burkhan Khaldun, which the Merkit circle in an attempt to catch him before heading home with his young wife. But, if this is Khentii Khan, he couldn’t have done it. The distances are too great, the landscape too rugged. Either the incident is fictionalized, or we should be dealing with a different mountain. One possible theory is that every clan had its own Burkhan Khaldun – except that none has been identified. We are left with a paradox: Burkhan Khaldun must be Khentii Khan; but it can’t be. If this is disinformation on the part of Genghis’s entourage, it is supremely successful.

  Another problem is what, if anything, the grave might have contained. Again the evidence is not much help. Juvaini, who began writing his history at the new Mongol capital of Karakorum only twenty-five years after Genghis’s death, says that upon his election by the Mongol princes Genghis’s son and successor, Ogedei, ordered that ‘from moonlike virgins, delightful of aspect and fair of character, sweet in their beauty and beautiful in their glances . . . they should select 40 maidens . . . to be decked out with jewels, orn
aments and fine robes, clad in precious garments and dispatched together with choice horses to join his spirit’.

  Human sacrifices for Genghis? It is not totally impossible, because it was an ancient custom in China and across Central Asia that ordinary soldiers, servants, wives, concubines and animals were killed to accompany the ruler in the afterlife. It was certainly said that before the arrival of Buddhism Mongol khans were buried with concubines, along with other possessions.

  But the evidence is shifty, even in China. These practices had never been universally observed, and as centuries passed the living were increasingly replaced by replicas. No Mongol tomb containing sacrificial victims has ever been found. And Juvaini does not claim that the forty moonlike maidens were actually buried with the khan, which would have meant digging up the grave, with all the risks to security that would have involved.

  Finally, the idea of a grave filled with riches does not fit comfortably with the image that Genghis liked to present. He had accepted the guidance of his top adviser, Yelu Chucai, and adopted the guise of a simple sage. In the words of his 1219 memorandum carved on to a stela (and quoted in full here): ‘Heaven has wearied of the sentiments of arrogance and luxury . . . I return to simplicity. I have the same rags and the same food as the cowherd or the groom.’ Given the need for secrecy, would his heirs have ignored his implied will and given him a lavish burial? More likely, surely, that they kept it quick and simple.

  Clearly the first task for grave-hunters is to check out Khentii Khan. It’s a daunting prospect for outsiders. The mountain (2,362 metres) is actually the western part of a 12-kilometre ridge with two peaks (the second, Asragt, being slightly higher, 2,452 metres). Our needle, always assuming it exists and is in this area, could be anywhere on the southern slopes of this haystack: an area of something like 100 square kilometres of forested ridges, peaty plateaus, steep-sided valleys and bare uplands, all trackless, hard to get to, hard to leave. The nearest town, Möngönmört, is 70 kilometres from the mountain.

  The first outsider to explore the mountain was an Englishman, C. W. Campbell, a long-time British resident in China, who travelled from Beijing to Urga, as Mongolia’s capital was known then. This was in 1902–3, when all Mongolia was under Chinese rule. Having arrived in Urga he backtracked to visit a gold mine in Khentii, and then carried on for another two days to climb Khentii Khan, ‘the holiest of the many holy mountains in Mongolia’. His account touches on most of the themes that dominate later explorations, my own included.

  The first thing he emphasizes is the mountain’s popularity as a pilgrim route and object of veneration. It was visited every year by the amban, the Mongol prince who acted as Chinese viceroy in Mongolia. He came ‘with a retinue of magnitude, to make oblation to the great nature-spirits, and Mongols and Chinese alike make pilgrimages from great distances to enlist their favour’.

  Campbell made his climb in September, describing typically tough conditions:

  Our camping-place (4500 feet) was strewn with the remains of fires, mutton bones, skeletons of camels, felled logs, and broken carts, relics of the yearly visits of the Urga Amban. I rode up the mountain, through a thick forest of pine, larch, and cedar . . . as we emerged on the exposed ridge above a strong nor’wester drove [the temperature] down to 17° (–8°C) and the crests of the higher hills were veiled with snow. In half an hour we reached the main altar where the Amban worships [possibly the site of ‘Kamala’s temple’] . . . The summit was reached without difficulty, except for the wind. The pilgrimages of centuries have marked recognizable paths, and Mongols ride the whole way up over tree-roots and fallen trunks. The slope was forested, but the broad uneven crest was blown bare of trees, and its surface was a mass of large loose stones of irregular shapes. When approaching the mountain, I observed from a distance of 6 miles a rounded boss on the summit . . . I clambered over this, and found it to be an oval tumulus, 250 yards long east and west, and 200 yards north and south, of the same loose stones which cover the mountain.

  I had no doubt that it was a human creation. There are two large stone obos on the crest of the tumulus, and on one of them there were the remains of a bronze censer. From a fragment of a Manchu inscription on this, which I copied, M. Dolbejev, of the Russian Consulate at Urga, read the date of the twelfth year of Chien-lung (AD 1748).

  This is a remarkable tumulus, probably the largest in Mongolia. I am unable to believe that it is merely a prayer cairn, and it is a conjecture . . . which I think is entitled to attention, that we have here the veritable tomb of Jinghis.

  Note the main elements: the relatively easy climb, the shrines on the ascent and at the top, and the great mound of stones on the summit. He missed one feature: a platform which seems to be scattered with what later researchers took for graves. He must have crossed it, but these collections of rock attracted no comment.

  Given that few foreigners went to Mongolia before it became the world’s second Communist state in 1924; that it was then pretty much closed off until the next revolution of 1990; and that conditions are horrendous – iced over in winter, boggy in summer – it is not surprising that so little work was done on the subject of Genghis’s grave until recently.

  First off the mark post-war was an East German, Johannes Schubert, of Leipzig’s Karl Marx University,fn2 who explored the mountain in a week-long expedition with Mongolia’s pre-eminent archaeologist, Khorlogiin Perlee. He described it in an account that confirms just how hard it is to get to and how tough the journey can be. This was in 1961, but it sounds like something out of the Middle Ages.

  Schubert started from Möngönmört, as expeditions must, with four local Mongols and a caravan of thirteen horses winding their way single file through the willow bushes, crossing and recrossing the Kherlen – a tough journey for a man approaching his sixty-fifth birthday. On the mountain, dense forest gave way to the overgrown terrace described by Campbell – ovoos, two big, three-legged iron cauldrons, a bronze container and remnants (Schubert guessed) of the temple built by Kamala.

  Higher up, as the trees became thinner, they came out on to a flat place ‘scattered with holes, which are filled up with boulders and between which grow scanty mosses’. (Please note these holes; they will play a significant role later.) And finally, on top, they came upon a field of 200–300 ovoos, with a main one where bits of armour, arrow-points and various lamaistic objects had been laid. Undoubtedly, Schubert concluded, this was the historic Burkhan Khaldun; and somewhere on these slopes must be Genghis’s tomb.

  But it was all guesswork. The search demanded high-tech archaeology, which became available only when, in 1990, the fall of Communism opened the country to outsiders.

  The Japanese were the first to seize the opportunity, with the Three Rivers Project of 1990–9, named after the rivers that rise in Genghis’s ancestral homeland – Kherlen, Onon and Tuul. Since the backer of the four-year enterprise, the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, wanted to recoup its investment in terms of publicity, there was no shortage of hype. According to the introduction of the report written by an eminent Japanese archaeologist, Namio Egami, the project’s stated purpose – to find Genghis’s tomb – was ‘so significant it may mark the beginning of a new history of the world’. It was an immense undertaking, with almost fifty members, ground-penetrating radar, superb cameras, global-positioning devices, many cars and a helicopter.

  First call, of course, was Khentii Khan. Approaching from below, the team rediscovered the ruins of the temple which may or may not have been built by Kamala; then, landing by helicopter on the top for an hour, they recorded the existence of the 200–300 cairns described by Schubert (not that anyone on the expedition seems to have read his account). They found no trace of any ancient tomb up there, or indeed anywhere else. No one ventured down from the top or up from the bottom, so no one saw the ‘holes’ described by Schubert on the middle level of the mountain. The project went on to find an astonishing range of graves and implements at other sites, without turning up a hint of anyt
hing from the early thirteenth century.

  The huge expenditure could hardly be justified by reporting hundreds of minor Turkish graves and offering detailed descriptions of the countryside as observed by satellites, aerial cameras and radar. The Three Rivers team needed to produce ‘underground relics’ that were ‘treasures of the world’. Luckily, two areas proved potentially rewarding. One was Avraga, the pre-Genghis capital, an important site, which the Three Rivers report glorifies with a bald and totally unsupported conclusion: ‘It is almost certain that Genghis Khan’s tomb is in this area.’ The second possible source of ‘treasure’ is truly a wonder – a stone wall enclosing a section of a ridge in the neighbouring hills. It is known locally as the Almsgiver’s Wall, and is almost certainly nothing to do with Genghis, because ceramics found there are Liao, the dynasty overwhelmed by the Jin in 1125, some forty years before Genghis’s birth. Yet the Three Rivers report blithely says that, from geographical observations and interviews (neither detailed), ‘it appears that Genghis Khan was buried somewhere in [the Almsgiver’s Wall]’. Two different sites claimed for the grave with equal vigour, no new evidence at all for the burial – despite its many important findings, in terms of pure Genghis research the Three Rivers Project achieved remarkably little.

  Seven years later came the most determined and perhaps the most well-publicized grave-hunter: Maury Kravitz, a financier from Chicago. Kravitz, who had one of the world’s greatest libraries on the subject of Genghis, raised $5.5 million, set up an advisory board and signed a contract with the Institute of Geography for exclusive rights to search for the grave. With reservations. He was banned from excavating on Khentii Khan.