In Search of Genghis Khan

by Tim Severin

  Further west, the city of Nishapur in the north-east of Iran seemed to have got off very lightly in the summer of 1220 when it promptly resupplied a Mongol flying column. Unfortunately the mood of the citizens had changed by autumn and they resisted when the Mongols reappeared. In the fighting a Mongol commander by the name of Toquchar was killed. Toquchar was a member of Genghis Khan’s family, and the Mongol vengeance was terrible. When Nishapur finally surrendered, every living creature was put to death, including the cats and dogs. Toquchar’s widow took part in the slaughter of the entire human population, and the severed heads were set out in neat lines by age and gender. Afterwards the walls and buildings of Nishapur were pulled down, and the order was given that destruction should be so complete that the ground could be ploughed where the city had previously stood.

  The mass punishment exacted for harming a member of the Chingizide family was a deliberate means of spreading the extraordinary awe now surrounding the person of Genghis Khan himself. Though the Mongols could also claim that there was the mandate of Tengri the Sky God, for them to subjugate the world, Genghis Khan himself had acquired his own god-like status. He was considered invincible and divine, and this adulation may have influenced his decision to summon Ch’ang Ch’un. In the autumn of 1222, when the Taoist sage finally reached Genghis Khan’s camp in the mountains of northern Afghanistan, he found that Genghis Khan had brought him all that distance in order to ask one question: did Ch’ang Ch’un have a medicine that would give eternal life? With admirable honesty, Ch’ang Ch’un replied that ‘there are means for preserving life, but no medicine for immortality’. Genghis Khan does not seem to have been unduly disappointed, and treated the old man kindly. He had a special tent erected for his accommodation so that he could stay with the camp, and even listened to three tutorials given by the sage on the principles of Taoism. He also seems to have found out that Ch’ang Ch’un was a vegetarian, because he sent him fruit and vegetables for his diet before he eventually made arrangements for another Mongol escort to ride with Ch’ang Ch’un all the way back to China. It was a return journey which, according to Li Chih-ch’ang, the sage made with complete equanimity, sipping only rice water for sustenance as he crossed the Gobi of Inner Mongolia. From a position of such lofty detachment, it was not to be expected that Ch’ang Ch’un himself would comment on his meetings with the Great Mongol, but he must have made a favourable impression on Genghis Khan, because the Khakhan made an edict exempting Taoist masters from paying taxes, and gave an order setting aside an area of the royal park in Peking for Ch’ang Ch’un to establish his own monastery. (Chiang Ch’un died there in the same month of the same year as Genghis Khan, August 1227.)

  There was a very down-to-earth need for Genghis Khan to promote the prestige of the ‘Golden Family’. The extravagant success of the Mongol invasion of the Khwarazm empire was now exceeding even his capacity for energetic government. The Mongols ruled or were about to launch military campaigns in Mongolia, north and central China, and all of Muhammad Shah’s former domains. Already they dominated half of Northern Asia, and there was no obvious limit to the expansion of their empire. Genghis Khan could not be everywhere to direct operations, so by distributing the mystique of his authority among his sons he could continue the phenomenal rate of expansion. He also realised that the Mongol army of some 130,000 men was far too small to control such an immense area. Cities and entire provinces were falling to them in every direction, and there were simply not enough Mongol troopers to go round. The policy of following quick victories with shocking massacres was one way of easing the problem. Opponents became paralysed by fright at the mere thought of fighting the Mongols. Captured garrisons often outnumbered their Mongol executioners as they stood meekly waiting with bowed heads waiting to be decapitated.

  But still the Mongol war machine did not have enough manpower. At the start of the attack on the Khwarazm empire Genghis Khan had been obliged to boost his troop strength with non-Mongol allies drawn from Turkish-speaking tribes hostile to Muhammad II. Now, with the empire growing larger and larger, he permitted his sons to recruit more and more foreigners. After the initial phase when renegade Turkish troops who tried to switch sides were killed, the Mongols began to welcome Turkish confederates into the Mongol war machine. The Turks were, after all, a related people who had their origins in the same steppe and mountain country of Mongolia. Even those who had adopted Islam retained many of the same tribal customs. The Mongol cavalry still comprised the loyal core of any strike force, particularly when speed of attack was required. But with a siege train that was already largely Chinese, and thousands of Turkish riders, Genghis Khan’s army was effectively becoming multi-national. In fact, without the help of the Turkish-speaking tribes who pledged allegiance to the nine yak-tail banner in increasing numbers, the Mongol empire could not have continued its headlong expansion.

  13 - Eagle Hunters

  Today a sizable Turkic minority still lives within Mongolia. Ninety thousand Kazakhs, a Turkish-speaking people, inhabit Mongolia’s mountainous and most westerly aymag of Bayan Olgei. Carpini and Rubruck had described Turkic as well as more Mongol customs, and both travellers frequently used Turkish words in their writings, which they would have picked up from the Turkish-speaking peoples whom Genghis Khan had included in his empire. Given the extreme isolation of the Kazakhs of Bayan Olgei, it seemed possible that they retained some of these Central Asian traditions, so I was eager to meet them. But there was one problem: Bayan Olgei lies right against the Soviet frontier and is a sensitive area politically. The gigantic Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan is on the far side of the Altai, and its people are racially and linguistically identical to the Kazakhs in Mongolia. Both the Soviet and Mongol governments were alert to the possibility that one day the Kazakhs might demand the political union of their people. Unsupervised travel close to the international border by foreigners had been discouraged in the past. I fretted that we might be hindered from going there freely, and discussed the problem with Doc as we made our way back to Ulaan Baatar. In the end we took the matter into our own hands. Up to that point everyone in authority in Ulaan Baatar had been so helpful and so enthusiastic for my plans to explore Mongolia’s traditions that I felt I could presume on the continuing understanding of the authorities. So Doc simply bought us three tickets aboard the 52-seater Soviet-built turboprop aircraft which made the daily run to the regional centre at Bayan Olgei, Beautiful or Rich Olgei. We had no special authorisation from the authorities; we made no prior arrangements; and we had no contacts. We would trust to luck and see what happened if we arrived among the Kazakhs unheralded. And there was an advange to arriving there without the Mongol riding team: there is mutual distrust between Kazakhs and Mongols. The latter often regard the Kazakhs as potential defectors and, besides fearing that the Kazakhs might take Bayan Olgei out of Mongolia, do not like to mix with them in the work place. Among the Mongols the Kazakhs have a reputation for being clannish hard-workers who, if they were allowed into any job, acquired all the best posts and then filled any vacancies with their fellow Kazakhs. In return, the Kazakhs resented being treated within Mongolia as a minority, largely ignored by the central government. Even such an easy-going person as Bayar pulled disdainful faces when he talked about Kazakhs, and Delger, who knew that Kazakhs ate horse flesh, believed they would devour his Mongol horses, given half the chance.

  On 2 August Doc, Paul and I flew directly westward for four hours from Ulaan Baatar towards Bayan Olgei, looking down at the terrain that we had covered so slowly on horseback. The flooded plains around the capital gave way to the rumpled mountain scenery of the Hangay and then the mountains faded away imperceptibly to steppe and then Gobi. It was a drab country of low sculpted hills and dried watercourses. Very occasionally there was a lake. Seen from 20,000 feet it had exactly the same tan and yellow colours which mapmakers use to depict areas of uninhabited low semi-desert. Nor was there any visible settlement except for a solitary gers every 30 or 40 miles. At
very rare intervals a ridge or a valley might have the slight tinge of green which indicated some sparse grazing. In such spots there was sure to be a line of ger, eight or nine of them arranged cheek by jowl on a nearby bluff.

  The capital of Bayan Olgei was a sprawling, dusty, pebbly town of 20,000 inhabitants, little charm, and the usual functional architecture of four-storey apartment buildings and government offices. Here, too, there was a suburb of felt tents behind wooden palisades. The barren foothills of the Altai pressed in on the south and east. The town’s name is usually shortened to plain Olgei, and in truth there was nothing Beautiful or Fertile about it. Nor, when we arrived on a dull and overcast day, was there anyone on the streets. Ninety per cent of the population had departed to spend the best of the short summer in the surrounding hills, leaving the featureless boulevards behind them. The population would return in mid-August.

  The first vehicle we saw was a jeep with Soviet registration plates which must have come across the border from Gorno Altaisk District, just two hours’ drive away. If the driver and his passengers had been hoping to do some foreign shopping in Bayan Olgei, they would have been disappointed. The few shops in town had virtually no stock. The first we visited had a total range of about twelve items including cheap combs, dolls of Chinese plastic and - for some odd reason - a line-up of a dozen old-fashioned photographic enlargers displayed in a dusty row. On offer in the grocery store next door was watery strawberry jam, countless bottles of a greenish yellow soda drink and a bin a quarter full of stale bread loaves. We were looking for supplies for ourselves as well as presents to give the Kazakhs so we bought a magnificent embossed brick of Chinese tea, a packet of sugar lumps and some boiled sweets. The shop had no coins in the till so our change was given in handfuls of sun-dried apples and plums from another larger wooden chest. The dried fruit had come from across the border, from Kazakhstan itself. We scorned the insipid strawberry jam, and regretted it, for when we returned three days later every jar had gone, and we were hungry.

  It took three days of patient -negotiation to extract the hire of a jeep from the local administration. As everywhere in Mongolia, vehicles were in desperately short supply, extremely battered, and most of them belonged to government organisations, which in Olgei were starved of equipment. The Mongol officials in Ulaan Baatar regarded the province as ultima Thule, the end of the line and very low on the list of priorities for investment or resupply. The happy result, we were to find, was that Ulaan Baatar did not interfere much in Bayan Olgei and let the Kazakhs run their own local affairs. In consequence the Kazakhs were very proud of their own achievements and made great efforts to keep their customs and language. There was a Kazakh-language newspaper, a Kazakh-speaking radio station, a new Kazakh theatre under construction, and a small ambitious museum largely devoted to Kazakh achievements. Even the town hotel had ‘KOSH KELDINIZER’ - Welcome - boldly written in Kazakh Turkish in large letters over the door.

  By great good luck Doc happened to meet an old friend, a Kazakh, whom he had known in Moscow when both were working in COMECON, the Eastern bloc’s economic cooperation organisation. In the intricate crossweave of Eastern bloc society, no one would have thought it odd that a Kazakh engineer and a Mongol cardiac specialist would have become acquainted in a Moscow office where neither of them had any enthusiasm or qualification to devise international economic programmes. What mattered in the system was to make useful friendships. So now in Olgei there was a sudden flurry of introductions and recommendations, and on the fourth day we left town in a jeep that had been resurrected from the repair depot of the municipal transport pool, and headed into the Altai.

  If the Hentei mountains had seemed desolate in May, the lower slopes of the Altai appeared even more barren at the start of autumn. Our Kazakh driver assured us that there were no people living in the lower valley floors because they were saving the pasture for the winter feeding of their flocks. Looking around, it was difficult to see what they were preserving. There seemed to be scarcely any pasture at all, only a little scrub grass, sandy soil, mile after mile of gravel, and the occasional dried up watercourse.

  After 12 miles we stopped at a small settlement to pick up Hojanias, the brother of Doc’s Kazakh friend. Hojanias was to be our contact with the Kazakh nomads. He was a big, energetic bear of a man with a strongly Turkish face. His brown eyes were much rounder than the Mongol eyes we had grown used to, his skin more fair, and he had a far broader jaw and a higher bridge to his nose which made him look completely different from the arats who had been our companions earlier. No one would have mistaken him for a Mongol, even if he had not been wearing a brightly embroidered Kazakh skull cap perched on the back of his shaven skull.

  Hojanias immediately volunteered to take us to a Kazakh friend of his who was camped with his flocks high in the mountains, very close to the Soviet border. His friend, he promised, lived the real Kazakh way of life.

  It took the rest of the day for the aged jeep to grind its way up into the mountains. We were climbing to the roof of Central Asia, a region so remote that it is doubtful whether any Western visitors had been in that particular locality for half a century. By late afternoon we were in sight of the tangle of mountains the local people called the Five Peaks. One of the 15,000-foot snow-capped summits marked the junction of the borders of China, Mongolia and the Soviet Union, and was part of what Soviet geographers grandly call the ‘World Watershed’, the divide between waters which drain to the Arctic or to the enclosed drainage system of Central Asia. Our destination was another two hours’ journey to the north, and by the time we came upon the first Kazakh yurts pitched in the high valleys the light was fading.

  The Kazakh yurts were, to the uninitiated eye, the same felt tents the Mongol called gers. But even in the dusk Paul and I saw the differences immediately. The Kazakh yurts had a different profile. They were taller and lighter in construction, the roof cones were more steeply pitched, and in general they were larger than the standard Mongol ger. But it was when you entered a Kazakh yurt that the difference was really overwhelming. It was nearly midnight by the time we reached the home of Camran, Hojanias’s friend, because he had chosen to put his yurt as the very upper end of the high valley, the last tent before the border. We needed to stop several times to ask our way, once from a Kazakh family who kept a captive wolf cub on a string. When we eventually arrived at Camran’s yurt, there was a shadowy figure in the dark to greet us, and we were led inside. Camran owned a generator, and after we had sat down inside the yurt, he switched it on. A single bulb hanging in the centre of the yurt lit up, and the interior was suddenly a bright pavilion.

  Every surface was gloriously decorated. The panels of the roof cloth were dyed red and black between the roof spokes. Long colourful ribbons of woven cloth were draped and crisscrossed behind the spokes. The floor was covered with thick carpets of white felt embroidered with bold antler patterns. The work chests were painted bright colours and inlaid with iridescent shards of metal. Every possible excuse for embroidery had been taken up. There were embroidered cushions, embroidered bedspreads, embroidered panels, embroidered wall hangings. The beds around the wall had been turned into small four-posters by the profusion of embroidered panels hung around them. And none of the embroidery was restrained. It was a tumult of hues and patterns, loops and whorls, figures of birds, flowers and horses, abstract designs and simple repetitions. What made the exuberance and richness of the decoration all the more impressive was that Camran’s wife had done every stitch herself. It was a tradition that no Kazakh wife should decorate her home with any present or purchase. When she was first married, she moved into a plain yurt, and over her lifetime she should demonstrate her skill and taste and industry by stitching all the decoration herself. By such standards Camran’s wife was a champion.

  Camran himself was thrilled by the arrival of his totally unexpected visitors. We may well have been the first Westerners that he had met anywhere, and I was sure that we were the first to have climbed
up into the mountains to visit his summer yurt. Yet he took the arrival of foreign guests with complete poise and a real enthusiasm to make sure that we were entertained and comfortable. We noticed the contrast between the Mongols and the Kazakhs, that Camran was much more the master in his family than if he had been a Mongol herdsman. But his dignity and status did not diminish his unaffected eagerness to be a good host. He was less reserved than any Mongol arat as he bustled around making sure that we were at ease, asking our news, and complimenting Hojanias. Then, while his wife prepared a meal, we all sat or sprawled on the thick off-white felt rugs with their red and purple and yellow embroidery while Hojanias sang. It turned out that our guide was a semi-professional singer, and he produced his dobri, the two-string Kazakh guitar, and strummed away lustily, producing a medley of traditional Kazakh songs as well as popular tunes from Mongol and Kazakh films. Well after midnight Camran’s wife served the food, and once more there was a contrast with our Mongol custom. As usual we were eating mutton, but this time the meat was tender and flavoured with herbs. And the plates were carefully washed in hot water before use, something which we had seldom seen in a Mongol ger. There was a final divergence: no offer of shimiin. We drank yak’s milk with the meal but the Kazakhs, though they lived in communist Mongolia and without Muslim clerics, still kept their Islamic prohibitions against alcohol. They neither distilled nor drank steam arkhi.

  At 2 in the morning we pleaded exhaustion. Camran and his wife piled up felt rugs to make a 6-inch platform. On it Hojanias, Paul, Doc, myself and the driver obediently lay down in a row, and our host and hostess then hauled three more layers of heavy felt rugs on top of our close-packed bodies. Around the edges, where chinks let in the icy draught, they wedged embroidered cushions to seal in the sides of the thick human sandwich. And we slept.