In Search of Genghis Khan Read online

  In Search of Genghis Khan

  Tim Severin

  © Tim Severin 2014

  Tim Severin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published by Arrow Books Limited, 1992

  This edition published by Endeavour Press Ltd, 2014

  Table of Contents

  1 - In the Year of the Horse

  2 - Heartland

  3 - The Secret History

  4 - Arat

  5 - Mountain of the Shaman Spirit

  6 - The Three Manly Sports

  7 - Leaving Erdenzu

  8 - A Hundred Remounts

  9 - Crossing the Hangay Massif

  10 - Cattle-herders

  11 - The Lamas of Mandal

  12 - The Sage

  13 - Eagle Hunters

  14 - The Black Death

  15 - Shamaness

  16 - The Eternal Icon

  Chapter Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Photographs

  Extract from Crusader: In Search of Jerusalem by Tim Severin

  1 - In the Year of the Horse

  At the Hour of the Silver Horse, on the Day of the Black Horse, in the Month of the Horse, and in the Year of the White Horse we - six Mongols, Paul and I - set out. A Westerner would have said that our departure took place between 2 and 3 o’clock in the afternoon, Central Mongolian Time, on 16 July 1990, and it would have been reasonable to suppose that the starting date had been scientifically calculated. Under normal circumstances it should, for example, have taken into account whether we had given ourselves enough lead time to select and train the horses and get them fit, whether we had been able to field test the different items of equipment like the new tent and the special antique saddles, and whether we would be setting out early enough so that we would finish our trip before the winter snow. But this was not how my Mongol companions had made their choice. ‘When do we start?’ I had asked six months earlier in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia’s capital. Ariunbold, a Mongolian journalist whose name means ‘True Steel’, opened his diary. I noticed that it listed both the Roman calendar and the Chinese year. He riffled through the pages, then stuck his finger against a date, seemingly at random. ‘Here,’ he announced. ‘This is a good day - July the sixteenth.’ I did not venture to voice my doubts on his method of selection. Ariunbold was supposed to be organising the timetable for the venture, and at least I had a firm date to work to, or so I thought. ‘Then it is settled,’ I said carefully via the interpreter, so that there should be no misunderstanding. ‘We begin the main journey on July the sixteenth. I will come back to Mongolia well before then so that I can help with the last-minute preparations.’ As the interpreter translated my words, I saw I had said something wrong. Ariunbold shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Well,’ he replied in embarrassment. ‘Let us say that we will probably begin on July the sixteenth.’ He noticed the exasperated look on my face. ‘You see, Mongols believe that when you are intending to make a long journey by horse, it is very bad luck to fix the exact day of departure. If you are too precise, it can bring misfortune.’

  This expedition, I realised, was going to be different from anything that I had undertaken before.

  In previous journeys I had tracked the steps of Marco Polo by motorcycle, crossed the North Atlantic in the replica of a medieval leather boat to test if Irish monks like St Brendan the Navigator might have reached the shores of North America 1000 years before Columbus, built the replica of an 8th-century Arab sailing ship and sailed her from Muscat to China to examine the origins of the stories of Sindbad the Sailor, and captained the reconstruction of a twenty-oar Bronze Age galley along the coasts of the Aegean and the Black Sea in search of the routes used by Jason and the Argonauts and by Ulysses. Most recently I had completed a horseback trek which did have some relevance to the new Mongolian adventure, at least at first sight. Two years earlier I had retraced the long march of the knights and commoners, women and children of the First Crusade from a castle in Belgium to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. That journey had taken eight months in the saddle and covered over 2500 miles.

  But I had planned the Crusade trip and all the other voyages before them as meticulously as circumstances and my finances allowed. I had calculated daily distances and checked weather patterns, allowed for rest days and repairs, conducted trial runs and scouted the terrain wherever possible. Never before had I paid the least attention to the Lucky Days of the Chinese astrological calendar, least of all relied on it for my final choice of departure day.

  But I made no comment to Ariunbold. If that was how the Mongols wanted to organise the start of their expedition, so be it. I just wondered if Ariunbold and his Mongol colleagues understood the complexities of running a successful long-distance project. In a stream of interviews and announcements over the past two months they had rushed ahead and proclaimed in the Mongolian newspapers and on television that they were going to celebrate the extraordinary feat of their ancestors who had established the fastest and most far-flung overland communications system the world was to know before the invention of the railways. It was an achievement well worth commemorating. In the Middle Ages Mongol riders on their wiry horses had carried dispatches and escorted foreign ambassadors along paths that spanned two-thirds of the known world. These leathery horsemen had travelled astonishing distances at high speed, using routes that extended from the banks of the Danube to the shores of the Yellow Sea. Even more notable was that they rode across lands that these same supreme horsemen had conquered while they established the largest continuous land empire the world has ever seen. Now Ariunbold and his friends had told the Mongolian public that they would emulate their forebears and ride from Mongolia to France in their tracks. The scheme was breathtakingly ambitious. It was the equivalent of riding from Hong Kong to London, and they had asked me to help.

  It was an invitation which I could not resist because it fulfilled an ambition that I thought would never be realised. Twenty-five years earlier I had written a thesis for a graduate degree at Oxford University about the first Europeans to penetrate into the heart of Central Asia at the time of the great Mongol world empire in the 13th and 14th centuries. They had been courageous and astute men - usually friars from the mendicant orders - who had faced the unknown with the same sort of courage as Marco Polo or Columbus, and they deserve a measure of renown, although today their story is largely forgotten. Escorted by Mongol riders, these dauntless pioneers had been sent as ambassadors, missionaries or spies to the courts of the great warlords of the steppe. It was, wrote one of them, ‘like entering another world’.

  They brought back eyewitness descriptions of a society so strange that Europeans found their tales hard to credit: barbarous assemblies of tribesmen under drunken princes who lived in splendid portable pavilions large enough to hold 2000 courtiers at a time; rough nomads who ate raw meat; heretic Christian priests who engaged in furious debate with witch doctors; and a professional horse army equipped and trained beyond the most ambitious ideas of any Western military leader. These fearsome riders dressed in armour of boiled leather, spoke in a grunting language which no one else understood and, as the European visitors warned, posed a terrifying threat to civilisation. Europe should cease her quarrels, arm and unite her forces, or risk being overrun by the Mongol Horde.

  At the time I wrote my thesis in the Sixties, there was not the least possibility of going to see the homeland of these people for myself, although I had often wondered just how much still remained of the exotic lifestyle described by my medieval authors. But Mongolia was forbidden territory. As the world’s second oldest communist country, the Mongolian People’s Republic
then lay isolated between a suspicious Soviet Union and a wary China. For half a century Mongolia had fended off Westerners interested in her unique culture and historical achievements. Her rulers pursued a deliberate policy of inaccessibility. No one but socialist fellow-travellers and official delegations were given visas, and that was only after each application had been subjected to strict and tediously lengthy vetting. When these Western visitors did arrive, their programme inside Mongolia was largely confined to seeing the country’s only city - proclaimed on 26 November 1924 as the capital of the new socialist state - the dismayingly ugly modern creation of Ulaan Baatar, ‘Red Hero’.

  Travel in the countryside was discouraged. Even Mongols themselves had to obtain permits before they were allowed to leave the city zone, and the police maintained checkpoints on all roads leading in and out of town. This was not a difficult task, as the country possessed only two black-top roads. The communists of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party ran a severely Stalinist regime which from time to time behaved with blood-stained ferocity. Cabinet ministers had been denounced on trumped-up charges, hauled away from public meetings, and shot. The cliché of a ‘Show Trial’ was given blunt and direct meaning when public cross-examinations were held on stage in the auditorium of the National Theatre. One politician-cum-field marshal, too powerful for his own good, was fatally poisoned while eating his meal on the trans-Siberian express, the most reliable method of approaching Mongolia at that time, though the spur line to Ulaan Baatar was not opened until 1949, twelve years later. The alternative was a dreary seven-hour plane flight from Moscow with a final stop-over at the Siberian city of Irkutsk near Lake Baikal before diverting down to the primitive airport at Ulaan Baatar. A shorter overland approach was through Beijing and across the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia, because Ulaan Baatar is on virtually the same longitude as Hanoi. But this route was open only sporadically. Nominally independent and with its own seat at the United Nations, (paired on entry in October 1961 with Mauritania) Mongolia was in fact a client state under tight Soviet control, and the Russians openly used Mongolia as a buffer against the huge mass of China. When relations between the Soviets and the Chinese were good, Mongolia was allowed to open her border with China. If they were bad, then the frontier was shut. Mostly it was shut.

  Gradually the situation improved. In 1952 the Stalinist dictator Choybalsan died after a reign of thirteen years, and although his successor, Tsedenbal, was still very authoritarian, Mongolia very cautiously began to allow in more foreigners from the West. But the old habits and suspicions died hard. Thirty years later visits were still under official control. Tourists were obliged to come in groups and then shepherded along pre-planned tracks by nanny-guides. The main exception was small parties of wealthy foreign hunters who, for payment in much-needed hard currency, were taken into the mountains to shoot the wild animals in which Mongolia abounds - deer, elk, Asian bear, and Marco Polo sheep with their splendid spiral horns, the largest wild sheep in the world. Private free-ranging travel was still discouraged.

  Then, in 1987, opened a window of opportunity. UNESCO, the world organisation for culture and science, announced the launch of a huge multi-national scheme to study the historic Silk Roads which linked east and west. The idea was that expeditions approved by UNESCO would criss-cross the continent. A northerly side-branch of the silk Road had passed through Mongolia, so I researched a plan to follow the journey of a medieval Chinese sage, Ch’ang Ch’un, who in 1221 had been summoned from his home near Peking to meet Genghis Khan, the one Mongol whom all the world has heard about. Ch’ang Ch’un’s journey by foot, horseback and cart had taken him right across Mongolia and as far as Samarkand and the Hindu Kush. I presented my proposal to the UNESCO offices in Paris, obtained their approval, posted off the documents to Ulaan Baatar and Beijing to seek the permission of the Chinese and Mongol authorities ... and heard absolutely nothing.

  Months later, and totally unexpectedly, I was invited to be the guest lecturer for a small group of tourists travelling from London to Siberia, Mongolia and north China on a cultural tour. The original lecturer had fallen ill, and the historical background from my Oxford thesis research qualified me as a last-minute replacement. More important, I did not need a special visa for Mongolia because I would be included on the group visa. Promptly I cabled the national Mongolian committee of the UNESCO Silk Roads Project in Ulaan Baatar to say when I was arriving and that I would like to discuss my project with someone in authority. Once again, I heard nothing. So when on 11 September 1989 my tour group was collected at Ulaan Baatar airport by a bus of the national Tourist Company, I introduced myself to the young lady interpreter assigned to us and, without much hope, asked if by any chance there were any messages for me. ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘at ten am tomorrow the bus will leave you at the main square and you will be met.’ I was little the wiser. I had no idea whom I was going to meet, or where, or even whether the Mongols had received my Ch’ang Ch’un proposal. I did notice, however, that pasted to the dashboard of the bus was a garish postcard of Genghis Khan. He was shown mounted on a battle charger and leading his victorious army. Yet for the past thirty years, as I had been led to believe, no one in Mongolia had been allowed to mention Genghis Khan’s name for fear of giving offence to the Soviets. It would have been tactless for the Mongols to remind their Russian mentors that the 13th-century Mongol armies of Genghis Khan and his successors had crushed the Russians on the battlefield, sacked Kiev, and imposed Mongol rule on large areas of Russia for nearly 300 years. I was aware that every Russian schoolchild was still being told again and again of the ‘Mongol Yoke’ (more often called the ‘Tartar Yoke’ from the common use of Tartar (also Tatar) for Mongol. See chapter 5) which had held his country in thrall, and that some Soviet economists were even blaming the centuries of Mongol rule for their country’s economic woes. One rumour also claimed that the National Museum of Mongolia possessed only a single small room devoted to the most celebrated period in their history - the rise of Genghis Khan - and that no native Mongol was allowed in to see the display. Only foreigners were permitted past the door.

  As with other rumours about Mongolia, I was to find that the truth was somewhat different, depending on whom you spoke to, and how much was still concealed or half-veiled. I was to meet eminent Mongolian scholars who told me that even at the height of Soviet domination they had been quietly studying the history of Genghis Khan, writing and defending learned theses on the imperial era. The only danger, they explained, was to be too public about the topic of one’s research. If you were discreet there was no real problem. But the authorities could lash out at anyone who had too high a profile and honoured the memory of Genghis Khan at a time when Party theoreticians were looking for scapegoats who could be accused of backsliding and anti-socialism. I was told about a notorious case in 1962 when a premature campaign had tried to rehabilitate Genghis Khan’s memory. A particularly hideous monument, a 36-foot high white slab set on end with a crude outline drawing of the world emperor, had been erected in the Mongolian countryside at the spot where Genghis Khan was believed to have been born 800 years earlier. A very senior Party member who was in the Politburo and Secretary of the Central Committee no less, by the name of Tomor-ochir, unwisely attended the unveiling ceremony. Shortly afterwards he was accused of wrong-thinking, bitterly attacked in the pages of Pravda, dismissed from the Politburo, disgraced by being given a minor post away from the capital, and finally expelled altogether from membership of the Mongolian Communist Party. A set of commemorative stamps issued for the 800th anniversary of Genghis Khan’s birth was also hastily withdrawn (a few examples did slip through the net and appeared for sale to collectors in the West). Now, twenty-eight years later, Tomor-ochir’s so-called errors had been reassessed and he had been rehabilitated and readmitted to the Party. The only drawback was that his official exoneration had to be posthumous because he had been murdered in mysterious circumstances in the early Eighties by an axeman who had broken in
to his apartment.

  It was an overcast, rather chilly September morning when at precisely 10 am the tour bus dropped me off in the monumental central square of Ulaan Baatar and went on its way, its tourist passengers deprived of their guest lecturer for the day. Waiting on the pavement to greet me was a smartly dressed, bespectacled man of about 45, fit-looking and with an unruly shock of iron grey hair, who appeared to be exactly what he was: a well-placed, well-polished bureaucrat of the central administration. This was Ariunbold, and he introduced himself, in faltering English which matched my hesitant Russian, as being the Secretary to the Mongolian National Committee for the UNESCO Silk Roads Project. Together we walked around the east side of the huge empty square with its central statue of Sukhebaatar, ‘Axe Hero’, mounted on his prancing horse. Sukhebaatar had been instated as the new icon of Mongolia, communism’s answer to Genghis Khan. He was the poor herdsman who in 1920 had smuggled to the Soviets the vital letter appealing for their help by hiding the document in the handle of his horse-whip. His reinterred remains now shared with the corpse of Choybalsan the grim marble mausoleum at the end of the square, which was a miniature and uninspired copy of Lenin’s tomb in Red Square in Moscow.

  Ariunbold led me around the back of what was, to judge by its pseudo-classical portico, the State Opera House and brought me to an office tower, the tallest building in central Ulaan Baatar, which housed the various international cultural associations. There, on the eighth floor, he had an office in the International Centre for Mongolian Studies. On his desk lay a thin folder. This, he said, was the Mongolian proposal for an expedition along the Silk Road in association with UNESCO. I glanced through the document. It was a faithful adaptation, paragraph by paragraph, of the exact same proposal for the Ch’ang Ch’un expedition that I had sent to Ulaan Baatar five months before. The names had been changed and now, instead of following the route of the Chinese sage from Beijing to the Hindu Kush, the text had been adapted to propose that a team of Mongol horsemen should start from the centre of Mongolia and retrace the medieval courier road to France.