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

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  The Mongol Empire changed the course of history and transformed the map of the world. Driven by an inspiring vision for peaceful world rule, Genghis Khan – mass-murdering barbarian to his victims, genuis and demi-god to his people – united warring clans and forged an empire that spanned Asia, bringing people, cultures and religions together and opening intercontinental trade.

  Under his grandson, Kublai Khan, the vision evolved into a more complex ideology, justifying further expansion. Fuelled by the belief that Heaven had given the whole world to the Mongols, Kublai doubled the empire’s size until, in the late thirteenth century, he and his family controlled one-sixth of the world’s land area. Along the way, he conquered China, made Beijing his capital and gave the nation the borders it has today, establishing the roots of the twenty-first century superpower.

  Charting the rise and eventual fall of Genghis’s ‘Golden Family’, John Man’s authoritative account brings the empire vividly to life, providing essential reading for anyone with an interest in history, geopolitics, and today’s complex and volatile world.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Maps

  Acknowledgements

  The Empire: Rulers and Regions

  Introduction

  Part I Genghis

  1 ‘His Destiny Ordained by Heaven’

  2 The Founder of His Nation

  3 To the South

  4 The Gates of Hell

  5 The Great Raid

  6 Emperor and Sage

  7 Death and Secrecy

  Part II Transition

  8 The Woman Who Saved the Empire

  9 Terror on Europe’s Edge

  10 The Foundations Secured

  Part III Kublai

  11 Westwards Again: Conquest and Defeat

  12 The Taking of Yunnan

  13 In Xanadu

  14 Kublai Emerges

  15 A New Capital

  16 Embracing Tibet, and Buddhism

  17 The Conquest of the South

  18 Burned by the Rising Sun

  19 Challenge from the Heartland

  20 What Kublai Did for China

  21 Kamikaze

  22 A Murder, and a Secret Grave

  Part IV Aftermath

  23 The Outer Reaches of Empire

  24 Grave-hunting on the Sacred Mountain

  25 What the Mongols Did for Us

  26 How to Survive Death

  Afterword: Back to the Future

  Picture Section

  Bibliography

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by John Man

  Copyright

  THE MONGOL EMPIRE

  Genghis Khan, His Heirs and the Founding of Modern China

  JOHN MAN

  For TW and DW-M

  MAPS

  The World of the Mongols, c 1150

  The Empire at the Death of Genghis Khan, 1227

  The Mongol Empire in 1294

  From the Empire, 10 Nations

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With thanks to: Chris Atwood, Professor of Mongolian History, Indiana University; Charles Bawden, Emeritus Professor, and former Professor of Mongolian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, who started it all; Dr Dambyn Bazargur and Badraa; Siqin Brown, SOAS; Yuefan Deng, Stonybrook University, NY; Dalai, historian, Ulaanbaatar; Ruth Dunnell, Associate Professor of Asian History and Director of International Studies, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio; Erdenebaatar, Institute of Animal Husbandry, Ulaanbaatar; Stephen Haw, for vital guidance on Marco Polo’s China; ‘Helen’, Renmin University, Beijing, for wonderful interpreting; Professor Tsogt-Ochir Ishdorj, Head, Department of Historiography, History Institute, Mongolian Academy of Science; Jorigt and Nasanbayar of the Mongolian Language Institute, School of Mongolian Studies, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot; Luc Kwanten and Lilly Chen, Big Apple-Tuttle Mori, Beijing and Shanghai; Professor Yao Dali, History Department, Fudan University, Shanghai; Lars Laaman, History Department, SOAS, for his help with Sharaldai (see Bibliography) and his translator, Geok Hoon Williams; Yuan-chu Ruby Lam, Department of Chinese, Wellesley College, MA; Du Jian Lu, Xi Xia Institute, Ningxia University; Richard John Lynn, for his Xanadu verse translations; Tom Man, of Perioli-Man, Oxford, for putting flesh on the Pleasure Dome; David Morgan, formerly Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Nachug, Director, Institute for Genghis Khan Studies, Edsen Khoroo (Genghis Khan Mausoleum); Oyun Sanjaasuren, MP, leader of Citizens’ Will-Republican Party, Head of Zorig Foundation; Igor de Rachewiltz, School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, for vital and unstinting guidance; Panoramic Journeys, together with Esee, two Nyamas, Ravi, Refika, Nancy and Joan; my Mongol guides, Goyotsetseg Reston (Goyo) and Tumen; Randall Sasaki, Texas A&M University, and Kenzo Hayashida for an introduction to Kublai’s lost fleet; Sainjirgal, researcher, Genghis Khan Mausoleum; Sharaldai, theologian, Genghis Khan Mausoleum; Professor Noriyuki Shiraishi, Niigata University, for his comments and guidance in Avraga; Professor Chris Tyler-Smith, formerly at the Department of Biochemistry, Oxford University, for his help on Genghis’s genetic legacy; Professor Wei Jian, Renmin University, Beijing, for unique insights and inspirational guidance; ‘William’ Shou for the Xanadu trip; Jack Weatherford, Macalester College, MN; Graham Taylor, Karakorum Expeditions, Ulaanbaatar; Frances Wood, British Library; Lijia Zhang, Beijing, for friendship; as always, Felicity Bryan and her team; and in Transworld Doug Young, Henry Vines and Sheila Lee.

  The quotations from The Secret History are from de Rachewiltz’s version (see Bibliography), with permission from Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Netherlands.

  A note on spelling

  In transliterating Chinese, pinyin is now standard, but it still overlaps the old Wade–Giles system. I use whichever seems more appropriate. Spellings of personal names vary widely. ‘Genghis’ is pronounced ‘Chingis’ in Mongol, and should really be spelled like that in English (to overcome a common fault: the G is soft, as in ‘George’, not hard, as in ‘good’). I retain ‘Genghis’ out of deference to tradition. I use the more familiar ‘Kublai’ rather than ‘Khubilai’, ‘Qubilai’ or ‘Kubla’. Xanadu is ‘Shangdu’ (Upper Capital) in Chinese; but Xanadu is traditional in English, thanks to Coleridge.

  INTRODUCTION

  THE IDEA FOR this book came from working on a proposal for a series of films. I was in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, with a corporate boss who was interested in promoting Mongol culture. One of his ambitions was to commission a feature film to tell the story of Genghis Khan. It would be big budget, $100 million in Hollywood terms, appealing to audiences worldwide. Never mind other films on the same subject – no one had done Genghis’s whole life. He had already discussed the project with three Hollywood scriptwriters. Things had not gone well. I could see why. He was interested in history, but knew little about narrative techniques; Hollywood scriptwriters know a lot about narrative, but care little about history. I saw one script by a well-known writer. It had this body-copy in an opening scene:

  The desert giving way to grass – sparse and flat. A woman, solitary, a symbol of sensuous feminine grace, carries water balanced on her head. Her hips sway timelessly.

  It would never work, not just because in Mongolia no woman ever carried water on her head, let alone doing so while symbolizing grace with hips swaying timelessly. It would not work because of the history. Genghis’s stor
y is too big to be contained in a single film, even for a brilliant scriptwriter willing to become familiar with medieval Mongolia, China, Korea, Tibet, Japan, Russia, Georgia, Hungary, shamanism, Islam, Buddhism and Daoism. You could no more compress it into a hundred or so minutes than you could the Second World War.

  It’s not just the range of material that makes it impossible. It wouldn’t work because Genghis’s empire is only part of the story. He died halfway through. His grandson Kublai took up where Genghis left off, doubling the empire’s size over the next seventy years. A single book, possibly; a single film, no.

  So, I told him, he would have to think really big. How about not one film, but nine? How about not $100 million, but $1 billion? That would give scope to tell the full story.

  He loved the idea. The problem is it will never happen, not because of the history, which divides quite neatly into nine self-contained stories, but because of its scope. How on earth do you write nine films all at once – and they have to be all written together, because they interrelate – let alone shoot them?

  The discussion had a positive outcome. It made me take the long view and look back on the Mongol empire from today, with Asia dominated by the empire’s top successor-state, China.

  On the map, China is, as its name says, zhong guo, or Central Nation, a singularity, a unity, linking the Pacific to Central Asia, the gravelly wastes of the Gobi to subtropical Hong Kong. But the view from inner space suggests otherwise. Open Google Earth, find China, drift from west to east for 4,000-plus kilometres, and you will see that ecologically the nation is divided. The west and north are all browns and greys, marking the deserts of Xinjiang, the icebound wrinkles of the Tibetan plateau and the grasslands of Mongolia. There are few picture-icons on screen. Click on some and you will see why – huge skies, lunar landscapes, unnamed mountains, hardly a city and not many people.

  Wandering very roughly from south-west to north-east, a colour change makes a fuzzy boundary. The browns of high and sparse wastelands tumble into lowland greenery. Along with China’s two great rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtze, the green surges east, over fertile lowlands, until it bulges into the Pacific like a well-fed paunch. This half is veined with roads, crammed with cities, exuberant with pictures and teeming with about a fifth of all humanity.

  From Earth orbit, China looks as if it is made of two different parts.

  In history, there were many more than two. Once upon a time, 850 years ago, China was not today’s China. It was divided into six.fn1 Before that, down the centuries, other parts came and went, sometimes a dozen or more, seldom fewer than six, sometimes thrusting westwards as if feeling a way towards India, sometimes scrabbling to the north-east into Manchuria and Korea. In fast-forward, the map of Chinese history looks like a cell-culture dividing, growing, dying back, but always a plurality, united only by an idea of unity that in the early days definitely did not include the very non-Chinese areas of Tibet or the deserts and grasslands beyond the Great Wall.

  What brought these parts together?

  For the start of the answer, stay on Google Earth, mouse your way up to Beijing, in the top right part of the green bit, then on northwest, across the grey-brown grasslands that span China’s northern border into what is now Mongolia proper. If you search around for a focal point, you may find the twin border towns where the only railway comes through. There’s not much to see. You are now over the Gobi, where the grass is so scattered on the gravel plains that only a camel would consider it as food. In summer, ramshackle trucks with two trailers belch their way northwards across wastelands that you might call trackless, except that the Gobi has many tracks and no roads. The tracks remain through the winter, because they are frozen. The desert may become temporarily trackless in early summer, when it is flayed by dust storms that could strip away your eyelids.

  Head north-west, following the railway line. Halfway to the capital, Ulaanbaatar, go northwards for 80 kilometres until you come to a river, the Kherlen, which you can’t miss because it sweeps round in a great bend, running in from the north and heading away north-east. Follow it upstream, and you come to forested ridges and mountains known collectively as the Khentii.

  If you want to understand why China is politically united and the shape it is today, this is where the story starts, on a mountainside where, in the year 1180 or thereabouts, a young man, hardly more than a teenager, has been hiding from enemies who want to kill him. The boy’s name is Temujin, and at this moment very few people have heard of him, because he is down, and very nearly out. But not quite. Soon, he will become rather better known as Genghis Khan.

  He is the key – his character, his vision, his beliefs, his ideology and his talent as a leader. Everyone knows about his ruthlessness, of course: millions dead, dozens of cities ruined. Less widely known is his genius for leadership, and less still the religious ideology with which his heirs justified their conquests. To them, Heaven was very much on their side, and every success, every city destroyed, every conquest, every submission, proved it.

  History is not always just one damn thing after another; sometimes it is a story that makes sense. This one, the story of the Mongol empire, has a narrative arc unified by an ambition that now seems quite mad. Genghis created the belief – perhaps in himself, certainly in his followers – that Heaven had given the world to the Mongols and that their task was to do everything possible to turn divine will into reality. The story of how this ambition ran its course spans almost two centuries, much ground and astonishing changes – from 1180 to the late fourteenth century; from nothing much to the world’s largest land empire; from an insignificant young warrior to the world’s most powerful ruler; from a dream of world conquest to the discovery that the dream was mere fantasy.

  But from that dream came something real: today’s China. Inheriting the vision of world conquest from his grandfather, Kublai conquered all old China, added vast new territories, united east and west, doubled the country’s size, gave it its capital, ruled from it as a Chinese emperor and created a new sense of national unity. Of course, the empire of which he was indirect head reached much further, to the borders of Europe, but his China – essentially today’s China plus Mongolia – was under his direct rule. No subsequent ruler thought of backtracking. That Mongolia itself became independent a century ago was simply an unfortunate aberration.

  Of the many ironies in this story, two of the strangest are that today’s China owes its shape and size – its geographical self-image – to a barbarian non-Chinese who was its greatest enemy; and that the same barbarian is now honoured as an insider, the founder of a Chinese dynasty.

  All of this still governs the geopolitics of Inner Asia. Mongolia has vast and untapped resources. China is hungry for them. The frontier between them, until recently nothing but expanses of gravel, sand and rock, is rapidly yielding unheard-of quantities of copper, coal, gold and many other minerals. These are, of course, technically on Mongolian soil. But Mongolia has been independent of its Chinese colonial masters for only a century, and to many Chinese the region is ‘really’ Chinese, on the grounds that it was once united by Kublai Khan, the Mongolian emperor who founded China’s Yuan dynasty. And who inspired Kublai Khan? Why, his grandfather Genghis, which in Chinese eyes turns Genghis into a Chinese.

  Did Mongolia rule China? Did China rule Mongolia? Much depends on the answers. To understand what is happening and what will happen here over the next few decades, there is no choice but to go back 840 years, to that young man hiding on a mountain in a wilderness, unknown to the outside world.

  fn1 Jin, Song, Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjiang and part of Mongolia (though the last is complicated in ways we’ll get to later).

  PART I

  GENGHIS

  ‘HIS DESTINY ORDAINED BY HEAVEN’

  1180, ON A mountain in Northern Mongolia: it all starts here, with the young man who would become Genghis Khan surviving an enemy attack. He has been lying low, following deer-trails he has known since childhood, s
leeping rough beneath shelters of elm and willow twigs. His new wife, with whom he is very much in love, has been carried off. When the coast is clear on the morning of the third day, he emerges. Only days before, with his enemies hunting him over scree-covered slopes and through fir forests, he seemed doomed to an early death in obscurity. Yet here he is, alive. It occurs to him that his survival is not solely down to good luck and his own skills. Surely he has been protected. Heaven – Blue Heaven, the ancient god of the Mongols – must have had a hand in it.

  From this tiny event – a down-and-out warrior grateful for his survival – grew a leader, an ideology, a dream of conquest, an empire, a new world.

  But before we get into the consequences, there are questions to answer. How and why did he get into this fix in the first place? Who wanted him dead?

  One answer is: Nature herself, for he had been born into a harsh way of life. These mountains and fir forests run across what is now the Russian border. A hunter with a good bow could shoot deer and elk, but there was not much to eat in the forests but pinenuts and berries. Real food was found in the broad valleys and the flatlands to the south, where grass for horses, cattle and sheep underpinned a herding economy. Or rather, real food is found: this should really be in a mix of past and present, because life in the Mongolian countryside is much as it was, with the exception of motorcycles and solar-powered TVs. It is from their animals that the herders must meet their needs: meat, skins, wool and the dozens of different products made from milk. There’s not much variety. Life is good in the summer, of course, when you can shoot marmots or gazelle, and your animals fatten on lush grasses, and there is plenty of fermented mare’s milk, the mildly alcoholic airag (otherwise known by its Turkish name, kumiss). Possibly, summers were even better in Genghis’s day. Recent research suggests that his success depended on 15 warm and wet years, which promoted ‘high grassland productivity and favoured the formation of Mongol political and military power’.fn1 But the winters are Siberian. The main river, the Kherlen, and the many small ones that run out of the Khentii Mountains, are frozen for half the year. Occasionally, ice-storms seal the grass in an armour of ice, killing animals by the million. Wolves take sheep. To the south, conditions are even harsher. Grasslands give way to the Gobi’s sparse and gravelly wastes.