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Mongolia Travels in an Untamed Land
2015 Jasper Becker
Jasper Becker has asserted his rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by Legend Publishing
First published in eBook format in 2015
ISBN: 9781783017836
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Table of Contents
1 Peking
2 Ulan Bator, May 1989
3 The Mad Baron
4 Choibalsan and the Years of Terror
5 A Form of Lobotomy
6 Buddhism
7 The Shamans
8 In Search of Genghis Khan
9 Hunting Dinosaurs in the Gobi
10 Buryatia
11 Tuva - Among the People of the Far Forest
12 Leningrad
Bibliography
One Peking
In the heart of Asia lies the enormous and forgotten land of the Mongols. The Great Wall marching westwards defines its southern boundaries, the still waters of Lake Baikal mark the northern limits and in the west the wooded peaks of the Mountains of Heaven and the swampy wilderness of the Saynsk range ring the frontier. Beyond this natural border a sea of grass rolls all the way across Kazakhstan, the Ukraine and over the Carpathian Mountains into Central Europe.
A land of bloody conquerors, of wandering tribes, of prophets, shamans and mystic kings. A country as immense as North America where the wolf still stalks the wild horse across a treeless plain and where the eagle hangs in a blue sky searching the bare mountains for the shy argali sheep that no shepherd has ever tamed.
The first Western travellers to cross those unmapped mountains or to traverse the Gobi s barren wastes since the fall of the Mongol empire had done so only a century ago. They found that the savage warriors whose ferocity had terrified the medieval world had become devout Buddhists ruled by a depraved and syphilitic God-King. The princely descendants of Genghis Khan had been reduced to penurious debtors, disarmed at last by the petty legerdemain of profit and loss.
Cowardice is the most striking trait of his character. Two centuries of Chinese rule and the warlike disposition has been systematically extinguished, Lt.-Col. Nicholas Prejevalsky, the famous Russian explorer observed in 1885.
Then for the last seventy years a blanket of darkness dropped over this vast region as it fell under Communist rule. Since the 1920s few Westerners had been allowed to enter what became the world s second Communist state. Once more Mongolia became a remote, forgotten hinterland.
Sometimes when I lived in Peking, I would stand on the Great Wall at the top of one of its many towers and look north where the ragged Western Hills dwindle away in deepening shades of purple. Just beyond, the yellow plains of Mongolia begin.
Mongolia is that close and the Wall itself is only an hour or two s drive from Peking. China seemed to me a crowded, regimented and oppressive place and the thought of those grand and empty lands just beyond the Wall slowly took a grip on my imagination.
Somewhere out there lay, half-neglected, half-hidden, the ancient city of Karakorum, the capital of an empire so great that half the world s peoples had lived under its shadow. It would be fine, I thought, to camp beside its ruins. For days on end one would travel, seeing nothing more than the distant flocks of this ancient race of shepherd warriors.
A tent is my house, of felt are my walls:
Raw flesh my food
with mare s milk to drink.
So wrote a Chinese princess in a famous poem, homesick after being sent to live among those barbarian tribes. She dreamed of being able to fly home like the yellow stork but I thought I might rather like it there.
But what was it really like now? What had happened to the Mongols since the 1920s?
In Peking I had once met some Mongols at a wedding party in a bare flat in a soulless tower block with concrete floors. They seemed no more real to me than if I had met an Ancient Egyptian on a street in London. They looked so ordinary in their white cotton shirts and standard grey trousers yet I stared at them, seeing the enigmatic survivors of a vanished world.
This book begins in Peking where I worked as a journalist for many years and first became interested in Mongolia. It is not about a single unbroken journey although it does traverse the continent from China, through Mongolia and the Soviet Union.
Inner Mongolia was, as it happened, the first part of Central Asia to become accessible to the outside world when China began to open its doors in 1980. So I went there first in 1988 although much of it was and remains closed to foreigners, and the Communist Party still keeps a tight grip on its people.
It was a couple of years later that I was able to visit Outer Mongolia and was then lucky enough to witness its transformation from deepest Stalinism. From 1990 onwards, it embraced democracy and private ownership but more interesting than that, the Mongols began to rediscover themselves. In the countryside, the old ways of living and thinking resurfaced for the first time in generations.
With the collapse of central authority in the USSR, it was also, much to my own surprise, easy to wander through those republics or regions inhabited by Mongol tribes.
By chance rather than intention I found myself unravelling a history which until now has been hidden or at least obscured beyond all recognition. The history of all the Mongols since 1917 began to see the light of day along with a new pan-Mongolian political movement. A new nationalism was gripping peoples in all parts of the Soviet empire and, in many ways, it seemed that by describing the Mongols, I was recording changes which were taking place all over the region.
Perhaps it is odd, reversing the usual direction of travel books by going from East to West, but Peking is not altogether a foolish place to start.
Peking was after all the capital of the greatest Mongol emperor of them all Kublai Khan. After conquering China, he decided to move from Karakorum and he chose Peking as the site of his new capital for a particular reason.
It is a halfway house, a borderpost, where the great crowded river valleys of China and their countless rice paddies meet the boundless steppe. Here Kublai Khan could keep an eye on both halves of his empire.
Living there nowadays one almost forgot just how close to the Gobi desert it is. The camels which used to amble through the streets delivering coal thirty or forty years ago have now vanished. It was only in the spring that I would be reminded when strong winds blow a fine dust through the streets. The dust would invade through the doors and windowframes and in the morning I would find it deposited in small drifts as if the desert had laid claim to my floor.
The Mongolians have never forgiven Kublai Khan for moving the capital, preferring to remember his grandfather Genghis Khan, but he is perhaps the Mongol we know best.
Marco Polo worked for Kublai Khan as a senior official for many years and left us a lavish account of the magnificence of his court. It inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge s poem Kublai Khan in which the Khan listens to ancestral voices prophesying war in Xanadu, his pleasure palace.
Marco Polo wrote that Kublai Khan was the mightiest man, whether in respect of his subjects or of territory or of treasure who is in the world today or who have ever been, from Adam our first parent down to the present moment .
Marco Polo, biased though he is, is probably correct in this. When Kublai Khan ruled in the thirteenth century, his personal empire included Mongolia, all of China, Tibet, Korea, Burma, Indo-China, and his brothers or cousins ruled over what was the Soviet Union, as well as Iran and Iraq.
More than that, he sent his navies to Japan, Sri Lanka and Java.
Even in 1638, Christian missionaries found people on Java still speaking Mongolian.
In some ways his conquests gave shape to the modern world as we know it. The Japanese developed a new sense of self-confidence after defeating his seaborne invasions for which they thanked a divine wind, the Kamikaze. Thailand emerged as a separate state only after Kublai Khan s armies defeated the ruler of Burma and emptied the temple city of Pagan. China s claims on Tibet stem from his conquests.
Despite all this nothing at all remains in Peking to commemorate him. The visitor can walk around the Forbidden City and of all his vast riches only a large jar of green jade used to store pickles is left to see. And yet it was his architects who designed the Forbidden City, and its exterior walls still follow his plans. His slaves excavated the chain of lakes which grace its interior, among them the Zhongnanhai which lends its name to the compound from which today s Communist leaders rule their empire.
Indeed for a long time, it never really dawned on me that for 150 years Peking had been a Mongolian city. You have to look very hard indeed to find any trace of their occupation. It is as if the English had decided to pretend the Norman Conquest had never taken place.
Yet set beside Kublai Khan, William the Conqueror is a petty chieftain and for the Chinese, the Mongol invasions were not so much an occupation as a holocaust.
The bones of the slaughtered rose mountain high, the earth was thick with human fat and the rotting corpses gave rise to a human plague, ran one contemporary report of the conquest of northern China.
Kublai Khan was born on September 23rd, 1215, the year in which Genghis