Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World - Jack Weatherford [178]
Columbus embarked on his voyage: For more on Christopher Columbus and the Mongol influence, see John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
“the most singular people on earth”: The quotes in this paragraph are from the Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner, 1949), pp. 268–280.
“I have confined my plan”: The quotes in this paragraph are from Voltaire, The Orphan of China, in The Works of Voltaire, vol. 15, trans. William F. Fleming (Paris: E. R. DuMont, 1901), p. 180.
“The more I see”: Ibid., p. 216.
“what have I gained”: Ibid., p. 216.
“The lips are large”: The quotes in this paragraph are from George Louis Leclerc Buffon, Buffon’s Natural History of the Globe and Man (London: T. Tegg, 1831), p. 122, quoted in Kevin Stuart, Mongols in Western/American Consciousness (Lampeter, U.K.: Edwin Mellen, 1997), pp. 61–79.
“The leading characters:” Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London: John Churchill, 1844; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 307.
“the northern Chinese”: Carleton Coon, The Living Races of Man (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 148.
“Mongoloid race”: John Langdon Haydon Down, “Observations on the Ethnic Classification of Idiots,” Journal of Mental Science 13 (1867), pp. 120–121, Quoted in Stuart, Mongols in Western/American Consciousness.
“Parents too nearly related”: Chambers, Vestiges, p. 309.
“pre-human, rather than human”: quoted in Francis G. Crookshank. The Mongol in Our Midst: A Study of Man and His Three Faces (New York: Dutton, 1924), p. 21.
“Mongolian stigmata”: Ibid., pp. 72–73.
“Mongol expatriates”: Ibid., p. 13.
“Atavistic Mongolism”: Ibid., p. 92.
“from the East”: Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev, Pan Mongolism, in From the Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse, available at http://max.mmic.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/index.htm.
“dream of the past”: Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History (New York: John Day, 1942), p. 5.
calendar based on the year 1206: For Information on the Genghis Khan calendar, see Sechen Jagchid and Paul Hyer, Mongolia’s Culture and Society. Boulder: Westview, 1979), p. 115.
translation of the Secret History: During World War I, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions prevented much study of the Secret History. In the 1920s, the French sinologist Paul Pelliot prepared a French translation, but it failed to be published until after World War II. The German publisher Bruno Schindler of Verlag Asia Maior prepared the German text for publication in Leipzig, but because of growing Nazi persecutions, Schindler had to flee to England. He left the manuscript behind, where it was eventually taken over by another publishing house, Verlag Otto Harrassowitz, which managed to set it in type in 1940. In France, Pelliot’s translation was finally published in 1949. A complete Russian translation was made public about the same time, and the German edition appeared in 1981. Except for the few eccentric international scholars who worked on the manuscript, the world took little notice. Over the subsequent decades, these dedicated scholars from several countries labored to reconstruct and translate the history first into proper Mongolian and Chinese, then into Russian and French, and still now many debates still rage over particular passages. Some excerpts from Russian, German, and French translations did make their way into English, but overall the English-speaking world seemed to show a profound lack of interest in the Mongols in general, including this so-called Secret History.
“the fortress of old Bukhara”: Helene Carrere D’Encausse, Islam and the Russian Revolution: Reform and Revolution in Central Asia, trans. Quintin Hjoare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 164–165.
“to place the bloodthirsty barbarian Genghis Khan”: Larry Moses and Stephen A. Halkovic Jr., Introduction