The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [137]
Fifty years later, the popular Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi saw the dramatic potential of the story for the stage, and in 1761 he premiered his play Turandotte in Venice, the hometown of Marco Polo. It offered the tale of a “tigerish woman” whose “greatest sin is her unrelenting pride.” In a combined effort by two of the greatest literary talents of the era, Friedrich von Schiller translated the play into German as Turandot, Prinzessin von China, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe directed it on the stage in Weimar in 1802.
The Italian composer Giacomo Puccini was working on his opera Turandot when he died in 1924, and a colleague completed it. “It’s useless shouting in Sanskrit, in Chinese, or Mongolian!” Puccini wrote of his heroine who refused to marry. She challenged men because of the wrongs done to one of her female ancestors “who ruled in silence and pure joy, defying the abhorred tyranny of man with constancy and firmness.” The earlier queen’s reign had ended abruptly “when the King of the Tartars unfurled his seven standards,” and “in that cruel night when her young voice was stifled!” The opera of the Mongol ice queen never attained the popularity of Puccini’s other Asian heroine, Madame Butterfly, who lives and then must die for the love of a man.
The public memories of unusual people live on in sometimes unexpected but significant ways. Today, when Mongolian men wrestle, they wear a particular vest with long sleeves, a small back, but no shoulder covering and a completely open front. According to lore, they wear this in honor and in fear of Khutulun. To prevent being defeated by another woman, the open vest allows each wrestler to inspect his opponent’s chest before wrestling and make sure that he is genuinely male.
At the end of each match, the winner stretches out his arms to display his chest again to his opponent and to the spectators, and he slowly waves his arms in the air like a bird, turning for all to see. For the winner it is a victory dance, but it is still a lingering tribute to the time when Mongolia had one princess wrestler whom no man ever defeated.
Such folk stories may or may not be accurate, but they carry a cultural truth that transcends the torn, lost, and censored documents of the past. History may have turned its back on the queens of the Mongols, but the people have never forgotten their heroines.
I first heard the name of Manduhai in 1998 while staying on the Mongolian steppe at Avarga, the place where Genghis Khan created the Mongol nation, where he installed his daughter Alaqai over the Onggud and Al-Altun over the Uighur, where the Secret History was written, where Borte maintained her court, and where Manduhai and Dayan Khan returned after their conquests of the south. I was there researching the Mongol Empire when, as so often happened in my work, a group gathered to give me advice, ask questions, or just enjoy their new freedom of being able to speak openly about history, religion, sex, or any other topic.
“I am only a herder,” an older woman said, as though apologizing for not being a scholar. Her worn and creased face contrasted starkly with the smooth, bright blue deel she wore for the visit. “You should know that Genghis Khan was reincarnated as a woman….” She hesitated as though unsure how her listeners might respond, then proceeded firmly in saying what she believed: “It was our Queen Manduhai.”
Somewhat embarrassed, other people assured me that Genghis Khan had not been reincarnated, and it certainly would not be right for him to be a woman. The subject was closed, and we all returned to our respective gers.
Later that night, amid enthusiastic singing and prolonged drinking from a large porcelain bowl of fermented horse milk, people regaled me with several versions of the story of Manduhai. Much of what they said seemed too romantic or too trivial to have any use in my research. I quickly tired