The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [43]
Uighur script became the Mongol script and thereby the official script of the empire. For the next seven centuries, until 1911, it remained the official script in its Mongol and Manchu forms. Even during the Ming Dynasty, which favored Chinese writing, the Chinese court had to use Mongol script for communication with many parts of its empire and foreign nations as far away as Turkey.
When Genghis Khan left on his campaign against the Muslims, he had taken Alaqai Beki’s stepson Boyaohe with him as part of his personal detachment. The boy was ten or twelve years old when he set out with the army, and subsequently grew up on the campaign in Central Asia, where he performed very well and grew into an excellent soldier. By the time the Mongols conquered Muslim Central Asia and the army returned to Mongolia, Alaqai’s husband, Jingue, had died. In 1225, Genghis Khan then gave the precocious Boyaohe to Alaqai to be either her third or her fourth husband. At the time of his marriage to his stepmother (who was, of course, also his sister-in-law), Boyaohe was seventeen years old, and Alaqai was in her mid-to-late thirties.
Alaqai’s only child, Negudei, the son born from her marriage to Jingue, had inherited his late father’s title Prince of Beiping, and she groomed him to succeed her in power. She arranged an excellent marriage for him with a daughter of her brother Tolui. During the 1230s, after nearly a quarter of a century ruling northern China, Alaqai suffered one of the cruelest blows of her life; her recently married teenage son went to fight the Song army in southern China and was struck down in battle. This ended her dynasty, and she was too old to bear more children. With the same spirit she had shown throughout her life, she devoted herself to the care of Boyaohe’s other children, offering them a secure future by arranging the best marriages for them that she could within the ranks of her own Mongol family.
In the absence of her own son who could follow her, Alaqai improvised a new system that would set the pattern for Onggud rule for the next several centuries; she arranged a series of marriages of Onggud male subjects to women from her Borijin clan of the Mongols. Since Alaqai ruled for a long time, she arranged many similar marriages, which grew into a permanent part of the Mongol kinship system. When Marco Polo came to China more than half a century after Alaqai’s death, this system still functioned. He explained that the leaders of the Onggud, whom he called Tenduc, “always obtain to wife either daughters of the Great Khan or other princesses of his family.”
Throughout her twenty-year career, Alaqai Beki remained loyal both to her father, who sent her to rule, and to the Onggud people over whom she reigned. She laid much of the foundation for the later expansion of the Mongolian Empire into China, and she became a major conduit for selectively designating parts of Chinese civilization to be emulated by the Mongols and choosing aspects of it to be incorporated into their culture. Yet, in the end, without sons to follow her, the name of Alaqai Beki would fade quickly.
By 1226, Mongol queens controlled the Silk Route, with the exception of one small area, the still troublesome Tangut kingdom occupying the Gansu Corridor. Genghis Khan had grown tired of the perfidy of the Tangut, who promised obedience one year only to disregard it the next, sending tribute at one time and then refusing to later. Determined to finally remove the Tangut ruler, destroy his dynasty, and fully incorporate his subjects