The Secret History of the Mongol Queens - Jack Weatherford [68]
The many Mongols who stayed behind in China or near the border during the Ming Dynasty continued to be a part of the Chinese historical record. Those who returned to the Mongolian Plateau, however, largely passed out of the recorded history of their neighbors. But the Mongols were now literate and relied upon their own written documents and chronicles to supplement their oral stories. Today we would know almost nothing of Mongolia during this era if it were not for two Mongolian texts written in the seventeenth century. The Altan Tobci, meaning the “Golden Summary,” was recorded around 1651 in a jumble of names, stories, and genealogies; about a decade later, it was followed by the Erdeni-yin Tobči, meaning the “Bejeweled Summary” or sometimes translated as the “Precious Summary.” The accounts were recorded separately, long after the events contained within them occurred, and the details, particularly dates, vary between the two versions. Yet they agree in the overall narrative of events and in the identity and actions of the major players.
The exodus from China was significant, but many of the refugee soldiers streaming into Mongolia were not even Mongol. They belonged to the European Ossetian and Turkic Kipchak soldiers originally brought as imperial guards for Khubilai Khan, who had feared his own Mongol warriors as well as the Chinese.
The Mongol herders, following their traditional way of life on the steppe, did not welcome these strange Mongols gladly. During their seven generations away from home, the royal family had not become Chinese; however, they no longer lived as Mongols. They had all the confidence and bravado of the original Mongols of Genghis Khan, but they had none of the skills, strengths, or stamina. They seemed to have abandoned the virtue of Mongol life and ignored the virtue of Chinese civilization, preferring instead to combine the worst of both. The only occupation they had learned was ruling, and after the death of Genghis Khan, they had not done that well. Once back in Mongolia, they found themselves marooned in a vast sea of grass with little knowledge of their own nomadic culture.
The returning refugees hardly recognized their fellow Mongols who had remained north of the Gobi and continued to follow the traditionally rugged and independent life of nomadic herders. Throughout the sojourn of the royal family and their retinue in China from 1211 until 1368, these Mongols never completely submitted to the rule of their Mongol relatives from the Chinese capital. These Mongol traditionalists remained loyal to the spirit of Genghis Khan by following leaders such as Arik Boke, Qaidu Khan, and Khutulun, but they rejected, or at least remained suspicious of, the Yuan Dynasty established by Khubilai Khan and operated to the exclusive benefit of his descendants for nearly a century.
The Mongols who had dismounted in China and lived there for more than a century had lost their ability to survive in the harsh conditions of Mongolia. For them, hunting was an elaborately ritualized sport, not a survival skill; it was best done with transport elephants, dancing girls for the long evenings, trained warriors to pursue the animals, beaters to drive the animals to where the royals waited with their bowmen at their side, and a cadre of chefs to concoct exotic delicacies from the game.
They did not know how to stalk a wild animal, much less skin the animals or tan the hides. They did not know how to shear the sheep or make clothes from the wool, because they had grown accustomed to wearing silk woven by anonymous workers in the far corners of their erstwhile empire. Each Mongol aristocrat in China had his own private herd, but they were for show and glory, like the ten thousand white horses of the Great Khan.