Contents [Hide]
About Karakorum
Traveling to a place called Karakorum feels like stepping into the former glory and pride of the Mongol Empire. Taking a bus from Ulaanbaatar to Kharkhorin takes about half a day, which makes it the perfect time to brush up on Mongolian history. Most of what I used to know about Mongolia actually came from The Legend of the Condor Heroes and the novels of Jin Yong. Every time I read them, one impression always stuck with me: Mongolian names are really unusual.
Even though it was a secondhand bus from Korea, the decor had plenty of local character.
In the broadest sense, Mongolian history refers to everything that has happened on the Mongolian Plateau. In the narrower sense, it usually means the rise and fall of the great Mongol Empire, which is probably one of the most headache-inducing parts of any history class, because there are just too many concepts and terms to keep straight: the Mongol Empire, the Yuan dynasty, the Mongols, and so on—not to mention the names of the Yuan emperors. So with six hours to spare, it was time for a full-on crash course in Mongolian history.
Professor K’s ultra-simplified Mongolian history lesson
A long, long time ago, there was a vast grassland where people were scattered in all directions, happily riding horses every day. Eventually, people realized there was strength in numbers, and nomadic tribes began to take shape. Among them, the three best-known were the Xiongnu, the Yuezhi, and the Dingling.
The Xiongnu were formidable. They gradually defeated other tribes and established the first state on the Mongolian steppe. They were constantly at odds with the Qin and Han dynasties, to the point that the Qin had to build the Great Wall and the Han had to send princesses in marriage alliances. Then Emperor Wu of Han finally struck back after years of patience, winning over part of the southern Xiongnu as collaborators and driving the northern Xiongnu steadily westward, where they disappeared from the historical record.
Bonus trivia: Some historians believe that after the northern Xiongnu moved west, they became the Huns. One especially gifted young man among them was Attila, who, dressed in furs, beat the Roman Empire so badly it was left reeling everywhere. Unfortunately, he later died from a ruptured artery on his wedding night. Hmmmmm.
What are you even talking about?
Later, the Xianbei—descendants of the Donghu tribes—gradually rose to prominence (yes, the same people associated in wuxia pop culture with Murong Fu) and took over the steppe. The Xianbei had far too many uncles, brothers, and cousins in the family, which led to yet another era that gives history teachers migraines: the Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians. Things were finally unified for a while, and then a man named Tuoba Hong, who greatly admired the culture of the Central Plains, decided to move the capital to Luoyang.
The Tuoba clan had once had a subordinate slave tribe called the Rouran. As soon as they saw their former masters move away, they quickly turned the tables and took control of the steppe for more than a century.
Among their subordinates was a tribe known for ironworking: the Göktürks. Blacksmithing must have been excellent training, because when the Rouran grew weak from years of warfare, the Göktürks turned on them, overthrew them, and established their own Turkic Khaganate, which became powerful for a time.
Unfortunately, the Turks may have spent too much time forging iron and not enough time reading books. They were divided through political maneuvering into the Eastern and Western Turks, then spent decades being thoroughly battered by the Sui and Tang dynasties. In the end, the Turkic Khaganate was destroyed by one of its own subordinate tribes, the Uyghurs. History really does come full circle.
The three-man look-back squad
The Uyghurs were later defeated by the Kyrgyz. Let’s just skip over that period—I still think that name looks like garbled text.
Then the Khitans rose dramatically to prominence (yes, the Khitans of Xiao Feng, Prince of the Southern Court). Yelü Abaoji must have mastered the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms, because the state he founded ruled the Mongolian steppe and northern China for nearly 200 years. In Chinese history, that state is known as the Liao dynasty.
History loves to copy and paste itself: what unites must divide, and what prospers must decline. In the end, the Khitans were overthrown by their own former subordinates, the Jurchens. Wanyan Aguda of the Jurchens, perhaps feeling the grasslands were no place to dig for ginseng, granted titles to several Mongol tribes and put them in charge of different parts of the steppe—more or less like opening a chain of franchise stores. That decision planted the seeds for a major historical turning point.
One of those tribes was called the Kiyat. Don’t underestimate them just because the name sounds a bit like “beggar clan” in Chinese. Later, they would become known by a far more famous name: the Golden Family.
Karakorum
At last, we were getting close to those four famous Chinese characters everyone knows, and the bus rolled into Karakorum at dusk. Though it was once the capital of the Mongol Empire, Kharkhorin today is just a small county town with maybe a few thousand residents. During a break in the rain and wind, I found a place to stay: a ger for the night. The plump hostess was capable and efficient, running a solid business, and hers was also one of only two accommodations in town that could be booked directly online.
The wind and rain swept across the grassland all night without stopping. As I tended the stove and listened to the raindrops hit the felt tent, it almost sounded like the Great Khan’s armies thundering past.
The next day I climbed a nearby hill. The Karakorum of old is now completely gone, and only archaeological excavations can uncover fragments of its former splendor.
Where is Karakorum now?
On the hillside stood a stone tortoise that once guarded the capital’s frontier, now gazing down in solitude at the comings and goings below.
Only the cattle and sheep graze without a care
Back to Professor K’s Mongolian history lesson
Returning to the Kiyat tribe: its leader fought a small war with the Jin dynasty and established a minor state on the steppe. After several generations, the line passed to a man named Yesügei, who had a son named Temüjin. One time, Yesügei took Temüjin to arrange a childhood betrothal. On the way back, they ran into a group of people who invited them to a meal. Sounds harmless enough, right? But halfway through the meal, they suddenly remembered that Yesügei had once wronged them, so they poisoned him to death, orz. A dark grudge really can do terrible things.
Young Temüjin suddenly found himself growing up in a single-parent household. Once the family’s backer was gone, life became extremely difficult for them. Later, he did eventually marry his childhood fiancée (her father was Dei Sechen, arguably one of the greatest venture capitalists of the ancient world), only for his wife to be kidnapped afterward.
Apparently Mongolian goats also love wrestling
When God closes a door and then closes the window too, it’s not because He wants to turn on the air conditioning—it’s because He has something even more valuable in store for you. As Temüjin grew up, his extraordinary talent became more and more apparent. (Genghis Khan can fairly be described as one of the greatest military commanders in human history, and the Mongol army’s tactics and institutions were largely built by him.) He was not only a brilliant fighter, but also highly skilled at winning people over and rallying support. His popular base on the steppe became incredibly strong, and more and more people came to join him.
Once his operation grew large enough, he started absorbing and merging with other tribes, establishing a monopoly at home and founding the Great Mongol Empire. Later, he took those ambitions international, wiping out one state after another, including the Western Liao, Western Xia, Khwarazm, and Jin.
At that point, everyone decided Temüjin needed an impressively grand new title: Genghis Khan, meaning a ruler as great as the sea.
Karakorum and Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan chose Karakorum, a strategically favorable place backed by mountains and watered by rivers, as a base for rest and resupply between campaigns. His son Ögedei Khan went further and made it the capital of the empire. It is said that in the 13th century, Karakorum was one of the world’s largest CBDs. In the museum at Kharkhorin, I looked at a reconstructed scale model of the old capital and imagined artisans from the Central Plains, merchants from Persia, monks from Tibet, missionaries from Europe, envoys from the Pope, and wandering bards all gathering here. It’s hard to describe just how prosperous the scene must have been.
In truth, the city was not that large: four kilometers from north to south and two kilometers from east to west. Even in ancient times, that would have made it little more than a small county town by Central Plains standards. But the spirit of the Mongols was never something that could be measured by heavy stone walls. Each year, when the flowers bloomed and the grass grew tall, what truly embodied the Mongol soul was the sight of countless white felt tents along the Orkhon Valley, horses galloping in great numbers, and cattle and sheep covering the land.
To be continued in the mini history class
Genghis Khan had four sons: Jochi, Chagatai, Ogedei, and Tolui. Those sons went on to have many sons of their own, and nearly all of them turned out to be formidable conquerors. It almost makes you suspect this whole family paid for some kind of invincibility cheat code. In two great western campaigns, they fought from Moscow to Budapest on the Danube, and from Central Asia all the way to Baghdad and Damascus. Those who stayed in the east were hardly idle either, bringing the Southern Song and Goryeo under their rule. The Mongol Empire became the largest contiguous land empire in world history.
But as the empire grew larger, hearts grew farther apart, and the whole enterprise became harder to hold together. What do you do then? The Mongols, it seems, were remarkably pragmatic: with one clean snap, that enormous empire split into five parts—the Yuan dynasty in the east, and the four major khanates in the west (the Kipchak Khanate, Chagatai Khanate, Ogedei Khanate, and Ilkhanate, each ruled by descendants from different branches of the family).
Later, through negotiation, they jointly recognized the Yuan emperor as the legitimate Mongol ruler and honorary overlord, so in a sense they still considered themselves part of a loose Mongol federation. The four khanates each met different fates. Some were destroyed by the later Timurid Empire, while others survived longer and gradually became part of the histories of Eastern Europe and Russia.
As for the Yuan in the east, the throne eventually passed to Kublai, son of Tolui. At some point Kublai seems to have decided that steppe life had lost its charm, and that he wanted to become a stylish city dweller instead, so he moved the capital from Karakorum to Dadu (Beijing). The consequences were profound: aside from the few decades under the founding Ming emperor, Beijing would remain China’s political center from then on down to the present day. Under Kublai, the Yuan dynasty reached its peak. Many Western travelers came east in amazement, then went home and told grand stories about what they had seen. The most famous of these storytellers was Marco Polo.
Perhaps heaven had lent the Mongols too many gifts, and in the end such debts had to be repaid. The Mongols’ run of extraordinary talent seems to have ended abruptly after Kublai. The emperors who followed were each weaker than the last, and just 98 years after Kublai established the capital in Beijing, Zhu Yuanzhang drove them back north into the steppe. In 1380, Ming forces captured Karakorum. Fires burned for days and nights, destroying most of its buildings.
The Vanished Karakorum
By then, there was not much hope left. The Mongols split apart, reviving the old names Tatar and Oirat, and from then on became noisy northern neighbors. Karakorum’s importance as a Mongol political, economic, and military center was thoroughly torn apart in the repeated conflicts between the Tatars and the Oirats.
Today, Karakorum has become an ordinary small town, though it is also a world cultural heritage site that draws many visitors.
Although the capital city of Karakorum has vanished into history, traces of its legacy still remain. Southwest of Karakorum is a place called Erdene Zuu (referred to in Chinese history textbooks as Guangxian Temple).
Erdene Zuu from a god’s-eye view
Built in the 16th century, it was the first Tibetan Buddhist lama monastery in Mongolian history. When Erdene Zuu was constructed, builders used the ruins of Karakorum itself. Stones that had witnessed so many political rises and falls took on a new role as part of a sacred religious site. At its height, it was grand and crowded, with a hundred stupas and thousands of monks.
In the 1930s, Mongolia’s Stalinist leader Choibalsan launched suppression and persecution against Tibetan Buddhism and its monks. Erdene Zuu declined from that point on. Even in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, large numbers of old temples and khans’ palaces were demolished, and many monks could only hide in caves deep in the mountains. It was not until the 1990s, after Mongolia carried out democratic reforms, that Buddhism was once again allowed to spread openly.
Today, only a few temples and a Buddhist school remain at Erdene Zuu, but at least the sound of chanting once again carries over Karakorum. Let’s hope it will not be silenced again.
A group of hardcore French old-timers rode motorcycles all the way to Karakorum and shared drinks beneath the high walls of the ruins
It was also in the 1990s that Mongolia began gradually erasing the marks of the Soviet era and reclaiming Genghis Khan. By then, Genghis Khan had long since transformed from the brutal ruler of a thousand years ago into a source of spiritual identity for the Mongolian people. In truth, the shift from tyrant to hero did not take a thousand years—only about thirty years had passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
What was once Sukhbaatar Square is now Genghis Khan Square. In front of the State Palace, the remains of former leaders were removed, and statues of Genghis Khan and his descendants were erected in their place. They sit quietly upon their thrones, gazing out over the empire they helped create.
Every newlywed couple comes to Sukhbaatar Square for wedding photos, as if reporting the happy news to their great ancestor
As dusk approaches, herders drive their cattle and sheep home from the hills. Passing through the Orkhon Valley on the way back, perhaps they still catch flashes in their minds of those thunderous cavalry charges.