How Genghis Khan forged an empire that sought to span the world
The Mongols, under the brilliant, ruthless leadership of Genghis Khan, founded the world’s biggest land empire. So you would assume the Mongols originated in Mongolia. Well, no. Long before Genghis rose to power, they were immigrants, moving westward from lands beyond the borders of the nation named after them.
Their foundation epic, the Secret History Of The Mongols, written soon after Genghis’s death, says they came to their current homeland over a, or the, ‘Tengis’ – meaning a sea or lake – some three or four centuries before Genghis was born in 1162. What an academic storm that word has produced. Which body of water does the word ‘Tengis’ refer to? Perhaps the Caspian or Aral? Unlikely, because that would mean that the Mongols came from the far west. Or possibly, as some scholars argue, Lake Baikal in Siberia, where the Buryat Mongols live to this day. More likely, this Tengis was the only other large body of water in this part of the world – Lake Hulun, in north-east China.
The evidence is slight, but enough to construct a narrative:
Some 1,500 years ago, according to Chinese records, forest people known as Shiwei dominated the forests of the northeast, in present-day Manchuria. They lived in huts made of bent branches covered by the skins of the animals they hunted. They paid tributes in furs to the Turkic empire that ruled Mongolia in the 6th century (long before the Turks started to migrate westward to Turkey) and to the Tang in China from the 7th to the 9th centuries. They were divided into up to 20 clans, one of which lived in the western part of their range, the Xingan mountains, and was referred to as Meng-wu, the Chinese for Mongol.
Records say they moved west on to the grasslands of northern China, learned the art of working iron, and settled along the river Ergun (in one of several spellings), now part of the frontier between China and Russia. The name of the river suggests that this may be true: it probably derives from the Mongol ergikh, to wind or twist, which is something the Ergun does a good deal as it meanders northwards for 1,000 kilometres, to join the Amur.
Near the little town of Shiwei, its name recalling the long-vanished tribe, is an arch marking the entrance to a park proclaiming itself to be the Origin of the Mongols. Bronze statues represent scenes from the Mongols’ later history. Here, according to a local legend, there was a battle between the Mongols and the Turks. The Mongols were reduced to two couples, who fled into an enclosed valley in a range of mo
