Jack Weatherford
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So he had to oversee it.
He got mad and he picked up a statue of the Buddha and beat the Taoist representative to death.
So he just wasn't good for moderating debates.
So he was going to be the new Great Khan.
So he was declared the Great Khan in Mongolia.
But this was a turning life for Kublai Khan, who had never achieved much of anything other than talking to people.
So his wife, Chabi, sent him some coded messages, basically telling him, forget about southern China.
It's going to always be there.
You can conquer that some other time.
So he came back, he had a baby, and he decided to name him Temujin, the person of iron, or Iron Man, we might call him.
Right now, your brother is taking over the empire.
You should be the new emperor.
You are the next son after Meng Han.
And somehow she invigorated him.
And he came back.
And even though he didn't have all the military strategy, he had northern China.
The resources were immense.
He could cut off Mongolia.
Mongolia was very dependent on northern China for food.
All the Mongols supported Arikbo.
All the ones in Central Asia, all of them were supporting Arikbo.
And so he went to get food from them.
And then they didn't want to give up their food.
Yeah, we want to support you for Great Han, but we're not giving up our food.
So he was basically kind of starved into submission in 1262.
And then he was taken prisoner into China.
And then he...
mysteriously passed away in 1264 while a legal case was being brought against him for trial, but he never made it to trial.
He was gone.
So Kublai Khan had not really distinguished himself very much, but
He didn't have the genius of his grandfather, I won't say that, but he was smart and clever.
He understood more about China than most Mongols did, and he understood more about Mongols than most Chinese did.
So the great thing left that Chinggis Khan said on his deathbed, finish conquering China.
That was the great objective.
So Kublai was going to fulfill this, and they didn't know how.
After the man he killed.
The great wall of ships,
was protecting the Southern Song.
This huge Yangtze River was so wide, the ocean on the side, all of these things were protecting them.
So he has a kidnapped mother.
So he had one of his very smart generals named Aju, who was a real Mongol, but he was also able to think in an innovative way.
He was the grandson of Subodai, and he went with his father, Urihanggadai, on the conquest of the Red River of northern Vietnam against the Dai Viet people.
She's a second wife now.
They went down the river.
They were trying to surround the Chinese
territory.
So we're going to hit them from the north, from the west, and from the south.
So they went down the Red River to conquer the Dai Viet.
The Dai Viet moved their army up on the other side by boat, and then they had a whole corps of elephants.
So you have the Mongols on one side, the river, and the Dai Viet forces on the other side.
Orihangadai was a smart man, not a genius, but smart.
And he already knew from campaigns in Burma that the only way to rout the elephants was with flaming arrows to the feet.
That was it.
Not a legal wife, but just a second kidnapped wife.
But he recognized that they came up on boats.
Mongols didn't like boats.
They crossed the river on a goatskin.
They wanted to do something organic.
A boat was like a cart.
A cart belonged to a woman.
It was a floating cart.
I am not going over on a floating cart.
I'm going to ride a goatskin across the river.
So he's assigned one detachment.
You have to burn the boats so the diviet cannot escape when we rout the elephants.
Well, the war battle, I mean, got started.
The elephants are running wild.
All kinds of chaos is going on.
The group that's sent to burn the boats, they're Mongols.
And he's named for someone his father just killed.
They want to go to war.
Why burn a bunch of women's carts?
It's just not, you know, floating.
So they go and join the battle.
They leave the boats.
Well, the Mongols won the battle, but the Dai Viet forces got on the boats and sailed back to what's now Hanoi.
And then they evacuated the city, took all the food, everything out of the city, and they disappeared into the delta.
The Mongols arrived.
They conquered, quote unquote, Hanoi, the capital city.
And they had nothing.
They had nothing.
They won every battle, they lost the war, they retreated.
Ah-Ju was the son of Han-Ga-Dai and he saw all this happen and he recognized the importance of water and boats and so he knew.
And he spent his time studying the Yangtze River and every little river around it and the cities.
It was not an auspicious beginning,
And the crucial thing he saw was the cities are heavily, heavily fortified on the land side because invasion comes from the land and they expect this little line of boats to protect them on the water.
And so their city walls are weak.
The defenses are weak on that side.
And in fact, just episode after episode in his childhood was inauspicious.
That's where we have to attack.
So how?
They sent off the Ilkhanate to Persia, where Chinggis Khan, his uncle, was now dead and his cousins were ruling.
Or his nephews, we would say, or cousins, nephews.
So they sent over engineers to build a special kind of trebuchet, a catapult.
And they had to play around with it to adapt it for a boat because they were usually made for stable ground.
But they adapted it for the boat and for throwing heavy things and also for some incendiary bombs.
They developed it.
And they attacked the first city.
It fell.
They attacked the next.
It fell.
They had something that was working.
They worked their way down the Yangtze River, destroying city after city with this navy.
And then the army would move in after the navy had broken down.
So this is a catapult on a ship.
Catapult on a ship.
But it's, yeah, we call it tebushé for this type of catapult.
Yes.
Yes.
Now it's a great weapon.
It's like it's no longer a woman's cart.
It's a bow and arrow.
It is a giant bow and arrow.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
The father and mother moved camp one time when he was quite young, and somehow they overlooked him and forgot him.
Yes.
And they conquer their way down.
to Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Song.
They've been in power for a long time, since 970, and now we're already into the 1270s.
That's a long time.
They're dissipated, they've had imbeciles ruling, all kinds of things going on.
And at this point, we have a child in command.
But Kublai makes a very strange move.
He says, okay, let's invade Japan now.
What?
We're fighting against the Song Dynasty.
And most people ascribe it to all kinds of things, but actually I think
There was a great logic to it.
One was he had abolished his grandfather's policy of defeat and destroy until they are no more.
That was the phrase that was used for their enemies.
And he had replaced it with a kind of mercy policy.
Try to incorporate them into your army if possible, but be merciful.
He did not want to destroy, and he was not.
He was left behind.
He had a lot of defectors coming in.
And because the Mongols prized people with skills,
A lot of very clever people with shipbuilding and engineers and these people were flocking to the Mongols, whereas the scholars were all hanging out in Guangzhou doing calligraphy and poetry and having contests over who could sing or paint.
So here's this young child, we don't know what age, but it could be around four or five, I think.
I don't know what scholars do, but they were being scholars.
Yes.
But actually, I think there's a very, very good reason for...
invading Japan, several.
The main one was to cut off the supply of sulfur.
They needed it for gunpowder in South Tong.
They lost their sources in northern China when they were driven out.
They got it from Japan.
It was a great source.
But I think there were other reasons.
If they could trade, they could also perhaps flee to Japan, and they didn't want that to happen.
And then there's this idea of, you know, like,
kill the chicken that scared the monkey.
It's like, okay, we'll go do this, and then maybe they'll just surrender down there if they see us conquer Japan.
Well, it was a total failure.
He was left behind, and as it turned out, some other people, the Taichung, found him, and then they kept him for a while, and eventually he was reunited with his father and mother.
You've got a bunch of ships that are mainly great on the river and will ride along the coast, and you're crossing some treacherous water there.
And the Mongols basically just did not know what they were doing.
Okay, you can arrive with the trebuchet and you can throw grenades at the beach,
It's not really going to do a lot of damage.
It might scare a few horses, but you're not destroying cities.
And the Japanese cities were more in.
They weren't there on the beach waiting for Mongols to come invade.
So he failed in that invasion.
No, there was some fighting, and the samurai learned some very valuable things.
The samurai had such a ritualized way of... It's like the knights of Europe coming out with armor that had to be lifted up on a crane onto a horse.
I mean, it was just craziness, craziness.
The samurai, almost at that point, you ride out in front of your enemy and you recite the story of your genealogy.
Right.
You know, Mongols, they have no use for that.
They're there to fight.
They're there to win.
But on the other hand, this was an unknown territory to them.
And the weather did turn against them.
But I don't want to give too much credit to the weather.
I really think that the Japanese defeated them.
The Mongols weren't well prepared.
Their ships were not very good.
They were defeated in the first invasion.
Could they get off the ships onto the beach?
Oh, they did.
They had some skirmishes or small battles on land.
Yes, they did.
So they couldn't do their usual Mongol thing.
You're right.
Well, see, they don't have enough horses for one thing.
Yeah.
And there were many tactical things that they had done incorrectly.
It's the first time anybody had ever tried to have such a massive invasion.
Yeah.
So they're just learning the basics of what it means to have a navy.
So he has failed to conquer.
And it's very odd to me that I never have any inkling of a spark of relationship much between the father and the son.
And he's thinking like a Mongol that you rule the...
those waters and lands, but he ruled the ocean.
He stopped the trade.
He stopped the supply.
He cut off the possibility of the Song Dynasty fleeing to Japan.
He won in a certain way.
He lost, but he had won his objective of cutting off southern China.
Also, it gave him, Navy, some experience with the ocean, and now they were ready to move out into the ocean around southern China.
So they were closing in then.
Aju was in command, but actually the head command was a man named Bayan, who was a Mongol who had been raised more in Central Asia.
He was perhaps born close to the Fergana Valley in that area.
We're not exactly sure where he was born, but he grew up over there.
And then he eventually was living in what's now Iran.
But he came and he took over command of the army.
He was very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, intelligent,
Aju should have been in command, but Bayan recognized that, and he and Aju worked together very well.
Aju knew how to fight the war.
Bayan was able to negotiate things back with the capital city and handle things, so Bayan is in command.
And so the generals are deserting the South Song right and left.
The artisans are all coming up to join the Mongols.
The generals are loading up the boats with all the jewels, and they grab a couple of brothers to the little five-year-old emperor, and they put them on a boat, and they're fleeing.
They even deserted their own families.
The generals were corrupt.
cowards who fled.
The person left in charge was the Dowager Empress, an old lady.
She had no children.
Xie was her name, the Dowager Empress Xie.
They said she was missing an eye.
Because then when Timuchin is eight years old, his father decides to take him off to find a wife, which finding a wife in the Mongolian terms means you give the child to that family, or you give the boy to that family, and he will live with them, and they will raise him up, and they will train him the way they want before he can marry their daughter.
She was ugly.
They called her Ugly Xie.
That's what they called her at that time.
She was in charge.
And she offered the Mongols everything.
I'll give you everything.
Please let the emperor stay.
Okay, even if you demote him to just being a king, please let him stay.
Bayan said, no, total surrender, total surrender.
So she decided to surrender.
She said, yes, we will surrender the capital.
So Bayan came in with a small group of soldiers.
They looked around, and she invited him to come to the palace to surrender.
And he said, no, no.
I didn't win this war in the palace.
My soldiers won this war in the field.
You have to come with the emperor in front of my soldiers to surrender.
But he did not harm her.
He respected her.
And there was no looting of the city.
Now, later, they take everything in a very systematic way.
They take the archives and all this kind of stuff away.
But there was no wholesale looting and killing of people, nothing like that.
So they've taken the capital, and she comes out, she surrenders, she bows on the ground towards Beijing, and then she takes the child emperor, and they slowly make their way—she was a little bit sick, it took her a longer time—to Beijing, and they surrender again in a public ceremony, bowing to Kublai Khan.
He gives each of them a palace, he gives them a new
new title.
He's trying to show the world this is the new face of Mongols.
We don't kill off the old people anymore who are ruling.
We're going to give them a palace, treat them nicely and all.
But the navy that had fled did not defend the city.
Those cowardly generals
They made the new little boy, seven-year-old brother, half-brother to the Emperor Gong was his name.
They made him the emperor.
Well, they're just floating around on the ocean, losing all support from city after city.
The Muslims who were controlling the trade and controlling many of the ships of that area, they were Chinese Muslims, but they were still Muslims.
They switched sides to the Mongols because of the religious freedom thing and because they were merchants and their status would be raised.
So the Muslims were switching over.
The fleet was kind of a fleet lost without a country out there.
They had some loyal supporters some places.
They dropped the emperor in the ocean.
How do you drop the emperor into ocean?
They accidentally spilled him into ocean and then they fished him out, but he died.
So, fortunately, they had one more seven-year-old half-brother.
So, on Lantau Island, exactly where the
Hong Kong Airport is today the new, well, it's not so new anymore, but I still think it was the new airport on Lantau Island.
So they went there and they had a big coronation ceremony and all, but the people there were not supportive enough.
It certainly wasn't Hong Kong then anyway, the Delta of the Pearl River.
So they sailed out farther south to another island and then they took it over.
And of course, the first thing they did was, well, we have to build a palace.
What, the Mongols are chasing you and you're gonna stop and build a palace?
And so he's taking him off at age eight, but he didn't take the other son from the other wife, Bektar.
So these are like the remains of the Chinese.
Yes, the generals.
We're gonna protect it with a great wall of the sea.
They chained together the boats across the entrance to the harbor.
And they put the palace boat, so-called, in the middle.
The generals didn't trust their own soldiers enough, so they made all of them leave the island and go to the boats to fight the Mongols.
So Mongols arrived, and over and over and over, they asked them to surrender.
You won't be harmed, all this kind of stuff.
But the Mongols now took over the land.
So they had the water all around them, and they had the land.
And once the fighting started—
They could just shoot down from the highland right onto the ships.
And they've cut the ships off from the fresh supply of wood and water.
So they can't boil rice.
They have to try to eat rice and drink seawater.
They're all sick as dogs out there.
And the leaders refused to surrender.
The little boy is there, seven-year-old emperor, Bing was his name, with his pet parrot.
That's the only thing he had left in life was his pet parrot.
He was keeping him.
And then the Mongols, they offered every opportunity, but the prime minister so-called, coward that he is, although he's treated as a hero today in China and throughout their history, but coward that he was, he said, we will not disgrace the country by letting them capture the emperor.
There was something about Temüjin having been lost once and found by the Tai Chiud and reunited with the family.
So first he threw his own wife and children into the water to drown, and then he took the emperor
and held him, the seven-year-old, he was seven years and one month, he had just turned seven years old, and jumped into the water with his child.
A child murderer, he's a child murderer to do that.
Somehow in the whole ruckus, the cage came undone with the parrot, and the parrot fell in the water too.
So the seven-year-old boy and the parrot died in the water.
That was the end of one of the greatest dynasties in the history of the world.
The Song Dynasty, they were intellectually great.
They were artistically great.
They were technologically great.
They were just one of the greatest moments of world history.
And now his father takes him off at age eight, and he was gonna take him to Erlun's family, but he never made it.
And it ends with this coward killing a child and his pet parrot in order to save the honor
that was betrayed by this woman.
The men lost the war.
The men lost the war.
Who's to blame?
An old, one-eyed, ugly lady, Empress Xie.
All that is true.
And the Chinese summarize that with losing the mandate of heaven.
Very often, most scholars depict Emperor Xie as the traitor to the country.
And I say, no, that boy lived on for another 45 years.
And so she did not betray the country.
She protected her emperor that she was supposed to protect.
It was the man who killed the child emperor, who killed Yongbing.
Well, yes, first of all, he had unified China in the largest sense of the word.
He stopped with another family.
With Korea, Tibet, Manchuria, Mongolia, part of Central Asia, he had unified it.
It's sort of like the first family he came across.
But he did so at the expense of his empire.
They didn't recognize him as the great emperor, and there was great...
opposition from the Golden Horde of Russia and also from the central region, which is called the Chagatayid, the descendants of Sagade, the second son, the Chagatay Empire, and then from the Ilkhanate of Persia.
The sons of Genghis Khan.
Yeah.
And only the Ilkhanate was still loyal to him.
And...
But they're so far away.
In the words of the secret history, it's sort of like instant love, that there was fire in his eyes and fire in her eyes.
Yes.
But he had China.
It was unified under him.
And then he sent out the first expedition to sail directly to Persia.
There had been trade all throughout thousands of years, but it was usually port to port.
you know, different merchants trading goods.
No, he organized a great fleet to send a queen or princess to become a queen in the Ilkhanate, to marry the Ilkhan of Persia.
It's Persia and Azerbaijan and Armenia and Iraq and part of Syria, all of that area.
So he said, organized this, and it so happened that Marco Polo was ready to go home because they knew Kublai Khan was about to die.
And in fact, he only had about one year left to live.
And they wanted to get their riches out before they didn't know what's going to happen.
This is a new dynasty.
They've been in total control of China for one generation, and they didn't know what was going to happen.
And also, just before that,
That had been a bad sign because Kublai Khan had tried to invade Japan a second time, and he had failed a second time.
And the second time, I think, again, he had a practical purpose, and that was he had this whole huge Song army that now he's the new enlightened Mongol who doesn't slaughter.
And he saw this girl, Bershta, who was about nine years old, a little older, and he wanted to stay there with that family, according to the story.
So what is he going to do?
They're not...
They're not safe.
So he sends a bunch of them up into the Amur River of what's now the Russian Far East, or we call Siberian English, but the Russian Far East, the Amur River.
He sent expeditions up into Tibet exploring options up there, but there wasn't enough room or enough agricultural area for a huge group.
military colony, but most of his ships were loaded with former prisoners of the war from the Song Dynasty, and they were not armed.
They had hoes and implements for farming.
He wanted to create, obviously, an agricultural, military agricultural farm in Japan to help feed northern China, because it was very important, just as they were doing with the Amur River, but it was more complicated.
So,
Again, they lost.
They didn't have it.
And part of the reason is the exhibition was massive.
And they organized it in the Mongol principles of left wing, right wing.
This didn't work at sea because the left wing is from Korea.
There's Korean ships built up there.
The right wing is from southern China, mostly, with ships built down there.
They're not the same.
They have a head, but there's no center point.
Genghis Khan always had the goal, they called it, G-O-L, the goal, the center, or Q-O-L, actually.
And so the father left him there with that family.
He had the center in command.
No, he sent the two...
They were arguing with each other, not cooperating, not helping each other, sabotaging each other.
They get there, and once again, they have the same problems, even though they've come with lots of grenades this time.
Again, the grenades are exploding.
They're scaring the horses.
You know, it's impressive.
And a lot of silk screens are made later showing these impressive battles and all, but they lost.
And again, a typhoon happened to be the final destruction of the Navy.
But I think it's, Japan had defeated the Mongols, I would say.
But on the way home, the father decided he saw a drinking party and he decided to join him.
Japanese deserve credit for that victory.
And then the
The sinking of the ships was more caused by the typhoon.
But already the Japanese had developed good strategies while the Mongols had been away.
They knew how the Mongols fought.
And they knew that at night they could fire flaming arrows at the ships, set them on fire, and they were doing great damage.
So again, Kublai Khan lost the invasion of Japan.
But the soldiers were gone.
They drowned.
He didn't kill them off, it wasn't his deliberate plan, but the problem was solved.
It's one of those ironies of history that is hard to quite understand.
So this had happened, but then Kublai Khan was coming near the end of life, and Marco Polo and those wanted to get out.
They're ready to go.
And Kublai Khan allowed them to sail on this expedition with Khokhjin was her name, the Princess Khokhjin, to go to Hormuz.
And so they went, and that began a whole system of trade back and forth, back and forth.
Kublai Khan died soon after that.
His grandson, who's not so well respected in history because he's often called a drunk, but his name was Timur, Timur Encetu.
But he was a drunk when he was young, but his grandfather had him caned a couple times
They were Tatars.
in public, and he cured him of drinking.
And actually, he was not a drunk later on, and he was—first he knew—reassembled the Mongol Empire.
He did.
The Golden Horde declared loyalty to him, recognized him as Great Han, as emperor of the whole empire.
The Chagatayid of Central Asia, they declared loyalty to him.
He hid his identity.
The Ilkhanate was already loyal to him.
They all declared loyalty.
He had reassembled the empire, and he had the greatest navy in the world, and he sent out envoys to every place they had attacked or traded with to say, that era is over.
We're no longer attacking anybody.
We're changing from conquest to commerce.
On the step, everybody kind of figures out who everybody is.
We want to trade with you.
come to China, bring your goods.
We're going to trade with you.
He instituted, it was short, unfortunately, didn't last forever.
I wish it could have.
But it was a great era of the exchange of all kinds of things going back and forth all the way, actually all the way to Africa because from Hormuz, they had connection to Somaliland.
And some people say Kenya already at that time.
I'm not sure, but very wide, very wide.
So technically he ruled over the largest size the Mongol Empire ever had.
They figured out who he was.
Yes, but actually the Golden Horde of Russia, they were quite independent by now, and he let them be independent, but they were loyal to him.
And supposedly, they poisoned him.
And they were still exchanging back and forth all kinds of things.
So there were Ossetian soldiers in China.
They had a whole contingent of Ossetian soldiers there from Russia, from the Caucasus areas of Russia.
Over time, those groups...
They were allowed to intermarry.
The Chinese were not.
But they were intermarrying with Mongols, and they were switching to Mongolian language slowly.
At first, I don't know.
It's not clear.
But again, Kublai Khan, thinking in this internationalist way, said, okay, we need a new alphabet for the world.
Everybody in the world writes with one alphabet.
He got on his horse and was able to ride back home, but within a few days, he died.
Chinese, Mongolian, Russian, Arabic, everything.
It didn't work, but he tried it for a while and some inscriptions are still there to this day.
I like Marco Polo.
I use his work a lot.
I find him very reliable.
In the areas where he's not reliable, you can kind of tell because he wasn't there.
But the places he was, he reported a lot of stuff.
And so I'm very much indebted to him for a lot of things.
Because with something like The Princess...
and also another fighting princess from Central Asia named Hutulun.
He wrote about that, but I also needed other sources.
So if I could find Chinese sources or Arab sources or something else or Persian to support it, then I really felt a lot of confidence with him over time.
So now, Temujin is off living with another family.
But pieces were romanticized and you have to always discount it, but it's very good.
However,
I believe the best work written about Marco Polo, aside from his own book, which was actually written by Rustacello, dictated in prison in January, you know.
In the 20th century, Eugene O'Neill wrote a play that became a comedy on Broadway called Marco Millions.
That was both a play on what he was called, El Milione, the million one, because he had talked about cities of millions of people and about money in the millions and things that people in Europe just couldn't believe could happen.
He then published his whole play as a book to show people what he really meant.
And it was an ironic look at capitalism, because this is 20th century already.
versus the idea of like a philosopher king, which he saw in Kublai Khan.
And somebody comes from his family, a family, not a relative, but a close person named Mongluk comes to get him, take him back.
And so Marco Polo becomes a symbol of capitalism, not at its worst, but at its most
And that is, like the princess in this story, this is not in real life, but this is in the play written by Eugene O'Neill, but I think it captures a lot.
The princess, Hoxton, says, Marco is an excellent judge of quantity.
And there were things like that.
And then in the play, Bayan, the great general...
He talks with Kublai Khan and he said, look, these people are dangerous from the West.
We should go conquer them now while we can.
Kublai Khan tells Bayan, again in the play, this is fiction, but he tells Bayan, they are not worth conquering.
And if we conquer them, we will become like them.
And he said, Marco Polo has been in our land.
He has seen everything.
He has learned nothing.
He has seen everything.
He understands nothing.
For me, this was such an important moment in the history of the world, symbolically, with Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the coming together of two worlds.
It could have gone a different way.
It could have gone a different way.
And it's not that I'm anti-capitalist, I'm pro-capitalist, but the way so many things worked out
It was a misstep in history.
Maybe we took the wrong step at that moment and we could have learned more from cooperation.
And they make it through the winter.
They didn't quite integrate successfully.
No.
But today...
We've returned to that, I think.
The East and the West are confronting each other again on more equal terms.
For a long time, the West was so dominant and the East was so downtrodden by colonialism and other things, and internal rot and other things.
They make it through the winter.
But today, there's not necessarily equality, but there's more of a balance.
And which way will we go?
Mother Erlum, by now, she has four sons and one daughter.
You know, my work is often classified as Chinese history, which I think is ironic because for me, it's always a Mongolian history.
I think the daughter had already been born or the daughter was going to be born not too long after that.
But for the last book I wrote, which dealt a lot more with China because it was about Kublai Khan,
then in that book, I deliberately did not go to China.
I'd been there numerous times before.
I deliberately did not.
I'm an outsider.
I do not speak Chinese.
I'm not a Chinese scholar.
I never even had a course in Chinese art or calligraphy or anything.
And I wanted to be very clear, mine is an outside perspective.
But I think it's possible as an outsider to still have respect for
for that culture, even if I disagree that they appoint this one as a hero and that one as the villain, I disagree, and they'll say, oh, I'm wrong, I don't understand their history, and they're probably right, that's quite possible.
There's an outside view that is different and tries to be respectful of what happens in that part of the world.
Just as I'm respectful towards Chinggis Khan and the Mongol Empire, I respect China very much.
But they make it through the winter.
I'm an American.
I love the ideals of my country.
I love so many aspects of our culture, and there are many aspects I don't, of course, because it's impossible to love everything, even about the members of your own family.
And I do hope that through understanding one another or just making the effort to understand, even if we understand wrongly and we're incorrect in it, just to make the effort to understand will help us a lot.
The spring comes, and of course, the clan is going to move to a new camp.
And the West has had a long couple of centuries of extreme arrogance that they are there to teach the world.
And I...
sometimes dismayed I meet these young people all over the world who've come to help.
They're an NGO and they're going to teach the people how to take care of the environment.
They're going to teach the women how to exercise their rights.
They're going to bring in microfinancing to help liberate people.
We are arrogant beyond words.
And we need to be a little bit more humble and try to put ourselves on an equal basis with some of these people, not a superior basis.
They go to spring camp from winter camp.
Beautifully put.
despite the fact that Timur al-Jituhan had united the empire, at least symbolically, all of it, and they had the trade going on.
The Mongols never adapted well to China, and they began having problems in different areas.
And they have a ceremony for the ancestors.
So in some areas of the world, they became more like the local people.
So in Central Asia, they became Muslim, and they got more absorbed into that world and broke away from the Mongol examples from before.
Russia lingered on longer under Mongol domination, but it got weaker and weaker over time, and it was based around the Volga River, but they weakened to the point that they just became a tributary people minority within a Russian empire.
And they started the ceremony, but they did not tell Erlun.
But the Mongols had left the framework for empire for Russia.
That's something the Russians don't want to hear any more than they want to hear me criticize the end of the Song Dynasty.
But it is true that even yam, yam is the word that was used for this postal system, and that's the ministries today in Russia.
And there are many, many other things in Russia.
Even malchik.
Malchik is a herder.
Mal is an animal, and Chin is a person who takes care of animals.
You know, it's all kinds of influences in Russia that some people want to deny, but there's always a great, powerful strand of research and scholarship in Russia that supports
And so she came and she was angry that she had been left out.
this understanding of the Mongols, and I depend on them tremendously.
It's not just Gumilyov is one of the famous ones, but he was a little bit too romantic with his ideas and all, but I depend upon a lot of the research done by Russian scholars and by early German scholars in the 19th century under sponsorship of the Tsar.
So I depend on that work.
So you had a great influence there, but it was weakening.
So bit by bit, 1368, the Mongols had become so weak within China that they were overthrown.
But they weren't absorbed into China.
The Mongols had been there since 1215 to 1368,
They packed up, went back to Mongolia.
The old women said, you're the one for whom we do not have to call.
It was just another seasonal migration.
It was just amazing.
And they said, okay, we're still the Yuan dynasty.
We're not giving you the seals.
We're not acknowledging the Ming.
And they never did throughout the whole of the Ming.
In fact, they went down one time and captured the Ming emperor, took him back to Mongolia.
And then they tried to ransom him.
And the Chinese said, no, we're going to appoint another emperor.
So the Mongols decided, okay.
The worst thing we can do to the Chinese is give them back the old emperor.
So you had two emperors back.
Okay, let them work it out.
And the empire just weakened from internal reasons for the Mongols, but some external things from nature.
We will feed you if you come, but we do not have to take care of you.
And I think that was the great plague.
You know, everything in history, everything that's good comes with something underneath it that's bad.
And everything that's bad seems to have something underneath that sometimes works out good in a way.
But this great system that united, it's called the yam or orto, orto, that united everything.
People could move back and forth quickly.
Then it could also take the plague out of southern China into all parts of the world.
And I do think that's what happened.
And the plague destroyed the Mongol system.
And if all of these people are ruled by Mongols because they're benefiting so much from this system, and now the system collapses.
Letting her know that as a captive woman, she was not a real wife in their view.
Yeah.
You don't need the empire anymore.
Yeah.
So it just fell apart.
After 1368, the empire just fell apart.
And most of them stayed in...
Persia and Iran and Afghanistan.
The Hazara people are still descended from the army there.
And then in Russia, some of them stayed.
But then finally, in the time of Catherine the Great, a lot of them returned.
They had been there for hundreds of years.
And then they returned to Mongolia in the 1700s.
And so...
Many Mongols came home.
They were still Mongols.
Despite hundreds of years of exposure to other cultures, they came back to their tent and squatting around the fire and drinking fermented milk and eating dried curds.
Yeah.
Well, it was actually very difficult because they were a little bit lazy and they weren't so good with doing the task.
And that was really the signal that when they moved camp, they were not taking her with them.
And so it became difficult actually to support so many people coming home.
and eating up all the animals.
The Mongols in China had been used to just eating.
They hadn't been producing much for 150 years.
And they packed up and they took her animals.
Short answer is yes, absolutely.
No other power in the history of the world has conquered Russia and China and Persia and Central Asia and Turkey and Korea.
No power in the world has done that.
Not Alexander, not the Romans.
Nobody will ever do it again.
Nobody's going to conquer China and Russia again and rule both countries.
They took the animals, but at that moment, she still had one horse for a moment, and she jumped on the horse, and she took the banner of her husband, and she raced around the people.
Oh, I think there's a very good lesson.
The Mongols took Iraq.
They took Baghdad.
They held it.
The Americans, we followed the exact opposite strategy of the Mongols.
The Mongol strategy is, first, you take the countryside.
They're country people.
They think in terms of countryside.
You take the countryside, you occupy the countryside, and you cut off the city.
It cannot live without the countryside.
And that's how they did it every time.
They would come in, as I say, in some cases two years in advance to clear people out so they would have room for their horses and have pasture for their horses and all.
And you take the small towns and then the small cities, and then the last one is the big city.
Americans, they said, no, we're going to take Baghdad.
We're going to bomb Baghdad.
We're going to have this shock and awe.
We're going to go in.
We'll conquer the country from Baghdad.
So they go in.
They get trapped in their little tiny green zone.
They never conquer Iraq.
the strongest army in the world.
You know, this is something that worked in Europe.
World War II, yes, we bombed the cities and we took the city because that was the center of production for the modern era.
But the countryside is the place that produces the food.
The Mongols were very aware of that and supplies the water.
You cut off the water from the city, you cut off the food from the city, what's the city going to do?
They're going to surrender.
The Americans were applying something that worked in Western Europe to conquer Germany.
It did not work to conquer Iraq or Vietnam or even Northern Korea or Cambodia or Laos or Syria or God knows.
And the banner after death contains the soul of the person.
It worked only in Grenada.
I think that's the only, in my lifetime, that's the only successful war we had.
Lasted a couple of hours.
We went in, conquered the little tiny island.
Otherwise, we've been chased out of every country.
We've lost it.
Tail between our legs.
We dropped more bombs on Cambodia than we dropped on Germany.
It's hard to believe, hard to believe.
We dropped more bombs on Cambodia than on Germany.
We did nothing, because Germany, you destroy the cities, the people surrender.
Dresden's gone, Frankfurt, Würzburg, Berlin.
In Cambodia, you can bomb the countryside forever,
And so she raced around, and they were a little bit nervous, and so they camped for one night, and they waited until it was dark.
You can kill the people, and they did.
You can use chemical warfare, and they did.
And you could still go into the eastern part of Cambodia and you could go to large areas where you don't hear birds singing because of their chemical warfare of American bombs.
So we still do it, but we don't want to admit it and we don't want to go in to win.
In World War II, the Americans did have
Unconditional surrender.
Well, I mean, you can support the war, not support the war.
We did it right, we did it wrong.
These are all issues that people can argue.
But we had a clear policy.
We go into Afghanistan, we're fighting terror.
We're going to bring democracy and we're going to free the women.
What?
I mean, it's absolute sheer insanity, the things that we did.
And we kill people.
Not only did we use chemical warfare and kill a lot of people in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, we killed American soldiers.
We killed American soldiers and my father was one.
He died from Agent Orange disease.
Oh, but that doesn't count.
He didn't die on the battlefield and we didn't mean to kill him.
It doesn't count.
Then they took off.
Modern warfare is brutal.
And we just paper over it sometimes, you know?
It was designed to kill all vegetation.
This is going to be a humane way.
We're going to kill all the vegetation in the jungle, and that way they can stop moving the army through the jungle and they can stop the supplies from coming.
And this time, one of the friends of the family came running out to try to stop them, and they killed him.
That was the American strategy.
Yeah, Henry Kissinger, Nobel Prize winner.
He is now resting in hell, is exactly where he belongs, for what he did to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
The bombing was just absolutely horrendous.
So Agent Orange comes in, they defoliated, which means they wiped out the crops, so people are starving, literally, in the case of Cambodia, starving to death.
the animals are being killed, and deformed children are being born to this day.
And American soldiers died by the thousands, not immediately, not on the battlefield, not right there.
They go home, they have the disease, they linger, they take the whole family down with them in an emotional trauma of becoming slowly paralyzed and dying.
We did that to our own people.
So yeah, warfare,
I don't think we're any more humane with it any better today than in the past.
And Temüjin cried.
It's just we can hide parts of it more easily and deny it more easily.
If you're killed by a Mongol, it's very clear you're killed by a Mongol.
You're killed by friendly fire in American war, it's a different matter.
He was a little boy, eight years old.
Yes.
Yes.
I'm not a pacifist, again, but I think war is acceptable in some situations, but the more controlled it is, the better.
My effort is not to do away with all the things that happened under Chinggis Khan with the brutality and all like that, but it's to measure it against what goes on today in the world today.
And we have different images.
There are two images of Chinggis Khan.
There was nothing he could do.
One is our image.
He's a barbarian on a horseback killing people and raping women all the time.
The other image is the Mongolian image.
And when they finally built an official statue of him
He was just a little boy.
in this century for the 800th anniversary of his founding of Mongolia, they had to think about how to present him to the world and to themselves.
And now that family is left there on the step, four children, possibly five already,
And they chose the Lincoln Memorial as the model.
He was the late great log river of the Mongol nation.
And so he's seated there in front of the Mongolian parliament.
There's another statue that's better known, but it was a private enterprise that created him on horseback, but not with a weapon, but he's on horseback out in the countryside.
But the official one from the government is Chinggis Khan seated like Abraham Lincoln.
And they issued stamps to show that he is the great law giver.
Or depending on where you are and how you want to see it.
There are many things that happened that were terrible and horrible.
And for people who lose a war, it's going to always be terrible and horrible.
After conquering the Hawaiianism empire in Central Asia, Chinggis Khan returned, and then they had a great, what they called Natum, a great celebration that went on for a whole summer just about, and they had so much wealth to distribute to everybody, and everybody is being given all kinds of things, you know, for what they have done, including the people who helped save him when he was in the kank, in the ox yoke.
They were rewarded with—everybody was rewarded.
It was a great time.
But
The first place he had attacked outside was the Tangut nation, and they had sworn allegiance to him, and then when he went off to the Middle East, they refused to send troops.
Xochitl, the other woman with two children, they're all left there to die on the steppe.
He didn't forget that.
He's going back to the Tangut nation, and he's going to conquer them again.
As he was crossing the Gobi, which takes a while, and crossing the Gobi, he was distracted a little bit by hunting the Hulan, which is the wild—we say the wild ass or—
I used to say wild horse.
It sounds a little better.
But the Hulan, to say Hulan of the Gobi.
He was off hunting Hulan.
He fell from his horse.
and he injured his leg very badly, and he seemed to decline from that point, and it took some number of months before August of 1227.
He was very much near the end of life.
You can read online the exact date, and it's all very specific, but the truth is we don't know exactly which day he died in that time because one of his wives was running the camp,
When the winter comes, they will surely all die.
and they were keeping it secret until the defeat of the Tangut was completed.
And the Tangut offered all kinds of things for the Mongols to go away again the second time.
And Chinggis Khan told his family, no, accept nothing.
And then when they surrender, you kill the royal family, kill them all.
So that the idea, they were Buddhist people.
The Tanguts were Buddhist.
How do they make it through the winter?
And the idea was usually you can be reborn into your own family.
But he said, no, you kill off the whole family so they can't be reborn.
So he died there.
How was his successor chosen?
Oh, the succession issue was always difficult.
He did not have the right to appoint a successor.
That was not the Mongol way.
He could nominate somebody.
So before he set off for the Middle Eastern campaign, one of his wives said to him, you know, even the biggest tree falls.
Mother Erlun, in the words of the Secret History, she pulled her hat down over her head, she took her black stick, and she ran up and down the banks of the river, digging out roots
you've got to make a plan and talk to your sons about the future.
So he did.
He called the sons together.
So this is Zuch, the oldest boy who was born while the father was allied with his anda, Jamuk, and he was named visitor, Zuch.
And then the next one was Chagadai, and the next one was Akadai,
And the next one was Tala, the father of Kublai Khan, but he was still alive at this point.
So all four of them came.
So Chinggis Khan explained to them he wanted to talk about the succession and to get some consensus from them about the succession.
And so he said...
The Mongols always call on people to speak by order of age.
They also serve tea or food, anything by order of age.
It's always done that way, from then till now.
So he called first on zuch.
And he said, what do you say, zuch?
Chinggis Khan favored zuch.
This is the one who is questionable paternity, but he always favored him.
You know, the youngest Tulu was too hot-headed.
Agude was a heavy drinker.
Cagade was very rigid about the law of the Mongols and all.
You know, but he thought he seemed to favor Zut as a more reasonable, good warrior, but reasonable person.
But he called on Zut, my son, speak.
Cagade, the second one who believes in Mongol law, supposedly, he jumped up and he said—
This is when he accused his father of all kinds of, he said, how can you call on this Mongol, this market bastard?
If you call on him first, that means you want him to be the great Khan.
He should not be the great Khan of the Mongol Empire.
It is his Mongol Empire now, on and on, you know, you can imagine kind of scene.
Well, Genghis Khan is the greatest ruler in the world.
He's sitting there being lectured by his second son,
And this is when he gave that impassioned speech to his—and actually, the way the Secret History makes it look like it was his assistant speaker who said it, because very often the great power doesn't say the words directly.
They let somebody else say them for them.
They have a spokesperson.
But anyway, I think it was his words, and I think he said them on that day.
That's what I think.
of this business of, you do not know, you are not there.
The stars were moving in the sky, the heaven was turning around, the earth was turning over.
to feed the gullet of her brood.
You do not know who loved whom.
You do not know who your mother loved.
You do not know what your mother did.
And if I say he is my son, who are you to say he is not my son?
By the way, pretty just...
I believe that...
She fed them through the winter.
I don't know if she was alive at this point or not.
We do not have the death recorded.
Mongols are not good at recording death.
They usually just say somebody finished their age, or they have some euphemism for it.
But he made that impassioned speech, and Zagade had to submit.
And he said, yes, you are our father, and we accept what you say, but...
She found foods digging up
A deer shot with words cannot be loaded on a horse.
A deer shot with words cannot be eaten.
So, Chinggis Khan knew.
So he said to the boys, the boys, I mean, these are middle-aged men, they're not boys, but he said to the men, what do you want to do?
What do you want to do?
And he said, I don't favor Tzagate because
whatever she could, finding whatever she could, everything she could.
of his attitude and the situation.
And Talal is still hot-headed, and he actually ended up being drunk and dying early.
But the other guys, they said, well, a good day.
They chose him because he was the most generous and the bon vivant, and he was for every party and drinking every time and
Yeah, one time, Shiggy Hutuk, the great judge who wrote The Secret History, Shiggy Hutuk was sleeping in a cart one time for whatever reason.
I don't know what.
I think he also had passed out drunk, perhaps.
But Agudi came out drunk and grabbed him up and pulled him back into the party.
And Agudi was a party guy.
And so he was chosen as the next great Han of the Mongol Empire.
And even at this young age, Temujin was already beginning to go out to collect things.
But fortunately...
There was sort of a plan B, and that Chinggis Khan had set up very powerful women, his daughters, but also he had chosen wives for each of his sons, very, very capable wives.
And for Ogedei, he had a wife who wasn't even his first wife.
The first wife would usually be somebody closer by a certain clan or something, but he had a very intelligent woman named Dorjin.
And then she was more or less ruling in his last few years.
And then after he died, she ruled empire in her own name.
She was the ruler of the greatest empire in world ever ruled by a woman.
It's incredible.
And Darshan was, actually there was peace.
He could get fish.
He stopped all campaigns.
There was peace during her time, and the women, such as Dorozin and others, were extremely into economics and trade and running these—they had these private corporations called ortok.
He could do a few tasks to help feed the family.
She was running her ortok and everything.
So she became much more interested in the economics of the trade and running the empire.
And it was a time of peace, and she recognized that peace was better for trade.
It was better.
And so it was a peaceful time.
But like all of us, we have our weak points.
And she favored a worthless son to become the successor.
And
It was an extremely awful struggle at this point, but she saved every one of the children.
None of the sons actually were great, but Agud had favored another.
But anyway, she favored Guyuk, her son.
And so she arranged to have him made the great emperor while she was still alive.
And her primary minister was also a woman named Fatima from the Middle East.
And unfortunately, Guyuk organized a purge of her court.
and killed off a lot of these people who had been supporting her, and a lot of them were Muslims.
And he killed off a lot, and then he was going to march against the Golden Horde because they weren't supporting him.
So he set off and he died.
He was only in office for 18 months, and he was gone.
And then his wife took over Ogilchamish
Unfortunately, she was not capable as her mother-in-law at the origin.
Uncle Hamish was a bit greedy and she didn't start any new wars, but she just kind of messed up things and she didn't rule for too long.
And this is why Kublai Khan's mother, Sorokhtani, was able to have a revolution.
She united with the Golden Horde.
She was on one end on China.
She had Northern China.
The Golden Horde had Russia.
The two of them united against the center and they overthrew
Ogilhamish, and she put her son Mongkhan in, who was succeeded by Hublai Han.
Yes, yes.
In the end, he was a father, and he favored his sons, even knowing they were not so capable, and he had lost a grandson that he loved.
But he organized it, though, as what we'd call today almost a corporation.
All lands belonged to everybody in the family, everybody.
So Kublai Khan, that's why he had soldiers.
There were Christian soldiers, Ossetian soldiers, and Kipchak soldiers.
He had 10,000 of each come in.
And then they owned—the Russians would own silk factories in China.
The Ilkhanate would own silk factories and jade mines in China.
The people in China, the Mongols, they would own villages in Persia and in Iraq.
So he organized it all.
Everything was owned by the entire clan.
It didn't last too long.
like that because of the divisions that developed.
So the great Han was primarily in charge of conquering and expanding the land so they had more lands to own.
Yes, even after this, he was kidnapped at one point by Taichung people.
That was going to be the job.
And Kublai Khan fulfilled it.
Monk Han, to some extent, fulfilled it.
Ogedei did.
Goik did not.
Yeah, and...
They weakened with every generation.
Every generation.
He was kidnapped.
And we would say, I think the correct word, we enslaved.
They put him into a kink, a yoke, like an ox would wear.
It's interesting.
It's fun.
Where did they get the DNA from Genghis Khan?
So one of the criticisms you have is like, well... They don't have one shred of scientific.
And so his two arms are in it and his head is in it.
They're supposed to be scientific.
No, they found that a bunch of people are connected.
And then they- No, no, no, no, no.
To one person.
To one person.
Yes, but they choose Genghis Khan.
Right.
There's no evidence that it was from him.
No evidence.
It's from that time.
It's one person.
But from that time or 200 years before.
It could be 200 years before, yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
See, I mean, actually, I would like for it to be true.
In a certain way, I would.
And I do think there is a truth there.
I think that by attaching it to the name of Genghis Khan, they've done a disservice to themselves, but it gets a lot of publicity, a lot more funding, and it's exciting, and so on.
And he's trapped in this thing.
But I think it's to that Mongol experience.
But Genghis Khan's descendants were almost everyone categorized and
And every night he would be taken to a different gear to be guarded by that family.
and record it.
I mean, he's the largest conqueror in the world.
You do not have just children popping up all over the place.
He had four wives all the time.
He had children with two of them.
So it's not a lot of descendants.
We know mostly who they are for many generations.
His brother, Khasr, had many more children than he did.
Many more.
And they caused a lot of problems later on for the empire, too, by rivaling the power.
So it could be that one of these other people, Bodhichar the Fool, could have been the origin of this.
It could have been back well before Chinggis Khan.
I just don't believe—and in Mongolia today,
We have nobody who claims descent from Chinggis Khan.
Oh, I believe that they found some connection of people.
And one night there was a little celebration.
Yeah, but it's... They have no evidence that it's really connected to Genghis Khan.
I think it may be tangentially connected to him.
Yeah, I think that's quite possible.
But we've already had the Hans come through.
We've had all the Turks.
Every one of the Turkic nations is descended from Mongolia.
They all came out of Mongolia.
On the other hand, I wish they could get some proof.
So most of the people are drinking.
I mean, I wish it could be true.
I just can't believe it the way it is.
We have no DNA.
Nobody knows where he went.
So they don't know where he's buried.
Okay, Genghis Khan said, let my body go.
Let my nation live.
And he's left with a boy who's not very smart.
And he chose to be buried in an unmarked grave.
And the Mongols believed very strongly it should always be that way.
Most of the Khans who followed him were also buried in a similar way.
The Chinese emperors, you know, were buried in very elaborate tombs, but not the Yuan dynasty, no.
And so Kublai Khan,
was buried back with his grandfather in an anonymous grave.
And not everyone, like Goethe died when he was on campaign towards Russia.
He was buried out there.
I think his father, Goethe, was also buried out there.
That was more their homeland.
But many of them were buried with him.
And Temüjin managed to take the kank, the wooden yoke that he's trapped in, and use it as a weapon by turning it around very quickly and hitting the boy in the head, knocking him out.
known at the same time.
Officially, you should not know it.
You cannot know it.
It should never be disturbed.
He should never be disturbed.
We're not going to have a tour group coming in.
But you're saying the people of Mongolia, they have a sense.
They believe he's in a certain place, yes.
They believe they know where the place is, but it's sacred.
You can do nothing.
Nothing.
Just leave it as it is.
That's
No roads, no buildings, no killing of animals, no chopping of trees.
Nothing can be done.
It's a holy land dedicated to him and his family.
It's a pretty amazing, unmarked grave.
Yes.
I believe in his thing about let my nation live, let my body live.
And I say to people, they ask me, well, what did he look like?
And I say, well, that portrait was painted 50 years later by somebody who never saw him.
And actually, if you look at the portrait of Kublai Khan and Genghis Khan, they look alike except one's old and one's younger.
And I think that's because Kublai was trying to establish
He wanted to establish his legitimacy as a real Mongol, that they looked alike, but his grandfather said he didn't.
And then Ogode Han and Monk Han looked different.
They looked different.
So there was nothing.
But I say, if you want to see the face of Genghis Khan, walk in any gear in Mongolia, the first child you see, that's the face of Genghis Han.
It's his nation.
He created that nation.
That's his face.
That was one of the first lessons for the Mongols that anything that moves is a weapon.
No, not at all.
No, because he's everywhere.
You know, when you have these clans that are still operating in Afghanistan and the Russians are still using the Yam system, there are many aspects of him that are out there in the world.
And I think there, I find personally inspiration the same way that Thomas Jefferson did.
He found so much inspiration in the life of Chinggis Khan and the books of Chinggis Khan that you can still read.
He bought so many copies and gave to the Library of Congress, to the Library of Virginia, the University of Virginia, and to his granddaughter.
These ideas live on, and we still have not fulfilled them.
We do not have religious freedom.
We do not have the protections for women.
We do not have the protections for envoys and ambassadors.
The ideas live on, and the rulers do not live as the common people.
They eat the same food, wear the same clothes, sleep in the same—not a bed, in his case, but sleep in the same—
This is gonna go on for generations, very important for the Mongols.
situation and simple home.
No.
If it moves, it's a weapon.
Well, I think his policy ideas, I think, are important.
We can still learn from that about protection of diplomats, not buying and selling women, not kidnapping women, and having religious freedom of individuals.
But also, he had interesting things.
He had tax-free status for all religions, all physicians, and all teachers.
He did that, he raced off in the night and he jumped into the river to hide.
They didn't pay taxes in his empire as a former president.
A teacher.
I embrace that idea out of pure greed and self-interest.
But it's not to me the idea of saving the money.
It's the idea of focusing on that as something important for the society.
He didn't say tax-free for...
any other category of people, as I recall, just for those.
And he's highlighting the health of the people, the education of the people, and the spirit of the people.
That's very important.
That's a profound approach to life.
So these are policies, and I'm not advocating so much to policies, but I think some of the general principles of being willing to learn from our mistakes.
Admit your mistake to yourself,
Correct it and go on with your life.
All of us say it's important, but we don't do it for the most part.
We don't learn from our failures as much as we think.
The other idea of promoting people on ability, I think that's certainly an idea that's
He still got a kink on him.
that is very valuable, not in the simple way of meritocracy that we've done it with, oh, if you pass the exam with this score, you get this or that, but really evaluating people and their ability.
I think it's a very good thing, not the only thing, but I think it's very important.
He's still trapped under there.
And even though he failed in the end in his own life and he turned power over to his sons and his family, it's a principle that he lived by most of his life, and we can learn from that principle.
The other thing I think is just his global feel for the world, his global understanding.
Here was a man who had had no education in any formal sense, and he had this sense that the world should be united.
The people are looking for him.
We should have things that unite all people.
They come out and they're up and down the river and he's hiding underneath the water for the most part, trying to breathe as best he can.
Everybody should have their own law, but there should be a...
Higher law of heaven that governs people.
And this later was translated, everybody should have their own language, but they all write the same alphabet by Kublai Khan.
It didn't work.
Or his idea, he tried to impose the use of paper currency in Iran, the Persian Ilkhanate.
Chinese paper money.
It didn't work.
The people there weren't used to it.
But all this international spirit of their empire, I think that we need today, we talk about, oh, globalization, we're all connected.
It's just incredible.
And we're more provincial than ever.
We are just so provincial, and sometimes we use all this technology to help preserve our provincialism.
And we can't think in global terms.
We can't think about the world.
It's just amazing to me how narrow-minded we are.
But it's dark and it protects him a little bit.
willed an entire empire into existence.
Yes.
And everything against him that you can think of, your own family deserting you, your father dying at an early age, all these things like that.
But as Jamukha said, he had a good mother and he had a good wife.
And there were many crucial points at which it was either his mother or his wife
They give up and they say, okay, we'll come back tomorrow.
who made the deciding point.
His wife, Burshta, was the one who caused the first break with Chamaka to go away.
Later on, when the shamans had become too powerful and they had humiliated his younger brother, she was the one who said he had to clamp down on the shamans who
He can't possibly escape.
we're exercising too much power.
And she guided him a lot.
But the next day he knew one family that he thought he could go to.
Sometimes we can say they're not behind the scenes because they're always out front.
In the Mongol court, they always sat up front.
They were always out front.
And this horrified the Chinese, who were very good confusers.
It horrified the Muslims.
It horrified the Christians.
They didn't know what to do.
They said the women even drink in public.
Okay, yeah, they drink in public.
So sometimes it was like that, but other times, as with Dorjan, she's actually the ruler.
Or the case of his daughters, such as Alakai Bek, who ruled over a part of northern China called the Ongut people.
and the other daughters who ruled over different, they ruled in their own names.
And he's very, this is something about the secret history that upset me.
I get to chapter, all the sections are numbered.
I get to chapter or number, section 215, and there's only half a sentence left.
In 214, he's just awarded a girl, he calls his daughter, so she's probably a clan daughter, but she lives with his mother at this point.
His youngest son, Tolo, is only four years old.
And he was right.
Atatar comes and Mother Erlum gives him food because you food everybody.
He realizes this is the mother of Chinggis Khan and that's the child of Chinggis Khan.
He went to that family and at great risk to themselves, they in fact were a captive family of the Tai Chi Yut.
He grabs him up and kidnaps him and runs out and he's holding the child in one hand and he's pulling out a knife with another hand.
Altani raced out and she grabbed his arm and held it down.
And two men, Jeb and Jilin, they were back behind the gyr
slaughtering an ox with an axe, because you have to do it in the shade behind the gear.
You don't do it in the light.
And so they were back there doing that.
And so they raced out with an axe and they killed the man.
And so then Chinggis Khan was rewarding everybody for all their great deeds.
And Cheb, they wanted to be rewarded for saving the life of Talal.
He said, no, you killed the Tatar.
Al-Thani saved his life because she held a hand that had the
the knife until you got there to kill him.
She saved it, and now we reward her.
So he's finished that story in 2.14.
We get to 2.15.
He says, now let us reward our daughters.
It's actually only a phrase.
I said it's a complete sentence, but it's not quite complete.
The rest is gone, cut out.
It's missing.
And at great risk to themselves, they managed to saw off the kink and then burn it in their fire.
And I was just so, and I looked at all these different translations of how the different languages, and most often they translated as, and now let us marry our daughters.
Oh no, oh no.
He was very clear in his wedding speeches to his daughters.
I give these people to you to rule.
You have three husbands.
You have your honor,
You have your nation, and you have the man that I give to you.
But the man I give to you goes in the army with me and brings his soldiers.
Genius.
You stay here and rule the people.
Brilliant.
The Chinese, when they arrived in the court of Altani, they didn't know what to think.
There she is ruling this area, the Ongut people.
And they said, well, she can read and write, and she's the supreme judge, and she doesn't allow any death sentence without her permission.
And...
But they didn't say which languages she could read and write.
That has really puzzled me a lot.
And they gave him food to escape.
In that case.
I mean, other cases with his mother, they did not and all.
But I think in that case, because what happened is...
Most of these women had few offsprings because their husband was gone to war.
And Al-Thani, of course, she married several times, sometimes sons of the last one, you know.
But they were going off to war, and they weren't reproducing very—only one, Tsetsegat, who was ruling in Siberia.
She was the one who had a whole bunch of daughters.
They wouldn't be going off to war.
And so they actually spread out through the empire and had a lot of power later.
And then he had to go find his family again.
But what happened was the area for Al-Kaibak, for example, was then taken over by Kublai Khan.
And then all the Turkey areas one by one were taken over by Kublai.
their nephews, as they died out, not in their own lifetime, they didn't kill the women off, but as they died out, the men took it over.
So this is the kind of life
And so then they just wanted to kind of erase it.
It's like, no, northern China, even though it was ruled by Sorokhtani, it always was Mongol.
She was ruling because her husband was Mongol and her sons were Mongol.
Therefore, they had the right to rule it.
So they cut out the women for those reasons.
I think any time it threatened the power of a particular man.
Then there were other little things that are added in there.
Sometimes you can find a phrase and it's like, that phrase was not in the original.
that this boy Temujin had.
I tend to have a certain love for individuals and persons, but not a love for people in general, and especially not for institutions.
I tend to have a great...
suspicion about almost everything and mistrust in institutions over and over.
So he, just to be clear, the neck is trapped and the hands are trapped?
And I think that's my own prejudice, and then I find reasons to support that.
Chinggis Khan was very good at destroying a lot of institutions or bringing them to heel within his empire.
So then I like that and I stress that and I see those things
I think that's one thing, but other things that I learned from the Mongol people in general, not just about their history and all, but how it's possible to live for thousands of years in a place that for many people,
It's not the most beautiful in the world.
It's austere.
You have a band of mountains with some trees, and then big band of steppe, and then a big band of sand, gravel desert, the Gobi.
And for many people, it's not appealing.
It's just open.
There's too much space.
It's like, we need to build something over here.
Boy, you could have a condo right there.
We think that's how it is.
We could have a building.
We could sell them off and buy...
They haven't given in to that.
They really value their country.
They protect their country.
We just have the word.
Even now, only 1% is privately owned.
They keep it down.
And in the Mongolian records, farm and city count as one category.
It's just because it's settled people.
It doesn't matter.
You settle on a farm, you settle in a city, settled people, one category.
And they lived there in this land
They don't say the head and the hands.
that Genghis Khan would return to and love.
If he returned to the capital city, he would not know where he was.
He would have no idea.
And all the people would just say, oh, be Mongolian.
I'm Mongolian.
Yeah, I'm Mongol.
I have the hat.
I have the belt buckle.
I have all the tail that's all embroidered.
We know that his body is trapped in it.
You know, yeah, I'm Mongol.
And Genghis Khan would say, where's your horse?
Oh, I keep it in the countryside.
You know, but...
He wouldn't recognize the city, but it's still his country, his people.
They worship him in a literal sense, not the way we would worship God asking for favors, but in the sense of worshiping him with praise.
They have so many songs to praise him.
And about half of the hip hop in the country is in praise of Genghis Khan.
But from all evidence we have, it's the hands and the head.
You know, it's something we can't understand because when we pray, we're usually saying, you know, oh, thank you, God, for this and that and the other, and you're so wonderful, and I love you.
So would you please give me, and would you please do this, and would you please stop this pain in my knee?
We're asking for things all over the place.
But Chinggis Khan, no, no.
No one ever asks for anything.
They just honor him.
They just praise him and honor him.
Well, start with my home.
Let's start there.
You come over there.
It's a nice valley.
I have a nice valley there.
And he's running around deeply alone with this thing.
I think almost any direction you go outside of the city is going to be interesting.
It kind of depends a little bit on your purpose.
Most people go south to the Gobi, and they do a loop to the Gobi and around to Karakoram, Hachor, in the old capital from Agudean, but it was abandoned by Kublai Khan.
And then they circle back to the city, and they may stop off to see what we call Przewalski, the wild horse, but they call it Kaktaki.
to see the Taki, or they may go up to Khufu Lake, a big, beautiful lake, somewhat like Baikal, but much smaller.
Yes.
So that's a beautiful trip.
If you want to see the more Turkic area where they hunt with eagles, the far west is where the Kazakh people live.
And then he has to go out and find wherever his family is.
And the mountains are absolutely incredibly beautiful.
Most mountains in Mongolia are gentle, beautiful, but gentle.
The farther west you go, the more dramatic it is.
They become the more pointed and peaked and snow-covered.
Then if you go to the eastern Mongolia, it tends to be very flat.
There are massive, massive flocks of cranes that come in every year.
Millions and millions of cranes.
There are also tundra swans that come in and golden ducks and all kinds of beautiful birds out there.
And so each area has something special.
If you want particularly the history of Genghis Khan,
The Mongolians love him.
They worship him.
But they don't do too much to capitalize on his home area, the Hinti.
You can go to the Hinti.
There are areas you cannot go to.
Large, large areas, it's forbidden.
But you can go.
But they don't capitalize, like, this is the place.
No.
They go there themselves out of respect.
But the only...
One place they built this statue of him, which is the largest equestrian statue in the world.
But it's the place where they say he found his whip, which is...
when he was coming back from being at the camp of asking Orgul Han, or Torgul Han, or Orvang Han to support him, and he's coming back to his family, and on the way, he supposedly found a whip there, which is just a small stick with a couple of strands of rawhide at the end of it that's used.
But for the Mongolians, it's a symbolic thing, because obviously it's used for the horse,
But for the Mongols, your destiny, your self, is your , your wind horse that lives inside of you, your wind horse that guides you and gives you opportunities.
But it's up to you to ride that wind horse.
It's up to you to use the wind horse, not to just go wild with the wind horse.
And so I think it's at that crucial moment
He's on his way back home to go with Jamukha and the other soldiers to the market to rescue Burshta.
And so symbolically, he found a whip there.
But I think it means that he found the way to control his destiny, his fate.
That's very important, very important.
And that he did.
That was the beginning of everything.
Yes, yes.
And it's symbolized in that statue.
Some people think that he's holding this stick, that it's a baton or something like that.
But no, it's what they call a quip or tushur.
Well, almost every day I'm totally dissatisfied with everything on earth.
It's just that kind of old man, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
What are they talking about?
My grandchildren are talking to me.
I don't understand a word they say.
What are they, what?
And who are they talking about?
I never heard of this.
It's kind of like that.
By his father's own brothers.
And who's running for office?
Oh my God, oh my God.
It's everything like that.
But then almost every day I meet somebody
just one person who gives you some kind of hope, you just see somebody doing something nice, or they do something nice for you.
See, the men who kidnapped her, they had an obligation under Mongol law and custom to marry her when her husband died.
And I do find in Asia that happens a lot, that people just do nice things for old people every day.
And so then my dissatisfaction with all the big things in the world and...
the way my grandchildren talk, and the way young people are.
And then I see something like that.
And often it's something with the young people, something that the young people do.
And in an ancient
They're always bringing me things.
They bring me dried curds.
They bring me strawberries that they picked in the forest in the summer, or they bring the pine nuts that they found, or they bring me the milk.
in various forms, or yogurt, oh yeah.
Everybody thinks, you gotta eat the yogurt.
This is from my grandmother, and all the other yogurt in the world is not good, but my grandmother, she knows how to make the best yogurt ever.
And so over and over and over, I find despite my all intentions to be in a bad mood,
You know, somebody spoils you with these little nice acts that are really very touching.
Very touching.
They did not.
Yes.
You know, I've...
The people in Mongolia take such good care of me all the time, all the time.
And I think my wife had MS.
I've talked about this before sometimes.
She had MS and slowly declined for many years, becoming paralyzed, not able to speak, not able to control her movements or anything.
And we lived half the year still in Mongolia.
They should take care of her and her children because her children are the children of their brother.
Part of it was because the climate and the altitude were better for her situation.
It was very helpful for her, but also the people.
There was a poor country.
The sidewalks are broken.
Everything's not working.
But I would go out with her in a wheelchair alone, and I knew that every bump
Some arm would pick her up, pick up the wheelchair and lift her over that and not make me do it.
We could go to the opera and you had to go up this magnificent set of Soviet stairs to get to the opera, you know.
We would go and I had no worries.
I knew two guys would come from one side, two guys from the other side, they would carry on.
And they do not say, excuse me, may I help you?
They do not wait for you to say thank you, nothing.
They just do it and they walk away.
They have such respect.
Singers would come there all the time to sing to warm up the house for my wife.
They count as the sons of the clan, or they should.
And even dancers would come sometimes to dance or play the horse head fiddle, to play that, to warm up the house for her, to see how they treated a totally disabled person.
And if I was feeding my wife and when anybody saw it, they would come and immediately take over and start feeding her in their place.
Children would come up to her.
But no, they had all deserted, all betrayed him.
In America, they're often afraid that she's sitting in a wheelchair.
They just kind of look.
They don't know what to do.
But over there, the children would always come to her, always.
They were very—you just learn something about—
the people.
And living there in a country where you, out in the countryside, you come to a gare, you never ask for permission to go in.
You certainly don't knock on the doorframe.
That's, no, that's hugely offensive.
And you ask, it's like insulting the people, like, what, you're not good hospitable people, I have to ask you for something?
He learned very early on that you cannot trust family.
No, you walk in and you sit down and they fix food for you.
It's
an incredible thing, and these are the things that
Give me hope.
It's no institution in the world.
No, not the big things and not the pop culture and not all the platitudes.
Oh my God, save us from the platitudes of modern life.
You know?
Yeah, true.
It's the family that will fix tea for you in two in the morning because there was a flash flood and you got stuck and now you're cold and wet and they build a fire and take care of you.
Or you just show up and you make camp somewhere if you have your own tent.
And I swear, within one hour, some child is going to be there with water and milk.
You think, where did you come from?
But the mother sends them over.
Oh, there's somebody over there in the forest.
They believe that they're obligated to take care of one another.
Anybody in your area, you take care of them.
And things like that, individuals do give me hope.
people one by one or a few at a time, even though I'm lost in the modern world.
Well, I could tell you a favorite picture is a lake we used to go to called...
Uginur in the middle and somebody a very nice friend took a picture of us towards the end we're just sitting there watching the sunset over the lake that we've been to many many times in life and you know she's holding she we're holding hands she's in the chair paralyzed and we're just sitting there staring off in the distance you know that's one of my favorites but
With my wife, I was just blessed with a good wife that was exciting.
She was the most beautiful woman I had ever met in my whole life.
She was smart.
She would talk to people about anything.
She talked about jazz or physics or art.
My life is so small and narrow, but my wife, she's the one who gave me a life.
She...
The truth is very odd.
People don't believe sometimes.
I failed English in college.
I barely got in college.
Nobody in my family, I'd grown up with my grandparents mostly countryside, and they had third grade education.
My father had seventh grade, and I went to live with him after the grandparents died, and my mother...
There was no big education there in the family, but I somehow got to college.
My father told me to go.
He didn't want me to go to the war in Vietnam, so he volunteered to go because there was the rule that they couldn't send two people from one family against their will.
That was mainly designed to protect brothers.
But he could go as the father, and then I could go to college.
So I got to college, and I can't say, oh, I was drinking and having a party and not serious—
No, I was trying like hell to pass that course.
I failed English.
I failed it.
And this was just a huge shame to me.
In fact, after one year, I was put on probation to be kicked out of the school.
My grades were so low overall.
And then, so it took me a long time to confess this to my wife after we met.
I met her, I briefly had known her in high school, but just not well or anything.
But anyway, we met later and
And I told her, and she just looked at me, she said, what does a professor know?
The story of Temujin is not a unique story for that time.
It's just a professor.
You can write anything you want.
And she had the power to make me believe everything she said.
I don't care what she said, I would believe it.
And I always said, yeah, that's right.
That's just a professor.
And she inspired me.
But she also, she supported me all the way through graduate school.
She was taking some courses of her own and she was doing graduate work.
But she inspired me.
But she told me, I said, I want to write for more people than just for other scholars.
I've done this dissertation, a PhD, and it's just dry as the Sargobi Desert.
And I didn't know what to do.
And she said, just tell the story to me.
but I can't see you while you tell it.
You're on the radio and I'm listening in my car, driving somewhere.
Just tell the story to me.
And to this day, almost every word I write is always just tell the story to her the way that she would like it.
Now, as an isolated family of outcasts, of course, he's not participating in the various feuds and the raids of the people around him, but they are constantly raiding in the winter, and for women and for horses and for any kind of valuables that they can find.
And I always read the books to her.
Even she couldn't comprehend too much, you know, but she just loved hearing the book.
Because
It was mine, and you know, in the last years of her life, I gave up the teaching, and we went back to our original home in South Carolina.
And I said, okay, we're just gonna live here and watch the ocean and do things like that, and just be worthless teenagers.
And my wife used to have episodes of clarity.
I have no idea what caused it.
It might be two hours, it might be seven or eight hours.
And we would talk a lot.
And so one time she said to me, she said, this disease is going to take my life, but it's taking your life.
She said, you gave up teaching and you gave up writing.
She said, how do you expect me to die in peace if I know that you gave up everything to this disease?
She said, you should write.
And so every single day, we sat together by the window.
I moved it into the dining room overlooking the water.
We sat there at the desk, and she sat in her wheelchair next to me.
And sometimes we would play a little soft music in the background a little bit.
And for the most part, she couldn't talk.
But she liked to just sit there beside me working.
And she knew that she was inspiration.
She knew.
She was the battery that kept me going, you know?
How on earth I ever had a wife like that, I don't know.
That's beautiful, Jack.
That's really beautiful.
You know, I just hit the jackpot with her.
And I see so many people that get by and they even like each other or they're friends or something.
But
In my life, there was one person.
I love my children.
I still do.
I love my grandchildren, even though I don't understand them.
But there's one person in my life, and that was my wife.
44 years, and her funeral was on our anniversary.
That's just the way life works out, you know?
But I was very lucky, very lucky.
It's almost like their way of getting trade goods from China, that one group raids the other in order to find out whatever they have for textiles or for metal,
If she said it, I probably would have believed her.
Exactly.
She was too busy enjoying the world.
And, you know, in her final...
I could not ask her questions, and I would not say, oh, you remember that?
No, I never would say that, because I knew she couldn't remember.
But when she was being restless or something in the night, I used to recite scenes from our life and just give the scene without saying, do you remember?
But the last night, I certainly didn't know that she was going, but it was a rough night.
And we went back to...
the first night that we had in Moscow.
We came in December in the winter and the snow was so beautiful and white and the yellow lights shining on it.
And then the most beautiful night we went to the Bolshoi and she had this elegant blue wool coat from her grandmother from the 1920s with a huge, it's so ironic, it was a
a blue wolf, but it's gray-blue, like the Mongolian, gray-blue collar, this huge collar.
She just looked like a movie star from the 20s or something.
And we went to see Maja Plisetskaya, and it was one of the most beautiful nights.
But her last night,
I told her that story again, you know, of all the details.
I'd gone through it many times, but her coat from her grandmother, whom she loved very much, and the snow and the yellow lights.
And we arrived at night because, of course, the flight was late.
And then the next night going to the Bolshoi and all those beautiful things from Russia.
Mongols produced nothing.
So that was it.
She was an inspiration.
I have many, many nights or many days of great memories, you know?
They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen.
Well, I thank you very much.
And the amount of research when I...
realized how much research you had done, I felt like you're going to know things I don't know, and you're going to trick me and pull something out, and I'm going to be shamed in front of the whole world.
Come, come.
Thank you.
And so they had to get these items from somewhere, and it was through raiding.
And so even in the genealogy of Temüjin, you see going back generation after generation of women having been kidnapped, children born who are not necessarily the father's child, and it's unclear who the father was.
And all of these issues go back for a long time.
Later, Genghis Khan will realize, once he becomes Genghis Khan, he will realize that the true source of most of the feuding on the steppe is over women.
And later he will outlaw the kidnapping of women and the sale of women.
In part, not only because of what had happened to his mother,
but what happened to him next in his life.
At age 16, Bertha, the girl he had met when he was eight years old and she was nine, she's now 17, and she and her mother come.
It
It's hard to even imagine what it was like for this 16-year-old boy who has suffered these indignities of life in every way that you can imagine.
And suddenly here is the love of his life
who's gonna be living with him, making him happy.
He has somebody who loves him.
It's not just his mother running around getting food and trying to feed the five children and plus the other wife and her two children.
No, he has somebody who loves him.
And it's all the excitement that you can imagine with the fire in the eyes and the excitement.
And then it only lasts a few months.
And so there they are.
And there's a lady visiting them.
We don't know exactly who she is, but just they called her Grandmother Kowakchin.
Granny Kowakchin is there.
Granny Kowakchin is sleeping, of course, on the floor of the ger, the tent.
And early in the morning, she feels the vibrations in the earth.
And she knows that horsemen are coming.
She rouses the family.
And Mother Erlun is in charge.
Mother Erlun is still in charge, even though Temüjin is now married.
She puts all of her children on a horse.
She takes the baby girl, Temülin, in her own lap.
She has one extra horse, but she won't take Bershta because she knows.
She doesn't know who the men are.
She has no idea, but they're coming.
They're coming in the dark.
They're coming for a woman.
They know there's a girl there.
This family of outcasts has acquired a wife, and they know.
that they're coming for that.
And so she leaves Sochigl, the other wife, she leaves this old lady, Granny Kowakchin, who actually has her own cart, and she leaves Boerste.
They pile into Granny's cart,
and it's only an ox to pull it, so they don't get too far before the attackers get there.
But Mother Erlun is right.
She's able to get her children off to the mountain, to Burkhan Khaldun, to the mountainside, away from them, because the men are so focused on this cart and finding out how many women are in there and who they are and all.
So Mother Erlun saved her family, but at a cost.
Suddenly,
Temujin realizes he has obeyed his mother, but he's lost the most important thing in his life.
And I do think this is the defining moment of his life.
The story began back when his mother was kidnapped, but now the kidnapping of his wife, and he gets to define what will he do?
What should he do?
What can he do?
Is he going to just resign himself to it?
Is he going to go out, look for another wife?
And he decides that life is not worth living without Burshta.
He has found something good in this life.
And if he has to die trying to get her back, he will die trying to get her back.
He needs allies.
Allies.
He goes to a man who ruled the Karyat people in central Mongolia, on the Tol River about where the capital Ulaanbaatar is today.
He goes there because that Wang Han is his name, or Torgal Han.
He goes there because Wang Han had been the lord over
his father at one point, and his father had gone on raids for him, and so he went there.
And actually, he took a gift.
That's because Busta's mother had brought a sable coat as a gift for Mother Erlund at that time of the marriage.
So he took the coat,
And he took it and he gave it as a gift to Wang Han and asked for his help.
And Wang Han said, yes.
And he said, I will send some troops, but we need more.
And you need to ask Jamukha.
Jamukha.
Jamukha.
You need to ask him to come also.
He said, I will send a message to him to get troops.
Jamukha was a boy about the same age as Temüjin.
And his family had winter camp close to where Mother Erlun was living with her children.
And so the two boys met during the wintertime.
In fact, they both claimed descent from the same woman about four generations earlier, or five, it's a little unclear.
She was a Urihanghai woman who herself was kidnapped.
And actually, Jamaka was the descendant of her father.
from the fact that she was pregnant at the moment of kidnapping, and then Temüjin is descended from her through the new kidnapper, Botanchar, her ancestor.
So they're both, as the Mongols would say, from the same womb.
They come from the same historic
However, their lives were similar and had both lost their fathers very early, but Jamukha also lost a mother, so he grew up in the household of his grandfather.
He had no siblings, unlike Temujin with a whole household of siblings.
He grew up with his grandfather, and his grandfather had several wives, so he grew up with a bunch of old women, which later he said he thought was an influence on his life.
But the two boys meet.
So they come from different backgrounds, and Jamukha is not as deprived by any means as the life of Temujin, but he has a certain emotional deprivation, I think, having not had mother, father, siblings, and he lives with these old, old people.
The two boys meet, they become good friends playing on the ice.
And so they're playing on the ice, and then...
Very early on, I think when they're about 10 or 11 years old, they decide to make a pact.
It's called coming anda.
Anda is more than a friend.
A friend is like in the language, and there are several different types of friendship, but anda is a friendship that's beyond a friendship.
It's something for life.
And they swore that they would be there forever to protect each other, to help each other in every moment.
And they exchanged knuckle bones.
So each one of them had the knuckle bone of a roebuck, a deer.
Knuckle bones are used in these games that they play, but it's also used to forecast the future.
You can roll them around and all.
And it's very strange.
On the ice, I will say...
In the wintertime in Mongolia, it can be up to 50 degrees below zero.
And it doesn't really matter at that point whether it's even Celsius or Fahrenheit or what it is.
But you slide something across the ice and it's just absolutely smooth like silk and it goes on for a long way.
And if you put your ear down to the ice...
you hear this celestial sound that is unlike any sound on the earth.
It's just like the angels are singing under the ice.
So once they've sworn this relationship of Anda, then a couple years later, they swear it again, but this time they're slightly older boys, and they have bows and arrows, and so they exchange arrows with each other.
In fact, the text is very specific that Jamukha took the horn, cut it off of a two-year-old calf,
And he whittled it down, and then he drilled a hole into it in order to make a whistling arrow.
which is used for several purposes among the Mongols.
It's used for signals, for one thing, from one person to another.
But also when you're hunting, if you want to move the animal in a certain direction, you send a whistling arrow in the opposite direction to make the animal move.
So it had a lot of uses.
So the boys had exchanged roebuck knuckles.
This time they exchanged, and so they had been close friends.
And Bang Han said, okay, Jamukha should raise some troops and go with you.
And he did.
So the three set out.
Some troops from Wang Han.
He himself did not go.
He was too old.
But he sent some troops.
And then Jamukha and his troops.
And then basically just Temujin and his family.
He just had his brothers.
That's all.
They set off.
to find the Merkit people up the Seleng River, which flows into Siberia and on into Lake Baikal.
They had to go through some extremely rough territory.
And you see in this episode, though, Jamukha
is already a little bit fierce without necessarily thinking it through carefully.
He gives this long speech about all the things they're going to do to the market people.
We're going to jump through the tunnel, the smoke hole in the top of the gear.
We're going to jump in there and we're going to kill them all.
We're going to kill the men and the women and the children.
We will destroy these people forever.
He has an extremely militant rhetoric, at least.
And he's also rather critical of the elder people.
Wang Han's people came late, and he gave them this long lecture about, we are Mongols, and if we give our word, our word is our promise forever.
And rain or sleet or snow, it doesn't matter.
We be there on time.
So he's dressing down his superiors.
He's very aggressive, but he's very helpful.
So these troops, they move in on the Merkit camp.
They also come in at night.
And so there's a small amount of warning because some men are out hunting sables, the Merkit men, and they race back to the camp and they tell the people, and the people are getting ready to get out as fast as possible.
So Burshta has no idea who's coming.
She doesn't want to be kidnapped again.
It's just somebody.
So she and the grandmother go auction again, and so they're loaded into a cart to go away.
So Temujin comes in, and there's a full moon that night, so they could see what they're doing.
And he's really searching for her.
He's not paying too much attention to the battle.
And he's calling for her, and she hears his voice.
She knows who it is.
She jumps off the cart, and she runs to him.
And they're reunited, and he grabs her, embraces her, and then he said, this is the goal.
This is why we are here.
We don't need anything else.
He was very clear about that.
Yes, aside from the things, yes, his first full-on military engagement.
Now, along the way, in addition to escaping all these horrors, he had killed his older half-brother, Bechtel.
The killing of Bekhter, that's one of the things that's totally unknown outside of the secret history of the Mongols.
None of the Persian chronicles, none of the Chinese chronicles, none of them knew about this until the secret history was deciphered and translated.
But Bekhter was the older child of Xochitl,
And the older brother has complete authority over the younger siblings in Mongolian society.
They have to refer to him with a special pronoun all the time, ta, and he refers to them as chi.
It's like a formality.
And his word goes, he is the father in the absence of the father.
But also it's
quite common that if a man dies and he has no brothers or his brothers do not marry his widow, then if he has a son by another wife, she will become his wife.
So it would have been common that Bächter eventually, when he passed through puberty, would then perhaps marry Mother Erlün.
Now,
I don't know that that happened, but I think either it did or...
Temujin was trying to prevent it, because it was bad enough that he was the older brother, but he becomes the older brother and a stepfather.
I think Temujin just couldn't handle that.
And he was already, Bektu was ordering him around, so he would take things like a fish or a bird that Temujin had caught, and that's perfectly acceptable in the Mongol hierarchy.
Yes, it's only recorded once, but perhaps it happened several times.
Yes, he can do anything he wants just about with his younger siblings.
That's, yeah.
But Temujin is not going to stand for it.
So mostly in the record, they kind of put the blame on this fish.
which I'm not so sure that's really the blame.
And the boys had actually taken the sewing needles from their mother.
They were using them for fishing.
And I think it was more complicated than that.
But for whatever reason, he and his next brother, Hasser, decided to kill him.
And they did.
I think it is the symbol of that, and it could be the thing that pushes him over the edge.
But it's all these other tensions of what's going on with the family.
Because they shoot him with arrows, they kill him.
But what happens afterwards is also interesting for the dynamics of what was going on before, because we hear nothing from Sochigo.
She and her younger son, Belgetai, they stay with the family.
They don't go away.
But the one who is outraged is Mother Erlun, his mother.
She screams and hollers at him in the longest kind of tirade you can imagine about, you will never have anybody in your life except your own shadow.
And you are worse than everything that she could name that could be worse than.
She was outraged and went on and on and on about it.
So she was obviously extremely distressed about it, whereas Xochitl, the mother of the boy, she may have been distressed, I don't know, but nothing has shown up in the record.
So he does have this episode of having killed off his brother, but I don't think it was a deeply meaningful, I think it was important, but I don't think it was a mostly deeply meaningful for Temujin.
The brother was gone, the problem was solved, mother is extremely ticked off at him, but.
Yes.
He is capable of doing anything that needs to be done to resolve what he sees as a problem.
Bechtel was a problem.
He resolved it at a very young age.
So he'd had that experience behind him.
But now Bechtel's younger brother, Belgetai, is on the raid with him and with Czomoka when they go to capture Berste back.
So...
He has both loyalty, and Belgatai stays loyal to him his entire life, his entire life.
It was very interesting.
I think as children, he was too preoccupied with staying alive and trying to find fish and roots to eat and things like that to really be pining for her all the time.
But for whatever reason, she came and it could be that
her family liked him in some way or that she remembered him or that she had no other suitors.
Because at 17, she should have been married, actually.
So I can't explain why, but it was certainly a strong love story after the fact, if not before.
I mean, those two were loyal to each other throughout their lives.
She was, I would say, the most important person to him after that.
He went to literal war.
He risked everything.
He was willing to die.
He was willing to kill.
He was willing to die in order to get her back.
And he got her back.
And now he's reestablished his relationship with Jamukha.
And so they decide to stay together.
And they all go off to the Horonok Valley.
This becomes a huge issue forever.
It's one of those things that to this day, almost, it's an issue in what happens.
But as he says much later in life, when his own sons rebel against him, and they call that first child a mercant bastard,
He defends his wife viciously, his own sons.
He says, you were not there.
You do not know who loved who and who did not.
You did not see the sky turning around.
You did not see the stars falling.
You did not see the earth turn over.
You don't know what was happening.
And if I say he is my son, he is my son.
Who are you to say otherwise?
You were not there.
You come from the same warm womb.
And if your mother could hear your words, her warm womb,
would turn to cold stone.
So he defended her forever.
But he's off now.
We go back to the beginning.
She's pregnant.
They're in the Haudenosaunee Valley.
And he and Chamukh decide to renew their vows of being Anda to each other.
So this time, it's more serious.
And it's a ceremony in front of the whole family.
we can't say tribe, it's not big enough yet for a tribe, but a whole clan that's there.
And then Jamukha takes off a gold belt, which actually he had stolen from the market at some point, and where on earth they got a gold belt, I don't know.
He took off a gold belt and he put it on Temüjin, and then Temüjin gave him a mayor who had never had a fold, had never given birth,
And it was an unusual mayor who had a little growth on the front of her head, which they called a horn.
So it was an unusual gift.
And I don't—it has meaning, but I don't know all the meanings behind it.
You know, it's sort of odd to me.
But the golden belt, you can kind of sort of think about it in different ways.
But the golden belt—the belt for the Mongol man is really the sign of manhood, right?
And in fact, this belt of pus, a woman was often then and even now called person without a belt, because that's how they were at that time.
Today, women wear belts, of course, but they still use the word pusqui, pusqui, with no belt.
So it's a very important symbol of manhood.
So he gave that tamudjind, and they celebrated.
And then the words of the secret history,
They slept apart under the same blanket apart from the other group, and they were happy together.
And then when the baby was born,
Temujin named the baby , which means visitor.
Some people say, well, it's because the child was really the market child.
Other people say, no, it's because he was a visitor on the territory of Jamuk at that time.
And other people can say, well, Jamuk's ancestor, who had been born from the kidnapped woman who was pregnant, that they had named that , which meant foreigner.
So it's kind of like a parallel, the visitor, the foreigner.
And so Jamukha's clan took the name from him.
They were called Jadran, Jadran.
And so there are all these things that sometimes we can't quite understand because we don't have the total mentality of that time and we're not there.
As his first child.
Yes.
He defends this child through his entire life.
But not long after the birth...
He and Jamukha break apart, or really it's Temujin breaks apart at the urging of Ursta.
She said, he lords it over you too much.
He orders you around too much.
You need to be free.
We need to break away.
And she urged him, and he loved his wife more than anything.
I think that in a certain way, the most important other character in his life, adult life, would be the Anda relationship, which gets up being severely tested in the future years.
But they run away through the night.
They go all night long to escape from him.
But he obviously loved Bertha the most and took the baby, of course, with him as well.
The two of them never claimed to break it.
They had just separated and now...
We have Vang Han, the most powerful ruler on the steppe who's ruling out of central Mongolia of the Karyat people.
And so Jamaka remains loyal to him, but at first so does Temujin.
They're both loyal to him, but they're fighting in different kinds of campaigns and all.
So for a while, they're not fighting each other.
but eventually some things happened that separate Temüjin.
Temüjin was making all of these great victories for Wang Han, and he even got the title Wang, which means from Chinese meaning prince or king.
Wang Han received that from the Jin Dynasty because of all of these conquests against the Tatar people.
So Temüjin was rising up, and then he wanted his son to marry the daughter of Wang Han.
And Wang Han said no.
His own son told the father, no, no, no, no.
We don't marry those low people.
They're Mongols.
They're not like us.
We are Keryat people.
We're not going to marry them.
And so then now war, you could say, breaks out, or feud, really.
It's more of a feud.
Hemujin has to flee far away into the east to a place called Baljuna.
And he goes to Baljuna.
And at this time, then, Jamukha is going to fight on behalf of his lord, Banghan.
The two of them do not meet in combat, but now their forces are fighting each other.
Yes.
It's hard to know what's going through their mind at that point.
We only have it later on.
when the relationship is being resolved in unfortunate ways, that they claim that neither one of them ever truly broke it because they never harmed each other directly.
And in fact, then Temujin eventually defeats Wang Han.
So he takes over central Mongolia.
He's starting to really rise up now.
And he has the title from his own people of Chinggis Khan.
They give him that at Blackheart Mountain by the Blue Lake.
It's a very beautiful, special place.
But he takes that title.
That's not a title that anyone had ever held that we know of, Chinggis Khan.
It was a new title that he just...
thought up, or somebody thought up, or somebody thought it had auspicious meaning behind it.
It's very close to the word tengis, which means the sea.
It could have had something to do with that.
Mongolians really like, we might say, puns of, they like words with multiple meanings.
And that's very important to them.
The more meanings a word has, the more power that word has.
So if it has different meaning in different languages.
So in Mongolian, it sounds like strong, qin.
Chinggis, but in Turkic, and there are many Turkic people, including the Merkit themselves, are mostly Turkic people.
It sounds like the sea, tingis, tingis.
Especially with names.
Yeah.
I'm like, today in Mongolia, well, I've been there so long, I think the fad has passed now, but about 20 years ago, it was popular to name children Michelle.
Mm-hmm.
girls because it's a French name, an American name, and it means smile.
in Mongolia.
So it's the power of three great languages and three great civilizations.
And so many names are like that.
And so I think Chinggis, it doesn't have one meaning.
I think it means powerful.
It means the sea.
I think it means many different things.
But so he had become a Khan and he was ruling over him.
And so Jamukha now switched loyalties to the next kingdom over called the Naiman people who are farther West.
And, um,
He becomes the protege, you could say, of the Niman people, but
When Genghis Khan attacks the Naiman, Jamukha deserts the Naiman.
He tells them, these people have snouts of steel and they eat humans alive.
And he was telling them all these horrible things about the Mongols, you know.
And Tayang Han, the leader of the Naimans, he was rightfully scared about them.
And he was left there, and he, in fact, was very quickly also defeated.
So Jamukha has not fought against Temüjin in this campaign.
And he's off with some of his people, Jataghan clan people.
He's off with them, and they see the turning of the tide.
You know, but he now wants to become the great khan of the steppe.
He has very few followers, but he takes the title Gurkhan, which is a very old, ancient, important title, but because Wang Han is gone, Torgal Han gone, that he could take this title and pretend to be the great khan of the steppe.
But his own people,
turn against him, and they capture him, and they think they will take him to Chinggis Khan.
It's not Chinggis Khan.
They'll take him, and they'll be rewarded, perhaps, for turning him in.
And Chinggis Khan does reward them immediately.
He kills them all because they have betrayed their leader, who is his anda.
It's a very strange encounter.
And so, supposedly, Chinggis Khan says to him, come back to me, save me, be beside me, protect me, be my shadow, be my safety guard in life.
And supposedly, Jamukha says,
But I did betray you when my people fought against you.
And you will always know that.
And you will never completely trust me.
I will be like a louse underneath the collar of your tunic.
I will be like a thorn in the lapel of your dell.
He said, kill me without shedding my blood.
Let me die.
And if you do,
take my remains up to a high place and bury me, and I will be the guard, I will be the protector for you and your people forever.
So, they
Obviously, Temüjin did not participate in the killing, but he ordered the killing.
It's not specified how he was killed without shedding the blood, but the Mongols had several ways, because the most honorable way to die was without shedding blood.
The blood contains part of the soul, and if you lose it, you're losing your soul before you die.
So they usually wrapped them up in felt carpets,
and then beat them to death or trampled them to death with horses, something like that.
There are a couple other methods, but I think that's probably the method by which Jamukha was killed.
And so he was killed, and then Tamujin had—or Chinggis Khan had his remains taken up and buried in a high place.
This is over near Tuva, which is today part of Russia.
But until the 20th century, it was a part of Mongolia, the Tuvan people, very, very close culturally to the Mongols.
He had become very practical at this point,
And he understood that you needed complete, total loyalty and trust with everybody around you.
And I think for this reason, he was willing to accept the plea of Jamukha.
And when Chinggis Khan was asking him to come back and to be his shadow and to be his safety guard again,
maybe that was just a formality that he knew would be rejected.
Or maybe when Jamal Khan offered to be killed without shedding blood, that was a formality that he thought would not be followed through.
I would say in both negative and positive ways, it was the most important relationship of his adulthood aside from Bursa.
But that relationship really did not seem to have many negative aspects.
They sometimes disagreed on things, but small things.
So she was by him and she was positive in every regard so far as we know forever.
Although she was not submissive, but she was always on his side.
And Chamaka...
It was just a little too hot-headed for me, you know, I mean, in my evaluation of him, that these things like, oh, we're gonna drop down on the market and we're gonna come through the smoke hole, kill everybody and all, and he had a flair for the dramatic, even in a way giving the gold belt to Mujin.
But Jamukha also, he explained himself at the end of life.
And he said, you know, we both lost our father, but I also lost my mother.
And you had a strong mother to raise you.
I did not.
And he said, you had Burshta.
You have a very strong wife to help you.
And my wife...
He just used a word like prattler, like she just sort of complains and prattles along, and we did not have a relationship.
So I think something about that rings true, that there were some elements of that that were true, but he, Jamaka certainly didn't have the intelligence and the real genius
for dealing with people, dealing with soldiers, especially, and warfare that Temujin had.
Yes.
Yes, I often wonder, what happened to the gold belt?
It disappeared from the story.
And a gold belt doesn't just disappear.
What happened to that?
It's so interesting because Temüjin was never interested in material goods.
And as Genghis Khan is the ruler...
In some ways, you could say he became the richest man in the world because he controlled the most wealth flowing through him.
But he always dressed simply.
He always lived in the tent.
And he said, I eat what my soldiers eat.
I dress the way my soldiers dress.
I live the way my soldiers live.
We are the same.
So he had no interest in the wealth.
And Jamukha...
He had sided before with Wang Han, which was very advantageous because they had more trade goods and wealthier people and all.
He just didn't have the temperament, I think, that was going to be helpful for Genghis Khan's continued rise.
That is one of the powerful things about the Genghis Khan stories.
From absolute nothing.
He changed and matured in various ways over life, as we all do, or we hope we do, but he never became avaricious in any way.
He was never greedy.
He was never acquisitive.
He kept the simple life.
And part of the simple life for him meant that no one was allowed to write about him.
No one was allowed to make his likeness.
They couldn't paint a picture of him.
They couldn't make a statue of him.
No building could be built dedicated to him.
No palace, no tomb, no temple of any sort, not even at the point of death, the simplest gravestone.
Nothing, nothing.
And it's very hard to explain how he...
stuck to that, how he got it.
You're so easily corrupted by power, and yet he maintained this very fierce attitude towards, his relationship was with the people around him, his guard mostly, or his private part of the army that went with him, the central part of the army.
That was his relationship, his family.
He had four wives.
This was what was important to him.
And in fact, no portrait was painted until 1278.
Well, by then, he'd already been dead for 51 years.
And then no statue until the 21st century.
The Secret History is a very unusual document, and I happen to love it very much.
But I said, you know, Genghis Khan allowed nothing to be written about him in his lifetime.
People couldn't take notes.
Even the army was—he—Genghis Khan—
ordered the invention of the alphabet for the Mongol people, and it was adapted from the Uyghur people.
And so to this day, it's often called the Uyghur alphabet, the Uyghur alphabet.
So he had ordered that, and he'd ordered his children to learn to read and write, and some did.
I think most did not, but some did.
But
One of the things he did with every campaign, even the one at the market when he rescued Berta, was he always adopted one orphan.
And that child became a full member of the Mongol nation in his household.
His mother Erlun would raise the child.
So she eventually had a whole household full of boys of different tribes, but they all became very high-ranking members of the government.
And one was a Tatar boy who turned out not to be so great as a soldier,
but he could read and write.
He was the best.
And later, eventually, he became the Supreme Judge, appointed by Chinggis Khan, of course.
And so when Chinggis Khan died, he recognized it was important not just to write down the law.
That's all Chinggis Khan allowed to be written in blue books, only the law.
Nothing about him or campaigns or military, anything.
But Shigehutuk was his name.
Shigehutuk
realized that this was going to be lost, that this is a great historic thing that has happened.
So he compiled the work.
Part of it, I don't know, other people contributed, helped him, but it's a little bit unclear.
The Mongols, they don't specify.
They always tell you exactly where something happens.
So we know exactly where it happened in Mongolia.
You can still go to that spot where he wrote it.
That's very important to the Mongols.
And we also know it's the Year of the Mouse, so it was 1228.
Chinggis Khan had died in 27.
So he wrote down, it begins with what we would say are the myths.
I'm not sure they're myths, but the origins of the myths.
It begins with the marriage of a gray-blue wolf with a tawny deer.
Then some people say, well, that's some kind of myth.
It's totemic.
And Mongols will see.
They look at me.
I asked them about this.
They said, what?
He was named Blue Gray Wolf.
She was named Tawny Deer.
They married.
You know, very practical about it.
And they think they're real people.
Maybe they were or not.
I don't know.
But so this earlier history is just the genealogy as well.
It should be.
Who knows?
But it's also in there because like Bodhicharya, they call him Bodhicharya the Fool, the ancestor of Temujin.
He's cast out because he's just so dumb.
The rest of the family doesn't want him.
And his father is undetermined who he was.
He kidnapped the Urihanghai woman.
She has the child who becomes the ancestor of Jammu.
So it's a confusing mess, but I tend to think it's probably accurate.
It has a lot of good information.
And by the time you get to the life of Temujin, the reason we know these intimate things is because that person, Shekihutuk, he was there, sleeping in the same gear with the people.
So we even see in there, he will record instances where Bershta sits up in bed,
and tells her husband, okay, you gotta do this, you gotta do that, you can't do this anymore, we can't think of, you know, it's all recorded, right?
So it's a very intimate document.
And this is one reason that it was secret, it was only for the family.
They were trying to uphold Chinggis Khan's prohibition against putting out information about the family.
So it was secret for a very long time.
so much so that scholars began to think it didn't exist.
And then in the 19th century, a Russian academic who was working in China at the time, in Beijing, he discovered a manuscript, which was very, very odd, that people didn't think was anything because it's all Chinese characters, but it makes no sense in Chinese.
But he recognized, but if you read it,
pronounce it, it makes sense of Mongolian.
And so it was in this code that had been used to record the information in Chinese.
So they were recording the sounds.
The sounds, correct.
They used Chinese characters to record sounds, which is always problematic in some little areas.
You're not exactly sure what the name is or something like that.
But it was a very unusual document.
And then once they found it, they realized that some of the Persian documents had incorporated part of that already.
So that was very helpful to me because some of the Persians I trust very much and I like their work very much.
And so it was helpful that it already existed.
And some of it existed in Mongolian culture.
other Mongolian sources that were written later.
Some of it was just incorporated.
So it seemed to be fairly genuine, but it wasn't 100% pure.
Little things had happened to it along the way.
Some things have been stipped here and there, and a few words changed.
Like sometimes for Temujin, they call him Chinggis Khan.
Well, he wasn't the Khan then.
And sometimes they call him Han, which is like chief, and other times Han, which is emperor.
Well, in Mongolia, it's a big difference.
So there are little things like this that move around that you're not sure why, but it's a document that I have great faith in.
It was not published in English until 1982.
but Francis Woodman Cleaves at Harvard University translated it in the 50s.
It was ready for publication, and he was having trouble with the publisher, and so it didn't appear for nearly 30 years.
It was supposed to be two volumes.
The first volume is the translation.
The second volume was going to be the notes, and the second volume was lost.
To this day, it hasn't been found.
I would love to see that.
But anyway, now it's in all languages.
It's about in the world.
Can you clarify?
So there's two volumes.
Yes, that was translated and then published by Harvard University.
But the notes were just the notes from the scholar Francis Woodman Cleaves.
Those were his notes, not Mongolian notes.
There are Chinese notes that went with it because the Chinese had trouble understanding a lot of things.
And they also, they disapproved of some things, so they would try to put their own notes in the margins to kind of correct the story and explain away why...
The Mongols' women would be often marrying their stepson.
It just did not match with Confucian ethics.
So there's several things like that that they try to skip around.
So it's interesting just to read the Ming Dynasty notes that are attached to it.
But the document itself, Mongolia Nutsopcho, it's just so important.
And for me, it was the guiding document.
I didn't want to be guided by anything else first.
Everything else I would check to correlate and fill in blanks and give more information.
But I went to Mongolia to travel around to those places because they are so exact in there and to feel it.
And it's so important, I think,
Because history does not live in books.
History does not live in archives or even libraries as much as I need them for my work.
But history lives in the people.
History lives in the memory of the people and the culture.
And for example, the episode with the kidnapping of Bertha.
So I went to that place and I didn't know when it happened, what season it happened.
It was very important for figuring out the births that came afterwards and other events.
They were being correlated.
Very important to me.
And so I'm just talking to the people who live in that valley, the nomads there.
They said, oh, it's clear.
It was the winter.
I said, oh, where did you read that?
Said, no, Granny Coaxin was on the ground and she could feel the vibrations.
She said, look, this is summertime now.
You're not going to feel any vibrations.
The ground here is so soft.
suddenly a whole important piece that I've been searching for just came together from some nomad sitting there next to his horse,
And he was absolutely right.
It could only happen in the winter.
And that also correlates with the time that raiding was done.
So it correlates with other historic factors.
But then that gave me the time basis for figuring out a lot of other things.
History lives in the people.
just the experience of standing there.
I really set out mostly to visit the cities he had conquered across Central Asia and all.
And there was so little to learn.
I mean, everything was kind of known of whatever the chroniclers had recorded.
The archeologists had found whatever they had found.
And I get there and he hadn't spent much time there.
He didn't identify with it.
I wasn't feeling anything.
But in Mongolia, I would go to these places
And I would know, if Chinggis Khan came back today, he would know exactly where he is.
There's no road, there's no sign, there's no building, there's no power line going, nothing.
And just to smell the air,
to feel it, to see the animals, and to see what kind of animals live here, what kind of plants are growing here.
You begin to get a feeling for how he was thinking, and then you begin to see, ah, I know which direction they came from.
The only direction they could come from was that way.
You begin to see it, and his life starts to unfold in a very dramatic way, that I have the text
But the text, it's like it has no scenery, no props, nothing like that.
The Mongols all understand their way of life.
They don't need to explain anything.
They know which way the gear faces with the sun.
They know all these things.
But for me, that's how I learned it.
It was from being with the people.
It was the most important thing.
And this was starting in the 1990s.
And the people, at this time, they were amazed at us.
I would come.
The Soviet era had just ended.
Socialism was just ending.
Democracy was starting.
And Genghis Khan had been forbidden to them for almost the entire century.
And every known descendant of Genghis Khan was killed in Mongolia.
Following the secret history, that became the key to writing what I wrote.
Take the history, which is difficult to understand.
You have to go over, and I often never understand different parts, or I change my mind and think it was yes, now it's no.
But the secret history is a valuable document.
And to me, also, it's the opening document of Mongolian written language.
And I think it's very important how...
to people begin their written language.
And they begin it with the words, , from highest heaven came the destiny of the blue wolf who was married to the tawny deer and their descendants who came from the great sea to live at the base of Mount Burkhan-Haldun.
Mongolia is a world that, for the most part, is the same as when Chinggis Khan was there.
We cannot say that for hardly any other place in the world.
I mean, certainly not for America, but just a few hundred years ago, it was entirely different.
people, languages, everything.
But you can't say it for London or Moscow or Istanbul, Constantinople.
All of these things have changed so much.
But Mongolia is still Mongolia.
It's one of the largest countries in the world in space with the fewest number of people, about today 3.3 million.
And they're spread out and they live in their environment in such an intimate way.
This was important for learning about Genghis Khan, how he thought, how he hunted, how he strategized for war.
You learn that from the people today because they are still there.
They're still living.
The first thing I think about this step is that you can see forever in every direction.
There's no building, nothing to stop your line of view.
And
It's like being in the ocean in many ways.
So you have this extremely open space, and the wind is usually blowing through it.
But it's extremely fresh.
It's coming out of Siberia.
It's coming out of the Arctic.
It sweeps down across Mongolia.
Cold is a dickin' sometimes, but it's always fresh.
Always fresh.
So you have the wind coming in.
You have the smell of the wind, but also then there's grass everywhere.
the smell of grass becomes very important.
Now, because of the particular location, from one year to another, one area may have grass one year and then drought the next year, another area has grass.
So you don't always know.
If it's not grass, it's dust.
You have dust going in, the dust doesn't smell so good, it doesn't feel so good.
But that's just one more part of the country.
The waters are mostly pure.
Now, unfortunately, there has been pollution in this century from mining in several areas.
But even when I was there, even today, when we go to some place like the Salink River, where we were talking about the market lift, so it's a place of pure waters.
And that's how Mongolians define their world, is by the water.
They don't, Chinggis Khan does not give lands to his sons to rule.
He gives waters and people to rule.
They do not refer to the earth as land.
They refer to the earth as dalai, ocean, the sea.
And so water is very important.
And to learn the rules about water,
You don't camp by water.
If you camp by water, your animals and you are gonna be polluting it, messing it up.
So they're back, maybe in our modern terms, about a kilometer back.
You take the animals to the river to drink, and then you take them away.
You do not bathe in that river.
You take the water away from the river, and you bathe away from the river, so you do not pollute the river.
The rules are very strict and very clear, and they're from the time of Chinggis Khan, about how to deal with, but also, it's dangerous to live close to the river, because there are flash floods in the summertime, you could suddenly have it, and it could wipe away if your camp is right there by the water.
So the people, they live with nature in a way that I don't see anywhere else in the world.
And even today, with the changes with the cell phone,
and with solar panels, and they could get TV out in the middle of the step.
Still, they're living a similar life.
The young people, of course, want to drive a motorbike, but they're still herding cows and yaks and camels.
If it's on a motorbike, okay.
They're still doing it the Mongol way.
The Mongol and the horse are inseparable.
I wrote one line in the book that the editor removed because that was insulting.
I said, the mongrel and the horse, they live together, they know each other with every twitch of the muscle, and they smell the same.
Well, I was saying it just not to be insulting about anything, but they have that deep intimacy, and the horses do know their owner from the smell.
This is very important.
It's also important for Chinggis Khan because they made the flags, what they call the sult, out of the
horse hair from their own horses.
And so in battle, they used it for a very practical purpose, and that is the horses would return to their source because they knew the smell of their flag,
It was other members of their own herd.
So the language itself, I have never, ever mastered all the words just for the colors of horses, much less for all the other things about it.
I can remember Mongolians being out there in the countryside.
They say, oh, I want to learn English.
I say, okay, yeah, that's nice.
You teach me some words in Mongolian.
I teach you the words.
Okay, say, what color is that horse?
I say, brown.
Okay.
They would say, brown.
I'd say, yes.
Okay.
What color is that horse?
Brown.
Then they'd say, but you said this color was brown.
What color is this?
Yeah.
So, well, I mean, it's just amazing.
I mean, they have words based on sort of how smooth the coloring is and the variation in the texture and all the different.
Today in England, sometimes you can put them together.
We say like yellow-brown or brown-brown or, you know.
But the words for horses, of course, by sex, and then they have three, because they have geldings, and so they're very important too, and by age, and by whether or not they've reproduced in the case of the females, all these things are important parts of the horse.
And the horse, a few years ago, a presidential candidate ran under the slogan, raised in the dust of many fast horses.
It just resonates with the Mongolian spirit, and the dust itself is important.
The Mongolians, they will wipe the sweat and the dust off the horse and wipe it onto their own forehead, which is the most sacred part of the body, where the soul resides.
This is how intimate a relationship is with the horses.
They're hard on them in some ways.
They train them very well.
They ride them very hard.
But the horses are also trained for that.
They use a very small crop.
It's a little bit like a stick with a slight whip at the end.
They hit the rump of the horse.
Never anything else.
They're horrified at Western people who use metal spurs and metal to harm the horse in the stomach and to harm the head of a horse.
They say it's a capital crime.
I mean, I don't know anyone who's ever executed for it.
But you never, ever harm a horse's head.
So horses are...
important in every way, even religiously important with the making of the fermented horse's milk that the mother goes out every morning and she throws some to each of the four directions to start the day.
And they use it for every kind of thing.
But, you know, some things puzzled me that in my watching, I remember one day being with a very nice family.
It happened to be on a gelding day when they were out there gelding the
would-be stallions who don't get to be stallions, but this family, they had a bunch of boys, and I only think about one or two girls, like four or five boys.
And one boy was maybe 11 years old.
He fell from the horse.
You could see it, not so far away.
He fell from the horse.
He didn't get up.
No one moved.
In fact, they all kind of turned attention away.
And I thought, what am I supposed to say?
This boy fell down.
Somebody go get him.
No.
And then the boy was trying to hobble back.
He still had the reins to his horse, but he couldn't remount.
And he was trying to hobble back.
So his little brother went out to help him come in.
And they came into the gear and they sat down.
The mother just turned her back.
And I'm thinking, how on earth can you do this?
This is a child.
This is your child.
But two weeks later, by chance,
Another boy who is practicing for Nadam, the annual races, like this boy had been doing, he was off in an area right close to a forested mountain area, and the horse bolted, took off through the woods.
He was knocked off by a tree, and then the horse went deeper into the woods.
The boy followed him.
The boy became lost.
The boy was 12 years old.
He was lost for two weeks, and he lived.
I would have died in 48 hours.
He lived.
He said, well, he slept in the daytime when it was warm.
He walked at night when it was cold, even though this was the summertime, the nights can be quite cold, especially on a mountain.
And he sang loudly all night long to keep the wolves away.
And he knew what to eat.
And then he walked until he found water moving, and then he would follow that water down to the next.
He lived.
And I realized, the boy falls from the horse, his mother's not going to be there.
She knows that.
And it's probably hard for her, too, to see her boys suffer, but she knows.
You have to be able to take care of yourself.
And with the weather, for example, often in that time, and still today, some people, if they can have the privacy to do it, the men will strip naked in the first heavy snow and roll around in the snow.
in order to prepare for the coming winter.
And the valley where I live, a lot of wrestlers come there to train in the summertime for the competition.
And the water's very cold coming down from the mountain.
And every day when there's a break, they go down, they take, again, they do not get in the water, never, but they take the water and they pour the cold water over themselves.
And yes, that's refreshing to them, refreshing.
The Mongol, the horse, and the bow were a perfect combination, and it was the most lethal weapon known to the world before the modern era.
It was incredible, the synchronization and the timing of the movements, and also the years of skill, the fact that from absolute birth, the Mongols would be on a horse.
And by three years old, they would probably be riding alone on the horse.
Now, when I first went to Mongolia in the 1990s, at that time, all jockeys on horses for races had to be under six years old.
That was the age limit, the cutoff was six years old at that time.
And so you had some as three years old racing out there.
It's absolutely incredible.
And of course, at that age, they can't even have a saddle because they can't even be used.
So they're just, all they're doing is staying on the horse.
The horse has been trained to do what it has to do and they just stay on it.
But by staying on it, they learn the horse, they become one.
And not just one horse with one rider, but one rider with several horses.
Usually five is the number that you should have for you when you go off to battle.
And this ability that is shoot.
You have to defend your animals.
There are wolves around, foxes, other things.
In some areas, there were even tigers and other animals that would come in.
And you had to be able to shoot to defend it against other people who might be raiding you.
So they became excellent archers.
They had composite bows that were very powerful, much more powerful than those of most sedentary people.
Now, I say all that because it's very important, but those are all sort of nomadic traits of the great steppe anyway.
I mean, in an earlier version, you had the Huns who came out of Mongolia, and Hun is just the Mongolian word for human.
Hun, to this day, that's what they say for a human being.
So they came out of Mongolia, and all the early Turkic groups came out of Mongolia, and they had similar skills.
So...
you have this perfect weapon, but also you have to have perfect strategy and how to coordinate it and organize it and use it.
And this is where the genius that I cannot explain at all, but the genius of Genghis Khan came in.
Other people, I think, had been very good in earlier times, a number of Turkic leaders, and also, or even Attila the Hun, who, of course, was actually born in the West.
But
But they were charismatic leaders and very dramatic leaders.
It wasn't that they were so excellent in their strategy.
They were very good in warfare, and that's what carried them through.
Genghis Khan's army was extremely good in warfare, but small.
He never got probably above 100,000, at the most 110,000.
That is small.
When you're going against China that has millions just in the army,
not to count in the country, and you're going against Russia, and you're going against the Middle East and Persia and Afghanistan and these areas, your whole army has to be as finely tuned as each rider, each bow, and each horse.
That's the weapon, what the army becomes the super weapon of Chinggis Khan, how he organized it and how he used it and the strategies that he put together.
It would fit in a stadium today in America.
They had no infantry.
And he had no baggage train.
He had no backup commissary.
Early on, no engineer corps.
Later, one was added much later.
But no, all cavalry.
I think the first point is the extreme loyalty of the people whom Chinggis Khan chose.
His kinsmen, as we said, had deserted him.
His anda was a questionable relationship, but all the others that he found were just common people, herders or hunters, very common, and they were loyal to him and never, ever revolted against him, never betrayed him.
So he had extreme loyalty.
And then, as you mentioned, he organized his decimal system, so the smallest unit of the army was the aft, the squad of 10 men.
They were put together, and then the head of that squad, he had total control over it.
But the men knew that they were going to protect each other, and they had to come back with every member or everybody.
You don't leave anybody behind.
So this was extremely important.
So if you submit to the orders of the man in charge, you know that he's risking his own life for you also.
And you know that your brother on the left and on the right is risking his life for you.
The army was...
They were organized with five horses, each man.
They had their bow, and they had a lot of arrows, as many as they could have.
But they also retrieved arrows at the end of their battle, and they also would retrieve the enemy arrows.
This was a great advantage, by the way, when they hit Russia, because the Russians could not use Mongolian arrows.
They could knock them in their bow, but the Mongols could use Russian arrows.
But
So all these little things, but it's not even just the arrow.
Also, they had to carry needle and thread.
Every soldier had to be able to sew.
And sometimes that could be a torn garment.
It could be a piece of skin or a wound that somebody has.
It's a very odd thing when you think about the army of Ching as Han and they're carrying everything themselves.
They don't have any pack train behind them.
And that one of the things they have to carry is needle and thread in order to sew up things.
So complete self-reliance in that regard.
Yes.
They also carried dried dairy products, arult it's called, where they dry curd, and they can keep it for a couple of years even.
But you dry it, and then when you need it, you can put it in a flask of water.
You ride all day, it joggles up and down, boom, boom, boom, and turns into kind of thick protein.
It's said that the Mongols could easily go three to five days without ever building a fire.
They had enough food there.
So all these little things at the lowest level were important, as well at the highest level of his loyalty, of his men to him.
And it went all the way down.
Loyalty was extremely important.
And he organized the army into left wing, right wing.
or east and west.
Mongols, the word for left is east, the word for right is west.
So those two wings, and then in the middle was the gol, the center, this moving center that was his bodyguard and his unit in the middle.
then usually they'd have a vanguard and a rearguard.
Sometimes the vanguard would go out as much as two years in advance to clear the land, run the people away, scare them, make them go away so that the grass is left there for the army when it moves through.
And they never marched the way other armies do in a line of one following the other.
They would always go in long lines spread out in wings.
So that each horse is on its own path, you could say, but all parallel together.
So they had very precise ways of doing things.
And this, I think, was the secret with him.
And he used the best people, but he also...
He was willing to train them as much as possible.
He never punished them for what happened.
So Shiki Hutuk, for example, the Supreme Judge, he was command one time of a group in a battle in Afghanistan, and he lost the battle, which is very, very unusual for Mongols.
So Genghis Khan went out with him, said, okay, let's go to the battlefield together and look it over.
And you explain to me what you did
and then we will talk about it.
So he was very thoughtful in the way that he was training the people around him.
And they knew they weren't going to be punished.
It's not like these countries where the general comes back and gets executed because he lost.
No, Chinggis Khan knows every general is going to try 100%.
And if they retreat, fine.
They're saving Mongol lives.
They know what to do.
He respects that.
So all these things like that fit together.
But I think a part of it that was important for him was
So he had this base from step warfare already, the horse, the archery, and how that all fit together.
But he was very...
quick to embrace any kind of other technology that he saw.
I think that sedentary armies, like sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in their ways.
This is how we do it.
And we're gonna make it a little faster, we're gonna make it a little bigger, a little stronger, but this is how we think.
Chinggis Khan had no set way to think.
And when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209, after founding his nation in 1206,
He went out on these raids.
And I really think they were raids, not wars at first.
So he went into Tangut territory of what's now northwestern China in the upper reaches of the Yellow River.
So he went there.
And of course, the cities have walls around them.
This is a man who's never encountered a wall in his life.
Well, he did, but they were made out of felt.
The walls around his tent are, you know, felt walls.
Well, they have like the wall cliffs in some places.
They're familiar with that and they can climb them, but they don't have people at the top shooting down the mountain.
But he looked at everything around him and he saw, okay, they have this river and they have all these channels and they're always moving water around.
And like we said, for a Mongol, anything that moves is a potential weapon.
Anything that doesn't move is a target.
You've got moving water, you've got a standing non-moving wall.
So he said, okay, the men are going to dig a channel and they're going to bring down the wall of the Tangut city.
Well, they did it and they didn't know exactly what they were doing and the embankments weren't high enough and too much water came in from the Yellow River and actually flooded out the Mongol camp.
But, okay, it happened.
We learned that lesson.
So we're going to improve it.
And that became a strategy that actually worked for the Mongols.
for the next 50 years, all the way to Baghdad.
They were able to use it when they conquered Baghdad in 1258.
So this ability to see things and to try them, and if they fail, to try them in a different way, but a better way.
We all think we learn from our mistakes.
We all, yeah, yeah, I learned from that.
And what do we do?
We repeat the mistake.
I think it's just a part of human nature.
Well, it didn't work the first eight times, but I'm going to do it one more time.
I think it's going to work.
I know I'm going to win the lottery this time because I got the right... That's how we think.
But he had that real ability to, first of all, to be humble before these other things he didn't know about, technology, and to understand that he didn't understand.
But
He could understand it in his own way, and he did.
Over and over, the Mongols were excellent at putting together new things in new ways and using them against their enemies.
Yes, yes.
And they were able to do that for three generations, to create an army that was ever-expanding, ever-changing its tactics and its technology.
And they got worse at it over time.
But Chinggis Khan was the one who innovated it.
He was the best with it.
And he used it throughout his lifetime.
And he was getting better over his lifetime with using foreign information, foreign technology, foreign ideas.
He just had a genius for that.
Yes.
Usually the way the rotation of the horses would, the horse would usually ride for one day and then rest for the next four to five days.
And then another horse would be riding the next day.
One way to measure it is that later at the time of the death of a Gudehan, the word went from Mongolia to Hungary.
in six weeks.
The Mongols did not fight for honor the way we often think of brave soldiers, Achilles and the Iliad and things like that.
They fought for victory.
That was the one thing.
So to retreat, to save lives and all, there's no shame in that.
So the Mongols would often retreat, and Chinggis Khan basically, he himself never fought a battle
that he thought he could lose, and he won every battle he fought.
That wasn't true for every general under him, as we said for Shigi Hutuk, for example, but he won every battle because there was no shame in retreating and in not fighting, not engaging the enemy.
However, that also becomes a tactic, and that they would send in a small group of soldiers to attack.
And the Mongols were able to fire, of course, going forward on the horse.
They were able to then...
act like they were defeated and turn, but they could still fire backwards, which was the Parthian shot, which is unusual in the world, not totally unique, but unusual to fire backwards.
But the Mongols also could lean down and fire under the neck of the horse, so they're protected.
They had many different ways.
So they're firing coming, they're firing going, but
Usually the soldiers who were against them would break ranks to chase them.
They want to go, they want to get the weapons, they want to kill the Mongols.
And if they didn't immediately break ranks, the Mongols would often start throwing things out like loot from someplace and valuables around, and the soldiers usually couldn't resist it.
So they'd come chasing out after the Mongols, sort of pell-mell going in every different direction.
And then they would get to a certain point, and from behind the two hills, the Mongol army would come and slaughter them.
Over and over, this tactic worked.
It's like the one with the water.
I'm thinking, the people, how can they not know this is what the Mongols are doing?
How can they not know that?
The story of Genghis Khan, like the story I think of all of us, it doesn't begin at birth.
He really was a military genius.
But there were other things, too.
They didn't like Rhodes.
They just didn't like the roads.
So they would often be coming from some direction that nobody ever came from, and the people would be unprepared for that.
The most famous example is probably in Bukhara.
This is a beautiful, wonderful old city, a great place in the world to this day.
And they came across the desert.
Well, nobody had ever attacked across the desert, so people see dust coming.
They think, well, a caravan?
They don't even know what's going on.
But it was the direction that was a surprise element in that particular case.
So he was able to think in ways that the other people were not thinking yet, and to be able to surprise them.
That's the beginning of life.
I think the terror was one of the greatest weapons that he had, that he cultivated this reputation of ferocity.
The story begins long before birth.
Not only did he win battles, but he didn't allow people to write about him, as we said, but he encouraged people
refugees.
And when he conquered a city, he always made sure there were plenty of refugees to go to the next city because it's going to weaken them, it's going to weaken their food supply, and they're going to terrorize the people with tales of the millions of people that the Mongols killed with their steel chiseled teeth and eating children and all kinds of horrible tales.
And sometimes it can be many generations before and sometimes only shortly before.
Chinggis Khan encouraged it.
This is propaganda.
It's terrorism of a mental sort to weaken the enemy.
And so when you hear
Or even if you know they're coming, you see the dust, you hear the kind of roar that comes with all those horses and the trembling of the earth.
It must have been truly terrifying.
Genghis Khan had a precise system, exactly.
He sent in envoys first to explain to the people a little bit about the Mongols, already much was known, but to explain to them that if they surrendered, all the lives would be spared.
But I think with Genghis Khan, a crucial thing is to understand how his parents met and then how he was conceived.
and they could continue in their professions.
It's just that now the rulers would be the Mongols.
They would have to pay the taxes, and usually it would be the same taxes they'd paid before, but now they would go to the Mongols.
That was kind of the general system.
And because you only have 100,000 soldiers, you can't leave a detachment there.
So you're going to leave the local people in charge to run their country or their city or their area the way they have done in the past.
He was absolutely faithful to that.
In one episode in the north of Persia, modern Iran, his son-in-law, Tokhtar, he violated that and was stealing and looting from the people who had surrendered.
Chinggis Khan called him in, and he stripped him of his rank, and he said, the next city, you go first.
as a common soldier.
And of course he was killed in the next battle.
I don't know the name of the daughter, unfortunately, I've tried to figure that out.
But anyway, it was a close relative to him and he was killed in the next, violating this law.
So that was the law.
So then if the city fought and the Mongols won, they did not kill everyone.
What they did was they killed all the leaders.
And that is that one day,
They felt like the elite had not served them well.
And they usually killed the army because they couldn't incorporate the army into their own.
The army had failed.
But the one thing that they valued were all the artisans, everybody who had a skill.
And that skill could be making a pot.
It could be hammering out a metal plate.
It can be weaving carpets.
It can be translating or just reading and writing.
Every person with a skill was spared.
So the killing of the people who were defeated wasn't so severe.
What was truly severe was if you surrendered, and many of them did, and then they knew they would not be harmed, so they're not harmed.
a cart was coming across the Mongol territory, and only women drove carts.
The Mongols go on, the Mongols are hundreds of miles away, and all, so forget about the Mongols.
Cheikh al-Han said word that we're supposed to send so many cows or sheep to help, forget about the Mongols.
They're far away, it's a, no.
He stopped, he returned,
He conquered the city and he killed everyone.
That's the way it worked.
Yes.
And as it turned out, I would say it was more the Middle East or what we call around Iran and Afghanistan where these were the worst cases.
And I would say only in Afghanistan did sometimes the emotion of the slaughter change.
take over in an unfortunate way.
But he had a grandson whom he loved very much, and that grandson traveled with him, and he had the happy childhood that Temujin had not had.
Men rode horses.
And I think Chinggis Khan just loved that about him.
But in Afghanistan, he was sent off to conquer the valley of Bamiyan, where the great Buddhas are, actually.
Women also rode horses.
He was sent to Bamiyan, and
As it says in the Persian history, the thumb of fate fired the arrow that shot him down.
He was killed.
But women owned the houses, which were called gers, the tents.
And for Chinggis Khan, he had never lost a family member.
Not one.
None of his sons, none of his grandsons in battle.
He had not lost them.
And now to lose the most valuable grandson you have, the one that's your pride and joy in so many ways.
And so he called the father, his own son, to him and did not tell him.
He did not announce it to the public.
And the son came, and the son didn't know why he was being summoned.
They owned all the household equipment, and so they had to have carts for moving back and forth.
And Chinggis Khan said, you have to tell me that,
You will not cry or moan when I tell you this, but your son is no more.
And the father was, no one was allowed to moan.
No one was allowed to cry.
No one was allowed to do anything.
You just, he said, make them cry.
You know, he came down on the people of Afghanistan.
so harshly, and it went on for weeks and weeks, the killing in Afghanistan.
And then it just kind of wore itself out.
He recognized that he had allowed his emotions to overcome practicality and the slaughtering of these people should stop.
And the fact that a cart was moving meant that some woman was moving from one place to another.
And so he did.
But that's the only time I know of that he really kind of lost control of his own emotions.
And it's something we can all understand, but his response was truly extreme of, we will not cry, we will not mourn.
They will cry, they will mourn.
I should add, he did not slaughter the people in the peaceful towns.
What happened was the killing of what people thought was the heir, and he well may have been, of Genghis Khan, the killing of him revitalized a lot of people's hopes, and a lot of cities revolted.
The ones who did not revolt were not killed.
But the cities who revolted, he killed them all.
And in fact, her husband was with her.
There was a mass slaughter.
She was a new bride, and her husband...
The number itself is difficult to deal with.
Millions of people were killed.
For every family that lost someone,
It's a total loss.
It doesn't matter what the number is.
It's a tremendous loss.
And there was tremendous loss of life as in every war.
I don't think we should judge him
any differently than other conquerors in history and other countries today that fight wars, including our own country.
who was on a horse close to her.
Whatever we are willing to permit our country to do, we should be able to understand why Genghis Khan or the Mongols did it.
You look today in the world, people are killing
Children, women, civilians, every day, every day.
And it's always in the name of something, in the name of peace or in the name of God or in the name of our nation.
There are always reasons for the killing.
And the United States has certainly evolved with, involved with that.
Supplying the weapons for bombing people, invading Afghanistan, invading, fighting in Iraq, fighting in Syria.
So what happened was a man named Yasuke,
The United States is very involved in that.
And it's always, oh, but we're defending democracy.
Yeah, we brought a hell of a lot of democracy to Afghanistan.
We killed a lot of people.
You can even look back to World War II, our great moment of democracy and bringing freedom and democracy to Germany.
We dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Those were not military targets.
We were not doing anything strategic there.
against the country other than terrorizing the country by killing women and children.
That's America.
That's us.
Yasuke, the future father of Genghis Khan, Yasuke was up on a hill.
My father fought in that war.
In fact, he fought in all.
He fought in Vietnam.
He fought in that war.
And he fought in Korea.
And he was a good American.
I mean, there was nothing wrong with it.
And I'm not...
I don't even condemn America, but I'm saying, how can we condemn one set of people for doing it and then excuse it in ourselves?
But we tend to do that.
Especially barbarian people, people from the steppe, for example, we tend to demonize them.
Or any enemy we have, we tend to demonize them.
He was hunting with his falcon.
It's a justification.
People are always fighting for peace, always fighting for peace.
World War I was to make the world safe for democracy and peace.
And in World War II, but what happened?
We went to war in Korea.
The words of the secret history of the Mongols were very clear, and he looked down, and he saw her, and he could barely glimpse her, but he knew she was young, and she was a new bride, and he rode back to camp.
We went to war in Vietnam.
We bombed Cambodia.
We bombed Laos.
We bombed Afghanistan.
We bombed Syria.
We bombed Iraq.
We're always fighting for, you know, and I'm not a pacifist.
I am not.
I grew up surrounded with soldiers and I am not a pacifist.
But I try to be a realist that all nations kill.
It happens everywhere.
Creative destruction, it certainly works in some aspects of life.
Even with ourselves, for example, if we can creatively destroy some of our habits and build new ones, it sometimes works.
Or we can destroy relationships that we're in in order to create new ones, it can work.
He got his two brothers, and they came racing down, and they came, and first the husband
When you start applying it to world history, it does become a little bit more difficult.
I certainly think that these episodes create great changes
you can see great changes that happened because of the Mongol Empire.
Now, whether or not that's a good reason for the Mongol Empire having happened, it seems like a bit of a stretch.
for me.
The Mongols helped to unify many countries.
You can think Korea had been three, basically, kingdoms, pushed them together.
Everything that you see in China today was a part of the Mongol Empire.
They put together North China, South China, Tibet, Manchuria, and it was a little bit larger under the Mongols.
Even Russia, with so many little
kingdoms and duchies and dukedoms, and the center had been in the Ukraine, in Kiev.
And they shifted the focus out of Ukraine and more towards into what we call Russia now, and they began the process of the unification.
It had a great impact on the country.
So in a way, it's a new creation.
Yes, it does arrive out of the destruction.
But also, I think we need to look, where does the destruction come from?
And it often comes because the powers around them have been so debilitated and so corrupted and so decayed of their own lack of moral fiber that it was easy to conquer them.
The case of Kublai Khan finally conquered all of China.
of the woman looked around and he decided to flee.
He was conquering a decayed dynasty.
When the Mongols conquered Baghdad and overthrew the caliph, they were conquering a very decayed institution.
No one likes war, and I certainly don't like war, but I'm not 100% against it.
I think that there are times...
that people are going to do it for their own protection, if nothing else, of their family, and it's justified in that sense to themselves.
It may not be justified in a world sense, but I just make the case for being tolerant of what the Mongols did if we can tolerate what the Americans did.
And I am American, true and true.
There's no question about that.
But we overlook all of our things that we did.
Not because he was a coward, but he figured he would probably pull the men after him.
Now, it's interesting, for example, in Afghanistan, we were there for some 20 years.
We had made the Taliban stronger before when they were fighting against the Russians, and then we kicked them out, and then they kicked us out.
But some of the Taliban leaders are from the Jadran clan, descended from Jamuk family.
from his clan.
This is what I mean when I say that the ramifications from that time are still with us, and we don't even see it.
And when Saddam Hussein went on television for the last time in Iraq to plead with his people, he said the Mongols, meaning Americans, the Mongols have returned.
The Mongols have returned.
And he said the Americans are just the new Mongols.
They would chase him.
I can see it, I don't accept it, but I can see how people think.
If we can be honest with ourselves and strip away our own lies about ourselves, then perhaps we will be more ethical in our dealings with other people.
And they did.
They chased him.
He went far away.
He circled around.
He came back.
He arrived back at the cart where his wife was.
I'm guilty.
Still mad at him.
Carl is a very smart man.
I respect him very much, and I like him tremendously.
And he's right.
But that is not what I want to stress.
It's not that I want to deny the killing.
It's not that I want to deny the warfare.
Her name was Erlun.
But that's pretty much the same everywhere in the world.
And how much do we need to say about
how the wall was broken down, how this unit was defeated.
No, it's what comes afterwards.
You know, just as the story of our life begins far earlier than we are born, the story of our life goes on for a long time afterwards.
And Erlun had time to think while he was riding around being chased by the Mongols.
If you have a nation of one million people
and you are ruling over hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, China, Russia, the Middle East.
You do not do that through warfare.
You conquer them initially through warfare, but you do not rule them through warfare.
You've got to be offering something that they want, something that they like.
And all the things you've mentioned from the trading system, the postal system, the religious freedom, the rights of women, the rights of minorities,
These were things that people responded to.
And so the world benefited tremendously from the life of Chinggis Khan, but all we want to talk about, and I don't deny it, is the conquest part.
Okay, that's 20 years.
If it went on for another 150 years,
There's more to the story than just conquest.
And she decided,
Yes.
I guess if there's one thing that I try to do in my career of writing, it is to get us to recognize the importance of tribal people in the history of the world.
that it's more important for him to live.
We tend to have two categories for them.
There are barbarians who kill people and eat one another,
or their victims, and we should feel sorry for them and nostalgic about everything about them, and maybe wear some of their beads or some of their clothing to show how much we sympathize with their suffering.
That's the two roles for tribal people.
But I'm trying to show them in a different light, that they conquered—yes, they were conquerors—but they also created great things in the history of the world.
And she told him when he came back, you must flee.
And that the Mongol Empire was really the first modern empire in the way that I'm putting together that story.
And Chinggis Khan was the genius behind that, who created this idea that there could be one world in which there would be one set of supreme law, but all people could follow their own law.
You could have any religion you wanted, but ultimately you had to obey kind of the great ethics of the sky.
If you stay here, they will kill you and they will take me.
And there were things like that about his vision.
that I think very few people in history had a vision.
And I look around the world today, and in my lifetime, since the time of Roosevelt's death, I look around, I don't see much vision.
I see lots of slogans, lots of talks, policy papers, oh my God, we can produce it.
But if you flee, they will take me, but you will have the chance to find another wife.
Where's the vision?
It's always, we're gonna have peace and we're gonna have a better life and vote for me or vote for my party.
And we're really for the people and we're, what the heck are they talking about?
There is no vision there.
So what is this country?
What should this country be?
What is this world?
How should we?
No, no vision.
There are many women in the world.
You find one and you call her Hulun after my name.
Some empires in history and some rulers have been tolerant of various groups.
I mean, Rome, to some extent, was reasonably tolerant of different sects and religions, not of the Christians, but reasonably.
But what happened with Chinggis Khan, the first campaign he had outside of Mongolia
was for the Uyghur people who lived in Western China.
They, at that time, were being ruled by, actually, we had mentioned before, the Naiman king, Tayang Han.
And you remember me when you're with her.
His son, Kuchluk, had fled
no good, worthless son, but Gutsluk had fled into what is today the area around Kyrgyzstan, and they ruled over the Uyghur people.
It's a very dramatic moment.
He had been a Christian, the Naiman had been a Christian tribe, but he converted to Buddhism.
Well, his subjects were Muslim, and he outlawed the Muslim religion, and he made all kinds of things happen.
So the Uyghurs sent a delegation to Chinggis Khan
At this time, they knew that the emperors of China were too weak to protect them, so they sent delegation to Genghis Khan and asked him to come and save them from him.
And he did.
He sent down a detachment.
He didn't actually go himself.
He sent a detachment down there.
And he rode away.
They drove Gutsalik from power, Gutsalik fled down towards Pakistan in that direction.
They caught up with him.
They killed him.
That's what the Mongols did.
And then Genghis Khan made the first law that he ever made for people outside of Mongolia.
So up to this point, it's been tribal law.
And he saw, as we had mentioned before, that for the tribes were mostly fighting over women.
and he looked back and forth, and it said that the pigtails, or the braids that were hanging down, were whipping back and forth from his chest to his back.
So you outlaw the kidnapping of women, you outlaw the sale of women, and you cut down on a lot of the feuding.
But he saw that civilized, quote unquote, people
fought a lot over religion.
They weren't fighting over religion.
And so he made the law.
Now, this was very interesting.
We talk about religious freedom.
Religious freedom comes in many forms.
One form is to allow institutions to do what they want.
So we're going to allow the Mormons and the Catholics and the Jews and the Muslims each to do what they want in the organized churches that they have.
His law was not that.
It presumed that.
It allowed that.
But he said, every person has the right to choose their religion.
No one can stop them.
No one can force them.
The idea that it was individual choice, no one in history had ever thought of that, that it belonged to the person.
He was divided, obviously, in whether he should go or stay.
Yes.
It was a great source of power for him also.
You know, I don't say that he did this because of some ideological reason.
It's just like he didn't outlaw the kidnapping of women for ideological reasons.
He didn't come to it through studying ideas of moral right.
He came to it through practical experience of life.
His mother was kidnapped.
His...
Wife was kidnapped.
He knew that that was a crime against every ethics that you can think of and every form of morality.
That's why he did it.
Not for ideological reasons, but practical reasons.
It hurt people.
It hurt people.
It was the same with religion.
He gave this right to everybody because it was going to be their own personal right to keep them from being hurt.
But the three men were approaching again, and they were headed straight for the cart this time, and they came in, and they took Erlun.
And then that gave him tremendous support from minorities of many types.
And so they flocked to him.
After that, this was a minority effort of the Muslim Uyghurs to come to him.
Many people flocked to him for the same reason, for that kind of religious freedom.
And also I will say on a more...
more practical, political sort of way of thinking, he recognized the power of having a balance of power of like Shiite and Sunni, that both are going to be allowed equal rights.
One is not dominant over the other.
And Christians and Jews, they all have... Well...
That keeps the society from fragmenting against him, or uniting against him, and it's a kind of fragmentation that he's taken advantage of.
I don't think that was his main reason, but I do think he was quite aware of that, that you give every religion the right.
Unfortunately, the only religion he didn't recognize as a religion was Confucianism.
He said, what do they do?
The Taoists can do magic on the earth, and they can give people magic formulas to cure it, or they have all this kind of stuff going on.
Well, what do the Confucianists do?
So the people could be Confucianists.
That was okay.
But he didn't expend all the tax-free rights.
See, that was another thing.
She didn't say a word until her husband was over the ridge.
He dropped all taxes on religious institutions, all types.
But...
since the Confucianists were not necessarily classified.
But then, of course, eventually that was abused so much because the religions were then, can everybody donate property?
You can still use it, you can still farm your land, but it's ours, and now you don't have to pay taxes on it, you just give us some money.
You know, got abused, but it started off as a good idea.
It's interesting, you know, we said after the death of Sirimon, his grandson in Bamiyan, and the slaughter that followed that, he went through a new phase in which he summoned religious scholars of all sorts.
And when he was over the ridge and she could no longer see him, she began to scream and wail.
a famous Chongqing from China who I despise.
But anyway, he came with all of his magic formulas for things, and then a bunch of various Muslim leaders came.
So Chinggis Khan was exploring all these different religions, and not just in a simple way.
He had organized public lectures from these people and public debates, not antagonistic debates, but discussions among groups of people who had
hated each other and would never discuss anything, and suddenly this powerful man summons him, and he has to say, okay, well, explain your religion and explain yours.
And even sometimes you can't just explain it in terms of your own scripture.
And one of the brothers said to her, doesn't matter if you shake the waters out of the river and if you shake the mountains with your screaming, you will never see this man again.
What do you say to the people who believe it?
So he was exploring, but no, he never changed at all.
He was an animist, we would say.
That's not the only term we know to use.
Early in life, he worshiped that mountain where he took refuge several times, Burhan Haldun.
Burhan Haldun was the great refuge of his life.
He would go to the top.
He would pray.
He would take off his hat.
He would take off his belt.
He would stand there before the sky and pray.
Also, later on, actually, this became rather dramatic.
He would sometimes go away to pray, should we invade these people?
And so all of the...
The subjects are waiting to hear what's God going to tell Chinggis Khan when he goes up the mountain.
So there are episodes like that.
But he was very sincere.
But I think what happened—
The Mongols have so many spirits in the water, the mountains, everything around them.
And you have to know them personally and pray to them and know what they like and don't like.
And should you sing to them or should you offer some milk products or what do you do?
You have to know them.
Well, you get away from Mongolia, and this was a problem in China.
They didn't know the spirits.
This caused great consternation for the Mongols.
You've got a land here, and the spirits don't like us.
They're hostile lands.
We don't even know who they are.
We don't know these spirits in China.
It took a long time.
And so gradually, Chinggis Khan...
He kind of moved from just the spirit of the mountain that he worshipped, which remained his main focus of worship his whole life.
He removed that to the sky.
That was the one universal spirit.
It was everywhere in the world.
The sky was the same for every people.
And so for the Mongolians in their language, the word for sky and the word for heaven and the word for God and the word for weather are all the same.
And he was right.
Tengir, tengir.
And so, or in the case of the eternal sky, when they're talking about it in religious terms, the eternal blue sky.
So he became more universalistic in this animist vision of the world.
And so then the sky could embrace all religions, all religions, and all people were trying to attain the same form of enlightenment.
That was the moment that Genghis Khan's mother and father met.
Well, enlightenment is too specific a word.
but the same form of moral life and guidance from the sky.
He felt that each person knew morality.
Each person could communicate and know morality within themselves.
They didn't have to just be taught it by somebody from a book.
And in fact, as one of his grandson Meng Han said, you know,
You people talking to all the others, to the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Daoists, said you people have your scriptures and you don't live by them.
We have our spirits and our shamans and our drums, and we live by them.
That's the beginning of his story in this kidnapping.
There's a lot of things that look awfully progressive about the things he's implemented, and they stayed.
And it's going to reverberate.
I'm not trying to say it in modern terms.
You know, when you have one million people, you've got to use every one.
And the men are fighting, and so he left women to administer a lot of things inside the country, the economy in particular, and then some of the ancillary Turkic kingdoms around the Mongols, such as the Ongut, the Tahrir, and different Mongols, and the Uyghur even.
Every detail of it will come back again and again, not only throughout the story of the life of Genghis Khan, but it's going to continue on with the feuds and the issues caused by it all the way into the future.
were administered by his daughters primarily.
And his wives were in charge of administering the land of Mongolia itself and handling the economy.
So he was using the women, but in a very practical way.
but it wasn't necessarily in our ideological way.
I think it's the same with the environment.
I'm not trying to say he was an environmentalist in our modern way, but he passed very strict laws about the use of water and also about not using water, that you couldn't move water into an area to irrigate it
That was violating the earth and violating the water.
So they think, a lot of the historians, they think the Mongols are so stupid, they let the irrigation system be destroyed.
No, it takes more work to destroy an irrigation system than it does to create it.
They destroyed those systems out of a policy, and that was, this is going to return to pasture land.
This last Kublai Khan was the one who changed that, actually, and then started allowing for more irrigation and the movement of water and things.
But Chinggis Khan, we can't use these modern terms of like a human rights crusader, or I'm trying to say he's the Democrat in the modern sense, or an environmentalist, or a feminist.
But all of this was a part of it.
Another part was the protection of envoys.
He said every envoy, every ambassador, every messenger,
is protected from arrest, from torture, and from killing.
And if you kill one of ours, we will wipe you out.
And in 1240, that was the destruction of Kiev.
I mean, this is after Chinggis Khan already.
You know, there's Aguday Khan, his son, the happy, happy drunk.
Aguday Khan's army had come there under Subodai, the greatest general in the history of the world, I would say, Subodai, a person who's not, was Chinggis Khan for the military part.
He was the greatest strategist for organizing everything together.
But the military part was Subodai.
So Subodai had been there, and they sent in an ambassador who happened to be a woman,
Now, some of the Western sources say a daughter of Chinggis Khan.
I have no evidence of that, and I don't quite believe it, but maybe she was kin to him or something.
And to some extent, in certain parts of the world, you could say it still exists.
Some say she was a daughter of Chinggis Khan.
Others say she was a witch.
The people of Kiev decided she was a witch and killed her.
Okay, that's it.
That's it.
Kiev was destroyed for killing a Mongol envoy.
That's why these...
These plans, I say that the making of the modern world, most of the ideas have—we accept the idea, we don't do the practice.
All of us accept today diplomatic freedom.
Diplomats are killed around the world yearly.
We accept the idea of female equality and emancipation of every way.
But in fact, they're enslaved in many parts of the world today.
We accept the idea of religious freedom.
Oh, but not those people.
That's not—
Theirs isn't good.
Their religion isn't right.
But our religion, we will tolerate them, but they got to be more like us.
No, we only say these things, but the world still hasn't achieved some.
And he did achieve these within his empire in his time.
He achieved those.
Nomads in general are interested in trade.
And throughout most of history, they have been the traders who carried the goods from one city to another, one oasis to another.
And so the Mongols were also extremely interested and extremely dependent.
They could create very little in their home country.
They couldn't grow hardly anything, and they didn't have the technological skills for most of the crafts.
So they're very dependent on trade.
Well, they raised the status of merchants very high.
This was particularly a problem in the Chinese world.
It wasn't so much in the Christian or the Muslim world, but certainly in the Chinese world where merchants were considered extremely low.
And all of a sudden, he raises them up above scholars.
They're going to have certain rights.
For example, they get to be taxed one time.
Whatever the national taxes, that's it.
They're not taxed every time they stop in some new town.
And he created a set of what we would call rest houses or recuperation centers where they could get fresh horses, they could get food, they could deposit their money and get paper receipts that could be used anywhere in the empire.
They were guaranteed protection.
If they had to pass through an area where it might be dangerous, then a small group, a squad of men and horses would go with them.
So trade was extremely important.
And then the Mongols, they also, they supported trade in a very odd way, and that is the merchants would come in and they would ask for an outrageous price for some goods, much more than they should get, waiting for the Mongols to bargain them down.
What I was really interested in was
And the Mongols would say, I'll give you much more than that.
And his grandson, or his son, Ogode Han, was the one to ask, why do you do that?
You've got to stop doing that.
This was a Muslim financial advisor he'd called in.
He told him, well, you've got to stop paying more than people ask.
And Ogode said, where's the money going to go?
It's still in my empire.
It's going to come back eventually, you know?
And so they had a much different attitude with great respect.
And I think a symbol of that is in the time of Kublai Khan, when we see that his uncle and father went to China and came back from China.
And then on the second trip,
How did this happen?
Marco Polo went with them to China and back.
They were safe the whole way.
Their goods were safe.
They came back with tremendous amount of wealth.
They were never harassed.
Who was this person?
And the mere fact that they could cross, it took two years, but the mere fact that they could cross the whole continent safely and come back, that was unprecedented.
We really don't have any well-documented case of anybody, say, from China visiting Europe or Europe visiting China before the Mongols.
But since Genghis Khan, there's never been a year without contact between East and West.
As Wordsworth wrote in his poem, you know, the child is father of the man.
It was permanent.
Once he created it, it was permanent.
Yes.
It was an exchange of ideas on every level.
Ideas, technology, ideologies, beliefs, scientific information, everything was being exchanged, even agricultural goods of new crops for new areas.
And it's the childhood that created him.
But
But Genghis Khan, he had a part of his genius of organization was knowing what skill people had that would contribute towards his empire.
For example, the Muslims were very good with arithmetic.
In fact, he conquered the little empire of Khwarezm, from which we get the word algorithm.
because there was a mathematician there who invented algorithms.
And so a harezm belonged to him.
And it's that episode that was before he was born.
He conquered it very quickly, very easily, no problem.
But it belonged to him.
But the Muslims were using the zero.
The Mongols were absolutely impressed with that.
The Chinese less so.
They're very suspicious about the zero.
But the Mongols were very impressed because herders' numbers are important to them for keeping up with their animals.
In fact, the Mongols have a simple system.
They reduce all animals to the number of horses.
You can ask somebody how many animals you can have, and they can say, well, 100 horses.
And it doesn't mean they have 100 horses.
It's going to be like...
of five cows count as four horses, five sheep or five goats count as one horse, four camels count as five horses.
But all the things that happened throughout his childhood made him into the man that he became.
So they reduced it all down like that.
The Mongols take a census of everything.
And that's one of the first things Chinggis Khan did.
And that was one of the demands he made of every place he went, is a complete census of your people.
And every house had to post outside.
How many people, how many animals, what did they do, the occupations, all this information.
So they needed good mathematics for this.
The Muslims provided it.
So they took the Muslims to China, these Middle Eastern scholars and all.
Unfortunately, they were rather ruthless sometimes when it came to implementing the tax policies, but they became the financial advisors to him.
Other groups of people had other roles like that, and he was moving them around constantly.
And so he was now suddenly...
And so you had a combination, as I said, he himself had that genius for combining new bits of technology.
But it created a new kind of cultural spirit in which other people were also combining technology at other levels and being encouraged.
It was no longer heresy or the devil's work to bring in this thing.
So we had the spread of printing, for example.
We had the partial spread of something such as print money.
for example.
We had almanacs being created now through printing that combined different calendars and different information that was coming along.
But one simple but lethal form of technology was that, for example, the Chinese had gunpowder.
Mostly, it was used for fireworks, religious things.
And then sometimes in warfare, it was used for a kind of primitive hand grenade or a primitive bomb that could be thrown with a trebuchet.
this unusual situation was created where a child is going to be born to a kidnapped woman who's being held by strange people, the Mongols, they were not her people.
And this is in the time of Kublai Khan more, the grandson.
So they had that.
The Middle Eastern, the Muslims, and the Byzantines especially, they had naphtha, what we call Greek fire, flamethrowers that could set things on fire, you know.
The Europeans did not excel very much in technology.
They were behind in almost everything, but they could cast bells for churches.
Okay, let's take that bell, and we're going to turn it on its side, and we're going to use the principles of the flamethrower, and we're going to use the gunpowder from China, and you've got a cannon.
So the Mongols, even early on, by the time they got to the siege of Baghdad, but not, I think, in the lifetime of Chinggis Khan, but soon thereafter in his sons and grandsons, they were using some very primitive forms of cannon and even something like firing rods.
We can't even call it anything like a rifle, but it could fire a very small ballistic device.
So this combination...
of metalurgy, gunpowder, flamethrowers.
You put it all together and you come up with something incredibly different.
If we switch to the grandson, Kublai Khan, he...
First of all, he changed a lot of the strategies.
They were no longer working.
The Mongol system worked perfectly on the grassland.
But by the time you get to Hungary, the grassland starts to give out.
By the time you get to Poland, it's so many farms.
It's hard for horses to get through the farms, and they don't want to go on the roads.
By the time you get to the Indus River, it's too hot, too humid.
The bows are beginning to wilt.
The horses are exhausted.
It's not working.
So to conquer South China, Kublai Khan had to come up with new things.
One thing, the South Chinese had built a great wall.
And he already had another wife or husband.
It was called the Great Wall of the Sea.
This is before the wall that we know as the Great Wall, which is really the Ming Wall of the Ming Dynasty was built.
But the Great Wall of the Sea, and they used it as a defensive navy.
They had the largest navy in the world, it was defensive.
And it was literally defensive, and it came time for warfare.
They would chain the ships together across the mouth of a harbor to protect the city.
And so it became a wall.
He had a wife named Xochitl.
In 1215, Chinggis Khan conquered the city we now know as Beijing.
It was the capital of the Jin Dynasty of northern China.
He had at that time already one son.
And at that time, southern China was ruled by the Song dynasty.
dynasty, or usually called the Southern Song.
He had already conquered the Xixia kingdom of the Tangut people, and so most of northern China was under the control of the Mongols from about 1215, and then he conquered middle.
Later he had another son with her.
Later, his descendants conquered middle, and then Kublai Khan was the one to take on the south.
But Kublai Khan was born that year in 1215, about three months after the capture of Beijing, and he was nobody.
He was the second son of the fourth son of Genghis Khan.
Well, he's got lots of cousins out there who've been riding around.
They're conquering Russia and they've already burned down Kiev and they've conquered different places in the world.
It was a very odd situation.
They're real Mongols.
That's their whole life.
And he's born and he doesn't meet Genghis Khan until he's about seven years old because Genghis Khan was away on a conquest in Central Asia.
And in fact, the father, Yasuke, wasn't even there.
And Genghis Khan came back and he met him and he said, oh,
He doesn't look like a Mongol.
He looks like his mother's people.
His mother was a Sorakhtani who was actually a part of the royal family of the Merkit people whom he had conquered sometime earlier.
So it looks like his mother's people, who is a little bit more tawny.
Mongols tend to be very white with very bright red cheeks and have a certain very round face and so on.
And so he looked different.
And for whatever reason, his mother, I think she recognized the difference and treated him differently.
Her oldest son was called Mungh.
when Temüjin was born.
later Meng Han, Meng, and she wanted him to become, even though her husband was drunk, who died out on campaign drunk, and she took over northern China, and she began to put it together, and she wanted her son to become the great Han, the emperor of the Mongol Empire.
He was off fighting the Tatars, and during this campaign against the Tatars, he killed two Tatars.
And this wasn't in line.
This wasn't going to happen because he's the fourth son out of three others way in line, way ahead of her.
But she caused a revolution.
She made it happen.
She put her son in Mong Han in 1251.
He became Great Han.
He only lived till 1259.
He died of something.
It could have been cholera or they're different stories.
I don't know the truth of it.
But he died on campaign in China, trying to conquer southern China.
Well, up to this point,
Kublai Khan had not been distinguishing himself.
His mother was, she was a Christian woman, but she had a Buddhist nurse for him, and she had Chinese scholars come in to tutor him.
She had a very good education for him.
And I think that she planned that he was going to be a great administrator under his older brother, and he was going to administer the lands in China.
And so he was learning all this stuff for it.
But the older brother, he insisted on sending him out on campaign.
Oh, but he was overweight.
He was fat.
He had gout.
He needed to go rest.
There was always some excuse.
And the brother was assigning people.
One of them was named Temüjin Uge, which is sort of person of iron, is what it means from the Turkic, but today a part of also Mongolian language.
Orihang Dai, who was the son of Subodai, the great general, he assigned him to teach him warfare.
He wasn't great on the battlefield.
He really was not.
But he was very smart and at first a little bit lazy.
He liked talking about the religion, sitting around, go hunting, as long as he had many with him to do the shooting and then to prepare the food and all.
And his territory in northern China was just...
being run in the dirt by these administrators the Mongols had brought in.
They were just overtaxing the people, cheating the people, doing everything wrong.
And his mother basically just pulled his chain and she said, go to your land, this is your land, you have to administer this land, you go there, you live there, you take charge.
And everybody was terrified of the mother.
And so he ran off to China and he started administering his land and he started learning how to do it.
Well, when his brother died in 1259, he was down on the Yangtze River
on a campaign that he was sent by his brother.
He was having no success at all, but he thought, okay, the brother's dead, I should finish the campaign.
Meanwhile, his youngest brother, Arikboch, Arikboch was another hothead Mongol like their father, Tolu.
He was rather hotheaded and he was back in Mongolia and his tolerance for religions
He had to oversee the debate one time between the Taoists and the Buddhists because the Mongols thought the Taoists were overtaxing everybody, the Buddhists.