The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

More than two centuries after Genghis Khan’s death, Queen Man-duhai revived the dying dynasty and made it vibrant and new. When she could not defeat her enemies, Manduhai eluded them, learned from her losses, and prepared for the next battle. In keeping with the Mongolian admonition, if she did not win the first seven times, she would win on the eighth. Manduhai defiantly survived every tragedy, obstacle, and horror that befell her. Just as she gave control of her life to no man, she surrendered her army to no enemy, and she relinquished her people to no foreign nation. Heaven did not grant her a great destiny; instead, in the words of the Mongol chronicle, it allowed her to shape “the destiny of her own choosing.” In history, those individuals who refuse the options presented by the circumstances of life usually end up broken. Those few who reject what life offers and still find their own path are rightfully called heroes. In creating her own destiny, she also chose the destiny for her nation.

Dayan Khan lived on and continued to lead his people down the white road of enlightenment. He restored order to the south and ruled the united Mongolia without further serious disruptions. He married two more women, and had four more sons. He led numerous campaigns. The chronicles leave a frustrating mystery in stating that his reign ended in 1517, only a few years after Manduhai’s death; yet his death is not recorded until 1543, which would have been more than thirty years after her death, when he was seventy-nine years old.

In the sixteenth century, the Mongols began converting to Buddhism. In 1578, Altan Khan and Queen Noyanchu Junggen, both descendants of Queen Manduhai and Dayan Khan, bestowed on the Tibetan monk Sonam Gyatso the old Mongolian title of dalai, meaning “sea” or “ocean,” which had first been used by Genghis Khan’s son Ogodei as his title, Dalai Khan, meaning “Sea of Power.” Henceforth the lama and his future reincarnations would bear the title Dalai Lama, “Sea of Knowledge.” Not long afterward, in 1592, another of Queen Manduhai and Dayan Khan’s descendants was discovered to be the new Dalai Lama. Reigning under the title Dalai Lama IV, he was the only Mongolian to hold the office.

Buddhism brought Mongolia to new heights of literature, arts, and architecture. The Great Wall that divided the Mongol and Chinese nations did not guarantee peace, but it brought a new stability to the region. The foreign warlords did not return, leaving the Mongols and their neighbors to work out their own trade and commercial relations.

Manduhai and Dayan Khan’s descendants managed to keep the country independent until the conquest by the Manchu in the seventeenth century. Most of the royal family continued to thrive under the Manchu and their Qing Dynasty, founded in 1644, but the country as a whole and the common people suffered wretchedly until liberation in 1911.

The lineage of Manduhai and Dayan Khan remained in power until the twentieth century. In the political turmoil of World War II, together with the prior revolution in Mongolia during the 1920s, and subsequently in China in the 1940s, most of Manduhai and Dayan Khan’s identifiable descendants were deliberately killed by various factions seeking to eradicate the past for different reasons.

Almost all Mongols recognize Queen Manduhai the Wise and Dayan Khan as the two greatest monarchs in the eight centuries of Mongolian history after Genghis Khan. For Mongols, Manduhai continues to symbolize the one person who sacrificed all to save her nation and thereby to protect them, and for this reason they often call her simply Queen Manduhai the Wise. The earlier queens faded from public memory, but elements of their stories were folded into hers so that Manduhai Khatun became the quintessential Mongol queen, combining all the others into one persona and one lifetime.

No matter how assiduously the censors in the centuries that followed cut the Mongolian queens from the records and altered the texts, and no matter how much foreigners might scoff at their history, the people remembered. In their songs and poems, in their art, and in the names they gave their children and the stories that they told sitting around the fire at night, the Mongols preserved the memory of Queen Manduhai the Wise.

EPILOGUE

The Secrets of History