The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

When the daughter mounted her horse to ride away, she did not look back at the ger of her past but had to stare straight ahead into the future. Borte, like any Mongol mother, watched her daughter ride away but never shed a tear. A Mongol mother was never supposed to cry in the presence of her child. Of all the fluids from a mother’s body, tears were the most dangerous. The mother’s blood gave life to the infant growing in the womb, and her milk nourished the baby after birth. Her saliva moistened the food that the mother chewed and put into the child’s mouth, and she used her urine to wash and sterilize her offspring’s wounds. The tears of a mother, however, contained dangerous power; no matter how great the pain the mother felt, she could not shed them in the presence of the child for fear of causing future harm.

Instead of crying, the mother performed an ancient ritual of the steppe. She brought out a pail of milk, and as her child rode away, she stood before the door of her ger and threw milk into the air with a tsatsal, a wooden instrument resembling a large perforated spoon. With an upward and outward toss of her right arm, the mother waved the tsatsal and aspersed the milk into the air until her child passed out of her sight. The milk constituted a special prayer, and it carried the hope that the mother could pour out a white road ahead of her child. Because a route made of white stones and sand can reflect the moon and stars, it could be traveled at night as well as day. Particularly for Alaqai passing south across the Gobi, night travel would help her animals not to overheat and would thus require less water. A white road offered freedom, but it also posed far greater danger than the usual black road of day. Because it was traveled in the darkness of night, the white road could easily lead into the land of temptation, error, and sin. By sprinkling the milk, the mother reminded her offspring of their obligation to behave properly.

Once her daughter passed beyond the horizon, the mother put down her pail of milk, and then after walking far away from her ger and her family, she lay facedown on the earth and cried her pain and her tears onto the ground. Mother Earth always understood the sorrow of a mother and would hide her tears.

As long as her children remained away from her, the Mongol mother came out every morning with her pail and tsatsal to sprinkle milk in the direction of each one of them and any other family member away from home. For a people without ownership of land, the milk aspersions of the tsatsal also served to mark a territory of occupation. Her ritual sought a blessing and permission from the spirits of the land for her family to use all the land, waters, and pastures within sight in every direction. The tsatsal ritual located the family in space and in relation to one another, and it simultaneously established geographic location, spiritual connection, and social orientation.

According to the diplomatic procedures of the age, Genghis Khan sent Alaqai Beki to rule by marrying her to Ala-Qush, the leader of the neighboring kingdom, or the leader’s son, or nephew. The exact identity of her first husband remains unclear, but in time she married each of the men in succession, as needed or as she preferred. The confusion over her husbands’ identities frustrated generations of scholars, but the vagueness further illustrates the unimportance these men had in her administration. The identity of the Mongol queen mattered; the identity of her consort did not.

Alaqai’s kingdom occupied a large swath of land in what is now Chinese Inner Mongolia. Like the future empire that her father would create, Alaqai Beki’s multicultural kingdom spanned the Mongol, Turkic, and Chinese worlds. Because of her position at the intersection of these three civilizations, two of which were literate, we know more about her than her sister, Checheyigen of the Oirat. This information derives not from the Mongol chronicles, but from those of her neighbors, who exercised an intense curiosity about the Mongol queen.

As a leader of the Onggud, Alaqai Beki headed a tribe that had never been a powerful conquering or independent force, yet their history stretched back much farther than that of the Mongols. The Onggud formed one of the Turkic-speaking groups that had dominated the history of China’s northern borderlands over the previous two thousand years. They entered the pages of recorded history in the eighth century, when they constituted a part of the powerful Turkic empire based on the Mongolian Plateau during China’s Tang Dynasty, between the years 618 and 907. They roamed in the long region between the inhabitable Gobi to the north and the agricultural lands of the Yellow River to the south.