The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

Words and documents can dimly reflect the truth, like shadows by a night fire or the outline of a mountain through the mist, but alone they are too small and primitive to contain all of it. While words may be altered or censored, the truth endures, even when not properly recorded. Truth can be forgotten, misplaced, or lost, but never annihilated. The human hand might erase the words, mutilate the manuscript, or chisel off a name, but that only alters memory. Such vandalism tampers with the evidence without altering the facts. Cutting part of a document still leaves an outline of what was removed, a silhouette of the missing piece.Once an event happens, evidence will remain in some form. The land always remembers. The truth will lurk somewhere waiting for the wind to blow away the sand that hides it. A few scattered ashes tell us of a campfire from long ago; even a delicate footprint can survive in hardened mud for millions of years to permanently record a fleeting act. The world remembers long after people have forgotten.We rarely find what we do not seek. Once we look for information on these great queens, we realize that much of the history was not hidden at all; it was merely ignored. Snippets of evidence concerning these royal women can still be found in the diplomatic reports of the Chinese court, letters to the Vatican, the elegant Muslim histories, royal Armenian chronicles, the memoirs of merchants such as Marco Polo, and carved into the stones of Taoist and Confucian temples. Once we know what we are looking for, we find the Mongol queens in the rhymes of Chaucer and the arias of Puccini, in Persian manuscript paintings and silken thangkas hanging in Tibetan monasteries. Those queens are still there, waiting through eight centuries for us merely to see them again.This book is a small effort to find that lost story, to reassemble the clipped pages of the Secret History, to blow the dust off this neglected chapter, and to see once again what in our past has been denied to us for seven hundred years. What did those censors not want us to read? What is it about our history that we are not allowed to know? If the truth was important enough for one generation of powerful officials to go to great lengths to hide it, then it should be important for us to search for it now.

PART I

Tiger Queens of the Silk Route

1206–1241

There is a khan’s daughter

Who steps on in a swinging manner

And has the marks of twenty tigers,

Who steps on in a graceful manner

And has the marks of thirty tigers,

Who steps on in an elegant manner

And has the marks of forty tigers,

Who steps on in a delicate manner

And has the marks of fifty tigers.MONGOL EPIC POEM

Altan Urug: The Golden Family of Genghis Khan

I

It Takes a Hero

ARENEGADE TATAR WITH THE KNIFE OF VENGEANCE HIDDEN in his clothes slowly crept toward the camp of Genghis Khan’s elderly mother, Hoelun. He sought revenge against Genghis Khan, who had annihilated the ancient Tatar clans, killed many of their warriors, married their women, and adopted their children, even changing their names to make them Mongol.

As a military and political leader with many enemies, Genghis Khan lived in a well-guarded encampment where bodyguards had strict orders to kill anyone who crossed a precise point without permission. Hoelun, however, lived apart in her own camp, and although she now had ten thousand soldiers and their families assigned to her control, at her advanced age she let her youngest son take her part of the army out on missions with her eldest son, the khan, while she stayed home.

Despite her rank, Hoelun’s camp differed little from that of any other Mongol nomad. It consisted of a small collection of gers, the round tent of the steppes, positioned in a straight line with the doors facing south. Often called a “yurt” in the West, the Mongol ger was made of thick layers of felt wool pressed into large blankets, and could be packed up and moved as the seasons changed or as whim dictated.

The clearest sign that this was the imperial camp of the khan’s mother was the presence of Hoelun’s white camel and black cart. Women owned the gers and all the carts, but as befits a nomadic people, a woman was better known by her mode of transportation than by her home. Younger women rode horses; older women drove carts. Unless gravely ill or seriously injured, a man could never ride on a woman’s cart, much less drive it.