Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (12 page)

But it was also extremely short-lived. The Mongol rise had depended primarily on Genghis Khan’s vision, and they never again produced such a brilliant leader. Within a century, the Yuan was overthrown by the Chinese founders of the Ming, who drove the Mongols back to the north. Once they were gone, they didn’t leave much behind. Unlike other empires, the Mongols didn’t spread a dominant religion, or a form of writing, or a political system. They didn’t create technological innovations, and one of their few building specialties consisted of bridges, because they were always on the move. The sense of movement became their most lasting legacy—new trade and cultural exchanges that continued after the brief empire.

The Mongols wrote little, and we don’t know much about how they viewed themselves. Most contemporary accounts come from the people they defeated—a rare instance in which history was written primarily by the conquered. After the Mongol empire collapsed, its descendants were tracked most closely by the Ming, who had to deal with the periodic attacks of nomadic raiders. Some Chinese military officers wrote about these encounters, including a man named Yin Geng, who served in a Ministry of Defense department that dealt with border
issues. The historian David Spindler has translated Yin Geng’s words, which are as vivid and detailed as if he were still standing on the Great Wall today. Like most Chinese of the mid-1500s, he refers to the northerners as simply “barbarians.” “Barbarian women have buxom figures,” Yin Geng writes. “Because they eat meat and cheese and wear skins, their flesh is tender and white. They like to fornicate, paying little attention to whether it’s day or night or whether there’s anyone watching.” Mongol males, according to Yin Geng, have similar interests. (“Young barbarian men like to abduct women, carry them away on horseback, and copulate with them.”) He describes Mongols as smelling
shan
—“muttonlike”—and they possess other animal qualities. (“Every barbarian family brews alcohol, and all of them like to drink; the barbarians drink like cattle, not even stopping to breathe in the process.”) Lest the reader get the impression that Mongols are only interested in sex and alcohol, Yin Geng describes other pastimes. (“Barbarians like to spear babies for sport.”)

By the time of Yin Geng, the Mongols had lost the unity of Genghis Khan’s reign, but they were still brilliant raiders. They traveled on horseback, usually in small groups, and they liked to come at night. They followed ridgelines, because they feared ambushes. They communicated through smoke signals. They developed a nomadic version of micro-credit—this system allowed a poor Mongol to borrow a horse from a wealthier person, embark on a raid, and pay the owner a percentage of spoils. Generally the Mongols did not linger in Chinese territory. They penetrated defenses, gathered booty, and returned home as quickly as possible. (The Great Wall around Beijing and other regions has crenellations and arrow holes on both sides because soldiers sometimes attacked Mongols heading back north after a successful raid.) In China, the Mongols liked to steal livestock, household goods, and even Chinese people. They carried the Chinese men and women back to the steppes, where they forced them to form families. Then they turned the men, and sometimes the women, into spies—a Chinese could be sent south to gather military intelligence, with his or her family essentially held in Mongolia as hostages.

Sometimes these captives adapted so well to life in the north that
they seemed happy to stay there. It’s a type of pragmatism that’s still recognizable in modern times—Chinese who leave home learn to make the best of their new environment, whether they’ve gone south during the Reform years or north during the Ming dynasty. One text from the early sixteenth century, translated by David Spindler, describes an encounter between a group of nomads and some soldiers who were guarding the Great Wall. The nomads are accompanied by a Chinese man, originally from a town in Ningxia Province, and he makes no pretenses about his group’s desire to gather information. The Ming report reads:

Officers like Yin Geng described methods of identifying these turncoat Chinese. Their hair tended to be short, like the Mongols, and they often had visible scars. They smelled
shan
. If you asked them the year of the emperor’s reign, they sometimes couldn’t answer correctly, because they had lost track of time. They often referred to China as
nan chao
, the “southern dynasty.” In one battle, Chinese soldiers captured a man named Puning, a Chinese who had been kidnapped by the Mongols. An officer described the man: “Puning had been living among the barbarians for so long and eating meat and cheese that his frame was stocky and his face was like that of a lion.” The officer continued, “He was fat,
his hair was short, and he walked like a duck.” In ancient China, race was essentially cultural, and a person who lived among barbarians could lose his “Chineseness.”

For Mongols, though, political legitimacy ultimately depended on genetics. Leadership was supposed to be confined to the direct heirs of Genghis Khan, and anybody outside this line had few ways of improving his standing. One common solution was to try to gain goods and titles from the Chinese, and David Spindler has researched a number of instances in which this strategy culminated in attacks across the Great Wall. During the 1540s, Altan Khan rose as a capable Mongol leader, eventually founding the city of Hohhot. But he found himself limited by genealogy—he was the second son of a third son. In 1550, in an attempt to gain wealth and status among his Mongol peers, he turned southward, leading tens of thousands of Mongols on a surprise attack northeast of Beijing. At that time, the Ming fortifications consisted mostly of crude stone walls, which the Mongols easily penetrated. They pillaged for two weeks, killing and capturing thousands of Chinese. After that, the Ming began using mortar on a large scale to improve fortifications around the capital.

Altan Khan’s oldest son, known as the Imperial Prince, tried another strategy for dealing with genealogical shortcomings. He married dozens of women from important Mongol families, hoping to solidify alliances. But he ran into financial problems, which he solved in the simplest way possible: he sent the women back. Lacking money and accompanied by their families, the ex-wives began visiting Chinese wall garrisons, demanding gifts from the Chinese. In 1576, after one such appeal was rejected, some Mongols formed a raiding party and penetrated a gap in a remote part of the defense network. The region was so rugged that the Ming hadn’t seen a need for extensive walls, but the Mongols got through, killing twenty-nine Chinese. The Ming responded with another major wall-building campaign, this time using brick, which allowed construction on even the steepest terrain.

Nowadays, outside of Beijing, brick walls still cling to sheer cliffs, and tourists often wonder: Was it really necessary to build defenseworks in a place like this? But Mongols were indeed capable of attacking such
remote regions, and sometimes a leader’s position on Genghis Khan’s family tree was a major factor. Low genealogical status could initiate a chain of events that swept southward, resulting in violence against the Ming. Spindler calls the incident of 1576 “the Raid of the Scorned Mongol Women”—a failed harem that eventually inspired the stunning Great Wall of Beijing.

THE PARKING LOT AT
the Mausoleum of Genghis Khan was full of black Santanas with tinted windows. My heart always sank at such a sight—it was like watching a flock of crows settle into a quiet forest. In rural China, black Santanas are cadre cars, and if they show up en masse at a tourist destination it usually means that a junket is in full swing. When I arrived at the mausoleum, it was early afternoon but many of the cadres were drunk from their lunchtime banquets. They stumbled out of Santanas, shouting and laughing in the parking lot. I followed a group of three Chinese men as they staggered up the steps to the entrance, where they initiated an argument with the attendant. He was Mongolian, and he asked them for the standard admission price of thirty-five yuan per ticket. It was less than five dollars.

“How ’bout this,” slurred one of the cadres. “I’ll give you a hundred for three.”

“Three tickets cost one hundred and five,” the Mongolian said.

“Special price,” the cadre said. “Give special price. One hundred.”

“We can’t do that. It’s thirty-five each. One hundred and five.”

“How ’bout this,” the cadre said. “I give you one hundred.”

“One hundred and five.”

“One hundred.”

Each man spoke very slowly, and they continued this inane conversation for several minutes. In China, admissions to state-run tourist sites are nonnegotiable, and I couldn’t figure out why the attendant remained so patient, until I realized that he was also intoxicated. He slumped against his desk; the ticket booth reeked of grain alcohol. Inside the gate, three buildings were shaped like massive
ger
, traditional Mongol tents, their roofs decorated in tile of burnt orange and deep blue. Everywhere
I saw drunk cadres: they staggered through hallways; they tripped down steps; they sat red-faced in the shade, heads in their hands. They wobbled in front of exhibits, trying to read inscriptions about the history of Genghis Khan and the Yuan dynasty.

Exhibits appeared in Chinese, Mongolian, and English. As in many Chinese museums, there were subtle shifts between languages. One English sign read:

GENGHIS KHAN IS CONSIDERED BY THE WORLD AS A GREAT STRATEGIST AND STATESMAN.

The Chinese version said:

IN THE HISTORY OF THE CHINESE PEOPLE, GENGHIS KHAN WAS A GREAT STRATEGIST AND STATESMAN.

In China, people often speak of Genghis Khan as if he were Chinese, at least in the cultural sense, because he founded a dynasty that ruled China. And from the Chinese perspective, Mongolia was a natural part of the empire—it had been ruled by the Qing dynasty until their collapse in 1912. During the twentieth century, Mongolia proper became a Soviet satellite and then an independent nation, but Inner Mongolia remained under Chinese rule. After Mao Zedong came to power, he encouraged Han Chinese settlement in the region, and nowadays the population is over 80 percent Chinese.

The Chinese have also occupied the history just as efficiently. At the Mausoleum of Genghis Khan, there is no body; the true burial place of the great leader is unknown, although historians believe it’s located in independent Mongolia. The Chinese built the mausoleum in the mid-1950s, as a way of symbolizing their authority in Inner Mongolia. The exhibits put a Chinese spin on Mongol history:

The mausoleum’s central room features a row of coffins, supposedly belonging to Genghis Khan and his closest relatives. Outside the room, a Mongolian tour guide approached me, speaking Chinese. She asked where I was from, and when I answered, she smiled wistfully. “The Great America,” she said. “It’s like Genghis Khan used to be.”

I didn’t know exactly how to respond to that. Among the flocks of cadres she looked as out of place as many of my hitchhikers—dyedred hair, silver earrings, tight jeans. She was twenty-four years old, with high cheekbones and the long thin eyes of the steppe people. I was still thinking about the Great America when she spoke again.

“This isn’t really Genghis Khan’s tomb,” she said. “I work here, but I want you to know that this place is fake. Those coffins are empty, and nobody knows where his tomb really is. Anyway, according to tradition there were special ceremonial objects that contained his soul.”

She mentioned the names of the objects, but the words were unfamiliar; I asked her to write them in my notebook. For a moment she stared helplessly at the pen and paper. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I’m too drunk to write.”

She gave me an impromptu tour of the exhibits, pointing out mistakes and exaggerations. She told me that Genghis Khan had been born in what is now independent Mongolia—that detail was important to her. She believed that Inner Mongolia had become an ecological disaster, because of all the Chinese-style farming in the region. “That’s why you have dust storms in Beijing every spring,” she said. “Anyway, we’re a fallen race. We used to be great, but now we’re nothing. We don’t have a united country—there’s Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and then the Buryats in Russia. And yet at one point we were the greatest race in the world. We’re not the same as the Chinese; those are two totally different
races. Mongolians like freedom, but that doesn’t matter to the Chinese. Have you noticed that Mongolians drink a lot?”

I said yes, this was something I had noticed.

“It’s because of the psychology,” she said. “It’s bad for your psychology to fall so far. And there isn’t anything for Mongolians to do about it, so we drink.”