Epilogue: The Thunderbolt of God

After writing their history, we have recorded something of what is found in their books regarding their beliefs and religion; which we offer as a matter of astonishment and not as truth and certainty.

~Ata-Malik Juvaini, Baghdad, thirteenth century

Myths can be more inspiring than truth, particularly during times of crisis. When old systems of thought prove to be inadequate, some people will embrace ideas that in more stable times would appear totally irrational. The more improbable a story, the easier it suddenly is to believe. Amid the warring ideologies and violent religious movements of the twentieth century, Genghis Khan offered a unique appeal to some who favored peace, as well as to others who did not.

In 1921, thirty-five-year-old Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, commonly known as the Mad Baron, arrived in Mongolia from Siberia with an anti-Bolshevik cavalry of 1,500 Cossacks, Russians, Tibetans, Mongols, and a few Japanese and Chinese riding under the banner of a yellow swastika. A self-proclaimed Buddhist descendant of Attila the Hun and reincarnation of Genghis Khan, he had supported the restoration of Czar Nicholas II to the Russian throne and, when the czar and his family had been executed, he had imagined that he could bring about a new golden age from Mongolia, in which the emperor of Japan would be the new world ruler and the Panchen Lama of Tibet the new spiritual leader. Dressed in a red silk jacket and blue pants and filled with an inexhaustible nervous energy, he dashed around the capital of Urga in his chauffeured Fiat, chain-smoking cigarettes, handing out death sentences, ordering people to pick up trash, and shooting any dog found eating a human corpse. He ruled Mongolia for one hundred days, until the Red Army seized him and executed him by firing squad.

The horrors of Mongolia titillated and repulsed people in equal measure, and excited the imagination of some who were eager to enter this bizarre world of living gods, mad revolutionaries, and hills littered with dragon bones, as dinosaur fossils were called. The 1920s witnessed two major expeditions sponsored from New York to the Gobi Desert. The American Museum of Natural History, with financial backing from J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, among others, sponsored Roy Chapman Andrews on his search for fossils of the first humans, which he figured must have evolved in Mongolia, the “Scientific Garden of Eden.” Andrews did not find the origins of humanity, but he did unearth an unrivaled collection of dinosaur fossils and their previously unknown eggs.

Ten years later, a British writer, James Hilton, introduced the world to a mythical land named Shambala, or Shangri-la, through his bestselling novel Lost Horizon. Inspired by Hilton’s novel, some mystics began to see Mongolia as the spiritual center of the universe and suggested that Shangri-la would soon emerge from under the ground somewhere in its hills. No one seemed certain exactly where in Mongolia this mythic land would be found, but the search for Shangri-la found some unexpected adherents.

At the height of the global economic depression between the two world wars, the United States surreptitiously embarked on a quest to find the secrets of Genghis Khan. American officials funded the search to locate the sacred Chandman jewels of Buddhism, one of which was said to have been in the hand of Genghis Khan at his birth, and to discover the entrance to the underground world of Shambala or Shangri-la.

Between 1934 and 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture Henry Wallace quietly provided government money for his controversial guru, the Russian artist Nicholas Roerich, who claimed to be a reincarnation of the fifth Dalai Lama. With Wallace’s backing, Roerich planned to find Shambala and to unearth the wish-granting jewel that Genghis Khan had, according to Buddhist chronicles, clutched at birth. The two men called their project “The Sacred Union of the East.” Aware that their quest might seem quixotic and be resented by taxpayers at a time of debilitating national poverty, they code-named the project “Kansas,” a nod to a popular American story about a girl from Kansas who set off in search of the mysterious Wizard of Oz.¹ Under the official guise of seeking drought-resistant grasses to transplant in the Dust Bowl of the American Midwest, Roerich went to search for the stone and Shambala as part of his goal to initiate the new World Order of Peace by 1936.

Equipped for the expedition by Abercrombie & Fitch and accompanied by a ragtag militia of White Russians with weapons supplied by the U.S. Department of War, Roerich set out across Inner Asia in a camel caravan. Despite reputed links to Japanese imperial spies, the group traveled beneath the Stars and Stripes “fastened to a Mongolian spear,” which they called the Spear of Salvation.² Roerich hoped that by finding the stone he would miraculously solve all the world’s woes, create peace and cooperation with the Soviets in Russia, the imperialists of Japan, the Nazis in Germany, Buddhists in Tibet, Communists in Mongolia, the capitalists in America, and everyone else at war over ideas, ideology, or religion. He believed that through this work he could persuade “the summits of Asia and the heights of America to clasp hands.”

Some mysterious power seemed to be working in Wallace’s favor as Franklin Roosevelt chose him as his vice president in the election of 1940. With the authority of his new office, Vice President Wallace, who labeled himself “a practical mystic,”³ became the first high-ranking American official to visit Mongolia and look for the shrine of Genghis Khan. As World War II was still being fought in the summer of 1944, Wallace flew secretly from Alaska to Siberia and then made a series of airplane hops to Lanzhou, deep inside Nationalist China.

With the help of a Chinese warlord, monks from a Buddhist monastery seized the shrine of Genghis Khan and temporarily incorporated it into their worship while protecting it from the Japanese army.⁴ Wallace made a long trek to the monastery to visit the shrine.

Mongols believed that anyone who sought divine power needed to go to the shrine of Genghis Khan and pray for it. Over time, many Mongol khans and queens had come to the shrine seeking the blessing of Genghis Khan. Some had their wishes granted by the unseen spirit of the shrine, but many came away with nothing. A few were actually mysteriously killed at the shrine or soon after visiting it.

Wallace visited the shrine shortly before the Democratic convention of 1944. He came away with nothing. In fact, shortly after his visit fate turned against him. His critics in the Republican Party had obtained access to some of the more than 250 so-called Guru Letters he had been writing to Roerich and other members of the secret quest. A scandal erupted as papers charged that he had wasted money on his mystic projects. In the ensuing outrage, President Roosevelt was forced to drop Wallace as vice president and substitute the lesser-known Harry Truman. Wallace never became president, and he never found the magic stone, the holy chalice, the sacred spear, world peace, or the entrance to Shambala. Instead, Truman became the first American president to drop a nuclear bomb.

Genghis Khan continued throughout the twentieth century to be a potent symbol in Asia, inspiring groups struggling to break free of European colonization. The movements he inspired were diverse and unexpected, from imperialists in Japan to Jawaharlal Nehru in India. Leaders of opposite political persuasions found inspiration in his deeds. In the midst of World War II, Mao Zedong wrote an epigraph for Genghis Khan’s tomb, describing him as “that proud son of Heaven.”⁵ Later, the fourteenth Dalai Lama wrote that “what Genghis Khan achieved, he did through a determined exercise of courage and physical strength.” Therefore, he concluded, “it is fitting to remember with pride what he accomplished for Mongolian independence, unity, and freedom.”⁶

While Mao Zedong and Wallace paid their respects, in his homeland of Mongolia, Genghis Khan otherwise largely faded into history. As long as Mongolia remained under control of the Soviets, his name and image were banned. Anyone suspected of a kinship connection to him or openly exhibiting interest in him was subject to persecution. On dark nights, Nogoon Malgai, the Green Hats of the secret police, came wearing black coats and carrying bright flashlights to haul away such antirevolutionaries. Any attempt to glorify Genghis Khan, or even to mention his name, was condemned with a mixture of nasty labels: reactionary feudalism, right-wing nationalism, Japanese imperialism, Chinese hegemony, or Western capitalism. The paranoia of the Russians was only intensified by Chinese praise for Genghis Khan, the Japanese effort to build a new monument celebrating Genghis Khan as the father of pan-Asianism, and the visit of the American vice president to his shrine. In the mid-twentieth century, mere possession of a written family genealogy connecting one back to Genghis Khan was sufficient reason to be sentenced to death in Mongolia. Every identifiable descendant of Genghis Khan was executed, along with lamas, shamans, and other innocent civilians accused of being feudalists, antirevolutionaries, or Japanese spies.

The Mongols could no longer worship the founder of their nation, but they learned to honor him secretly without saying his name, to call on him without seeming to do so. The dashing revolutionary poet Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj, who had studied in Russia, France, and Germany, showed his nation the secret way. Following his interest in embedding secret messages in literature, Natsagdorj translated Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug,” a somewhat bizarre tale about the sophisticated coded letters in a treasure hunt. This inspired him to follow the example of Genghis Khan, who had compelled his soldiers to use poetry, song, and elliptical phrases as the primary means of military communication. Natsagdorj now turned to poetry again as a means to resist political repression.

He was imprisoned for his suspect loyalties, and emerged from prison at the end of 1932 with a poem that was to become a virtual scripture in the religious wasteland of socialist Mongolia. Minii Nutag (My Homeland) contains no drama and virtually no action. To outsiders who read it, the poem seems static, a boring recitation of locations in Mongolia in the new style of socialist realism. The phrases are trite, like stale travel advertisements: the rivers are crystal or blue, the grass green, the desert is like an ocean, the steppe covered in grass, the animals well fed. The poem ends by praising the red flag of socialism flying over a new era in Mongolia’s history.

Like Dante, who used coded words to deceive ecclesiastical watchdogs, Natsagdorj had concealed a code completely obscure to Stalin’s censors. He packed the essentials of Mongolian history into the stanzas of this one poem. The first word was the name Khentii, the district around Burkhan Khaldun where Genghis Khan was born, and the second was Khangai, the sacred forested zone on the mountains from whence the Huns, Turks, and Uighurs originated. Every word contained a hidden story, marking out the geographic territory of Mongolia and the life of the nation’s founder. Natsagdorj’s poem was the opening verse of modern Mongolian literature, and other writers followed his example after his tragic and mysterious death at age thirty-one in 1937, supposedly after falling into an alcohol coma. They took old poems and songs about Genghis Khan and substituted features of the landscape for his name. Their poems preserved their history and the true faith of the Mongolian people, the worship of their nation. During the long totalitarian winter of the twentieth centuries, the poets kept the spirit of Genghis Khan alive.

In December 1989, as the Soviet Union crumbled, a new generation of inspired Mongols gathered on the plaza in front of the Lenin Museum in the capital of Ulaanbaatar to demand their freedom from Soviet occupation and Communist repression. In the blistering cold, their individual breaths mingled with the rising breath of others to form a foggy mist as their voices united in a call for democracy. For seven decades the memory of Genghis Khan had been repressed, but they still called on his name to lead them and turned to him for inspiration. The Mongols found their voice once again, and with it they sang the praises of their founder. One breath, one voice, one soul.

For some faithful believers, the history of “the Holy Lord Genghis of us Mongols”⁷ has not finished. In the nineteenth century, guardians at the Shrine of Genghis Khan in the Ordos predicted that he would return to the land of his birth after eight to ten centuries.⁸ This is now the ninth century since he created his empire.

For some of those who await his return, Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire was merely one phase in the eternal spiritual journey of the universe. In the thirteenth century, the world could not accept an empire in which rival religions cooperated in pursuit of the good of all, and still today, the world is not ready for such a dream.

True believers hold that in the blinding light of the sunrise over Mount Burkhan Khaldun, Genghis Khan will emerge from the sacred city of the Holy Lord Khormusta to complete the Mongol conquest of the world. In his next manifestation, he will appear as the Thunderbolt of God, mounted on a stone horse with wings of wind, clutching the sacred spear of salvation, and leading a million holy warriors out from the gates of Shambala, crossing the crystal Tengis Ocean of precious jewels to liberate our world of darkness from corruption, sin, and evil.⁹

With the strong cord of his lasso and the power of his golden whip, he will return all religions to the rightful path and hitch them to the Golden Star of the North. After his army has punished the wicked and united the honorable, the long-awaited God of the Future will emerge from the mists to vanquish the past, abolish history, erase knowledge of evil, and reign over the Pure Land of Goodness and Light.¹⁰

Boltugai, boltugai, as the Mongols say. May it be so!