Genghis Khan – Life, Death and Restoration
By John Man
Published by Bantam Books, 2005

The great warrior – less the dust of history and the garishness of Hollywood Technicolor – re-emerges in lifelike tones, having conquered heaven too. My review for The Nation, published on July 16.

Genghis Khan, wounded, sleeps on even today, his countrymen awaiting his return, whole again, so the land itself will be unified once more.
If this sounds like something from King Arthur’s tales, there’s a lot more such Merlinesque magic in John Man’s biography of the great Mongolian conqueror.
But the supernatural only watches from the wings as reality outstrips it: Genghis power-rides all the way to Korea in the east and Hungary in the west, building an empire four times the size of Alexander’s and twice that of Rome’s. Paris and London shudder at the thought that he’s nearby.

He always has the fastest horses and most lethal archers, and quickly co-opts the huge siege machines of defeated foes. To these he adds the debilitating razor of terrorism, while elevating the tactical bluff to the stature of devastating weapon.
Setting standards of ruthlessness that Hitler and Stalin will be hard-pressed to match, he leaves oceans of corpses in his wake. If a city refuses to capitulate, all of its inhabitants are systematically slaughtered – but for the carpenters and masons needed to rebuild, actors to amuse and thousands of innocents to be used as frontline fodder in his next assault.

These well-known aspects of Genghis’ modus operandi are thoroughly and evocatively reviewed in Man’s book, but its strength is in sifting through the legacy of a warlord who was already a legend in his own time.

Man knows Chinese geography and history well, and as an “old Mongolia hand”, so to speak, he’s quite at home in Genghis territory – the terrain, the people and their beliefs, the language and the shrouded archaeological remnants that always seem at once devoid of modern usefulness and pregnant with possibility.
Among the possibilities is one that the author frets over, the “restoration” of the subtitle.

Abetted by Chinese investors, Mongolians are getting frenzied about promoting Genghis as a tourist attraction and, spurred by nationalists, as a new religion. Alleged sites of his birth and death compete for credibility; his divinity is debated. A quick look at the Internet will show how many foreign tourists eagerly regard his mausoleum at Dongsheng, pictured above, as a holy place; the cult of the khan is fledging.

John Man appears to have read everything ever written about Genghis, in every language, so he can balance out the selective revelations and whole-cloth vagaries of “The Secret History of the Mongols”, completed about 1228 but only translated from its Chinese versions to English in the 19th century.
From its clues and the discoveries and musings of other explorers, Man sets out to find Genghis, and it is very much a grail quest, through fogs and forests, valleys and tombs, encountering spectral beasts and human characters both angelic and puzzling.

And then there’s the Holy Mountain.

Man is among those who believe Burkhan Khaldun, identified in the “Secret History” as the burial site of Genghis, is today’s Khan Khenti, yet in this decade a Chicago financier and Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper have sunk millions of dollars into digging elsewhere.
In an echo from Loch Ness, the scale of the technology they use seems to rise proportionately with their inability to find anything, and Man wonders whether there’s some collusion with the local authorities, particularly in the case of the Japanese.

The central drama here, the compelling mythology, is that Genghis was buried secretly, on his own orders, so that news of his death could be hidden until the conquest of all of China had been completed by his sons. Since it was his wish that the grave itself be kept secret, so it remains. Did the Japanese (and perhaps the American) acquiesce to official directives to dig elsewhere? The newspaper after all got its big documentary, Man says, and the financier his access to another potential site.

So it’s left to the author to get up that mountain on his own, in an ATV skirting hungry bogs, with thunderstorms threatening disaster, and see what he can see.

John Man has quite a name for this mission. He begins his biography with the startling hypothesis that emerged in 2003 from a DNA study of 2,000 men across Eurasia: It would have been possible for one citizen of the 12th century to be the direct ancestor of 16 million people in the region today.
Given his mileage and his lustiness, that one man could have been Genghis.

From this distinct likelihood, the author is literally encountering the great khan everywhere he goes, right from young Temujin’s (probable) birthplace in the wonderfully described steppes of Mongolia to China’s swollen belly, which gave birth to his own imperial dynasty.
Then it’s down the Silk Road into the shocked core of the Muslim world, a full 7,500 kilometres into Russia, to the shoulder of Venice, and even to Hollywood, where John Wayne raged in a 1956 film, “Your treacherous heads will not be safe on your shoulders, for I am Temujin, the Conqueror!”

Keeping a firm grip on the rudder of a ship coursing through all this space and time and all the preconceptions we have of Genghis would be quite a feat. Man does so with only a few wearying detours into sheer speculation and U-turns for a second look, but he always guides the reader safely back to the grasslands of central Mongolia, where we can “hear skylark song pouring from the clear blue sky, and the fizz of grasshoppers underfoot”.