Mongolia | Khovd Aimag | Ja Lama and the Siege of Khovd

By the end of the year 1911 the Qing Dynasty in China was in its death throes. Mongolia, which had been part of the Qing Empire since 1691, soon declared its independence. On December 29, 1911, the Eighth Bogd Gegeen and twenty-third Incarnation of Javsandamba was named Bogd Khan and placed on the throne of the sovereign country of Mongolia. Two hundred and twenty years of Qing rule was over.

8th Bogd Gegeen

At the same time a badarchin, or wandering holy man, named Dambijantsan, a.k.a. Ja Lama, Ja Bagsh (teacher), Dambija, Khoyor Tsagaan Temeet Lam (Two White Camel Lama), etc, was in what was then the Khovd Border Region, now Khovd Aimag, some 700 miles west of the Mongolian capital of Örgöö. According to the famous Mongolian monk known as the Diluv Khutagt, head of Narobanchin Monastery in western Mongolia, on December 29 Dambijantsan did a “strange, magical thing." According to the Diluv Khutagt:

The Bogd was declared Khan of At the same time a badarchin, or wandering holy man, named Dambijantsan, a.k.a. Ja Lama, Ja Bagsh (teacher), Dambija, Khoyor Tsagaan Temeet Lam (Two White Camel Lama), etc, was in what was then the Khovd Border Region, now Khovd Aimag, some 700 miles west of the Mongolian capital of Örgöö. According to the famous Mongolian monk known as the Diluv Khutagt, head of Narobanchin Monastery in western Mongolia, on December 29 Dambijantsan did a “strange, magical thing." According to the Diluv Khutagt:

The Bogd was declared Khan of Mongolia at the time of the Mongol Revolution in 1911. Long before the news of this event reached Western Mongolia, Ja Lama called the people around him, and said, “The time for rejoicing has arrived.” He then touched the barrel of his gun to the top of each man’s head, in the way a lama gives a blessing with his prayer beads, and said, “Go to the east and pray.” Later is was discovered that this was the exact day on which the Bogd had been declared Khaan.

In the months to come this wandering badarchin known as the Ja Lama would lead the attack on the Khovd Fortress, the last outpost of Manchu authority in Mongolia, and within a year he would become the most powerful man in western Mongolia. He would achieve fame all over Mongolia for his alleged magical feats and become notorious for his cruelty. Worshipped and feared in equal measure, he became the subject of any number of legends which continue to be retold down to the present day.

Mongolia at the time of the Mongol Revolution in 1911. Long before the news of this event reached Western Mongolia, Ja Lama called the people around him, and said, “The time for rejoicing has arrived.” He then touched the barrel of his gun to the top of each man’s head, in the way a lama gives a blessing with his prayer beads, and said, “Go to the east and pray.” Later is was discovered that this was the exact day on which the Bogd had been declared Khaan.

In the months to come this wandering badarchin known as the Ja Lama would lead the attack on the Khovd Fortress, the last outpost of Manchu authority in Mongolia, and within a year he would become the most powerful man in western Mongolia. He would achieve fame all over Mongolia for his alleged magical feats and become notorious for his cruelty. Worshipped and feared in equal measure, he became the subject of any number of legends which continue to be retold down to the present day.

Dambijantsan, the Ja Lama

But who was Dambijantsan, the Ja Lama? All of his life he was a mystery and he remained even more so after his death. The Diluv Khutagt was six years old when he first met Dambijantsan, would encounter him many times in later life, and was eventually involved in the plot to assassinate him. In his Autobiography he included an entire chapter about Dambijantsan, the only individual to warrant such attention, and yet even to him the Ja Lama remained an enigma. “He called himself a lama, but nobody knew if he really was one,” the Diluv Khutagt wrote, “No one knew his real age. No one knew the real truth about him.”

While traveling through Mongolia and China in 1927 George Roerich, son of famous artist, mystic, and Shambhalist Nicholas Roerich, attempted to gather information about Dambijantsan. In his book Trails to Inmost Asia, he, like the Diluv Khutagt, included an entire chapter about Dambijantsan. Here he noted:

. . . no one knows exactly where he came from or what his ambitions were. It is extremely difficult to piece together all the existing information about his life, so varied were his activities and so extensive were his travels. The arena of his activity was the whole of Asia, from Astrakhan to Peking and from Urga to distant India. I succeeded in collecting information about him and his life from Mongolian and Tibetan lamas and laymen whom fate brought into contact with the dreaded warrior-priest. This singular personality for some thirty-five years hypnotized the whole of Greater Mongolia. At present, some six years after the death of the man, Mongols feel an unholy dread of him, and worship him as a militant incarnation of one of their national leaders.

George Roerich’s arguably more famous father Nicholas noted in his own book about the expedition: “Ja-Lama was no ordinary bandit . . . What thoughts and dreams fretted the gray head of Ja-Lama? . . . All through the Central Gobi, the legend of Ja-Lama will persist for a long time. What a scenario for a moving picture!” Indeed, a movie was eventually made about Dambijantsan, and it is still occasionally shown on the Mongolian State TV.

Nicholas Roerich

Many others, including I. M. Maisky, later Soviet ambassador to England; Danish colonist and explorer Henning Haslund, author of Men & Gods in Mongolia; Swedish explorer Sven “the Desert Wanderer” Hedin; and famous Mongolist Owen Lattimore, would attempt to piece together what little was known about Dambijantsan’s life. From their accounts and others we can attempt a tentative biography of the enigmatic Ja Lama.

Oddly enough Dambijantsan was born in Europe, on the Caspian steppes along the Volga River north of the Caspian Sea. Ethnically he was a Dörböt Mongol, one of the several tribes of the people known as Kalmyks. The Kalmyks were Oirat, or Western, Mongols, who back in the 1620s and 30s had left their homelands in what is now western Mongolia and the current Chinese province of Xinjiang and migrated en masse westward to the Caspian steppes, where they became nominal subjects of the Russian Czar. By the 1760s many Kalmyks had become disillusioned by life under their Russian masters, and on January 5, 1771 over 150,000 Kalmyks suddenly packed up and left the Caspian steppes on what would be a long and fateful trek to Xinjiang, China. Only about 70,000 survived the journey.

Some Kalmyks, in particular members of the Törgöt tribe, remained behind and were eventually accorded Russian citizenship. It was among these people that Dambijantsan was born, according to several sources, in 1860. From 1860 to 1890 we have only rumors and legends about Dambijantsan’s life. At the age of seven he supposedly entered a monastery of the Jangjya Khutagt in Dolonnuur, in what is now the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, and began religious studies. He is also said to have studied many years in Gomang College at Drepung Monastery in Lhasa, Tibet. According to George Roerich:

It is generally said that he killed his roommate in the monastery because of a dispute and had to flee from Lhasa in order to escape from the stern monastic law. This fact is generally known in Tibet and Mongolia. It seems that the murder was a crucial point in his life for from then on begins his life as an errant warrior-monk, full of wonderful adventures, messianic prophesies, and cruel deeds.

Drepung Monastery in Tibet, where Ja Lama supposedly studied

Perhaps it was after this unfortunate episode that he turned up in India as a wandering holy man. Already well-versed in advanced Buddhist metaphysics and tantric teachings, in India he may have encountered fakirs from whom he learned more of the mind-reading and the other paranormal skills for which he would later become famous. In the years prior to 1890 he also found time to work as a guide and factotum with various Russian scientific expeditions, including N. M. Przhelvalsky’s 1883–1885 trip to Central Asia and Tibet. Bizarrely, it was said that at some point in his wanderings he even turned up in St. Petersburg and studied law with the Faculty of Jurisprudence at St. Petersburg University. This may have simply been a rumor spread by himself to burnish his own reputation.

Dambijantsan’s life prior to 1890 might be termed his apprenticeship period. In 1890 he suddenly appeared in western Mongolia, where he began in earnest his career as a fighter for Mongolian independence. Here he first met the boy who would become known as the Diluv Khutagt. The latter wrote:

When I was only six years old . . . Ja Lama made a trip through Outer Mongolia going from east to west, and he stayed one night at the tent of my father and mother. He was riding one horse and leading two. He let his horses out to graze, and in the morning did not have to catch them, he just went to the top of a little hill and called, and they came to him.

Dambijantsan soon unveiled a startling revelation. He was, he claimed, the descendant of Amursanaa, the great Oirat freedom fighter, the leader of the last Mongol uprising against the Qing Dynasty, come to free the Mongolian people from their Manchu masters. He quickly managed to involve several noblemen and high-ranking lamas in anti-Manchu-Chinese protests. The Qing amban in Uliastai soon became aware of Dambijantsan’s presence in western Mongolia and ordered him to appear at the Qing headquarters for questioning. Here he was arrested for entering Mongolia without any passport or other documentation. Two Mongolian officials serving under the Manchus, Nanrad and Avari, were called in to interrogate him. According to the Diluv Khutagt, Dambijantsan spoke to the two officials “in a very supercilious manner.” Dambijantsan:

Although I am a Russian citizen, I am a Mongol—and what does it matter to you whether a Mongol has documents or not, traveling in his own land? You two, being Mongols, would do well to pay attention to the affairs of your own people, whose time is coming to arise, instead of oppressing a comrade of your own people on behalf of a foreign people [the Manchus] whose time of decay has come . . . I am sure, in this huge land of your great people, you have nothing to fear from a solitary pilgrim priest. Since I have done nothing wrong, the most you could do would be to send me back to my homeland.

Nanrad and Avari were completely taken aback by this bold speech and could make no reply. Then two Russian merchants residing in Uliastai came forth and after they offered to post a bond Dambijantsan was finally released.

According to one account he may have traveled on from Mongolia to Tibet, his earlier crimes and misdemeanors there apparently forgotten by then. In the fall of 1891 he reappeared in western Mongolia, riding on one white camel and leading another. It may be at this time that he acquired the name Khoyor Tsagaan Temeet Lam (Two White Camel Lama). A year later, in 1892, the Russian ethnographer A. M. Pozdneev visited the Monastery of Amarbayasgalant in north-central Mongolia, and by that time the news of the Ja Lama’s appearance had spread throughout the entire country. Pozdneev:

. . . for at least an hour I listened to stories of how, during Dambi Jantsan's journey over the post road, the people, with secret fear and hope, had greeted him everywhere, paid him the most heartfelt obeisance, and brought him rich offerings. Others told me that Dambi Jantsan himself had scattered gold among the poorer Mongols, and there was no end of entirely legendary tales.

Once again Dambijantsan’s anti-Manchu agitations brought him to the attention of the Qing amban in Uliastai. In the late fall of 1891 he was detained and taken to Uliastai, where he was interrogated by Qing officials. He refused to answer any of their questions and demanded, since he was a Russian citizen, to speak to someone in the Uliastai Russian community. The Russian merchant P. I. Kriazhev was summoned. Dambijantsan, who had been handcuffed, asked Kriazhev reach into the folds of his deel and find a key concealed there. With the key Kriazhev opened the lock on an iron strongbox which Dambijantsan had with him. In the box Kriazhev found a pass allowing “Astrakan Kalmyk Jambi-Jiantsin” to travel through Mongolia. Fortunately for Dambijantsan the officials did not further examine the contents of the iron box. Hidden inside were proclamations in Mongolian “urging the overthrow of the Chinese yoke.” Had the proclamations been found Dambijantsan might well have spent the next years of his life in a Manchu prison. Instead he was let go for lack of evidence. Dambijantsan’s audacity in the face of the Qing authorities and his narrow escape became part of the myth about his invincibility. Had the magician who according to legend could control men’s minds mesmerized his Qing interrogators? In any case, the Qing amban had him in his hands and then simply let him slip away.

By this time Dambijantsan had also attracted the attention of the Russian consul in Mongolia. The consul, whose powers of extraterritoriality gave him authority over Russian citizens in Mongolia, finally had him brought to Örgöö and interrogated. Whatever Dambijantsan was up to, he was clearly a trouble-maker. Hoping to be finally rid of the unruly Kalmyk, the consul had him deported back to Russia through the northern border town of Kyakhta.

After his expulsion from Mongolia, we hear no more of Dambijantsan for twenty some years. How does a man like Dambijantsan, who had electrified the populace of Mongolia during his sojourns there in 1890 and 1891, almost immediately becoming the stuff of legend, and whose charisma, will power, and apparent magical abilities had left an indelible impression on almost everyone who met him, simply disappear for twenty years? This is just one of the many mysteries of Dambijantsan’s life.

In 1910 Dambijantsan suddenly appeared in the town of Karashahr, in what is now Xinjiang Province, China. Here he sought out the Brothers Kriazhev, Russian merchants who were operating in the area at the time. Karashahr, now known as Yanqi, was in an area inhabited by Torgut Mongols, many of them descendants of the Torgots who took part in the great migration of Kalmyk Mongols from the Caspian steppes back to China in 1771. Dambijantsan, himself a Dörböt, like the Torguts one of the tribes which made up the Kalmyks, would have found himself at home here among the descendants of the migrants from the Caspian steppes where he was born, and he ended up staying in the Karashahr area for over a year. He must have had his ear to the ground and his political senses no doubt told him that the tottering Qing Dynasty was about to come to an ignominious end. Perhaps he was just biding his time in among the Torgut Mongols near Karashahr, waiting for the proper moment to make a dramatic return to western Mongolia.

According to Diluv Khutagt he arrived back in the Khovd area in late 1911 in the company of “a man got up like a lama, and they had two riding camels. He visited the Torguud (Torgut) and Ööld banners one after another and everywhere caused everyone, great and small, to have faith in him. . .” He also traveled to what is now Uvs Aimag, where he met the Russian colonist A. V. Burdukov. According to Burdukov, Dambijantsan’s “entire body showed extraordinary vitality and mobility. He was dressed in a brown cloak of Chinese cut, under which one saw a rather incongruous collar of a European military tunic; he wore high Russian boots. He spoke in the Oirat language, and talked about India, China, Tibet, and Russia, where, he said, he had traveled a great deal.”

He also repeated his assertion that he was the descendant and/or reincarnation of Amursanaa. The Russian researcher I. M. Maisky, who traveled through the region a few years later, wrote:

One can . . . easily imagine the sensation Ja Lama created among the Durbets [Dörböts] when he let them in on the “secret” that he was none other than a descendant and reincarnation of the renowned Amursanaa and that the last hero of Mongolian independence had become incarnated in him so that he, Ja Lama, might lift the Chinese yoke from his native land. There was great excitement among the tribes of the Khovd region. The name of Ja Lama was on all tongues. Everyone saw him as the savior of the fatherland. Princes, lamas and plain folk came flocking to the newly-risen leader and donated livestock, silver, cloth, etc. In a short time, the bold monk became in fact the ruler of the Kobdo Mongols. He now began his activities in earnest.

Dambijantsan soon set up a military camp on the Dund Tsenkher Gol near the current day town of Mankhan, then as now the territory of the Zakhchin people. According to men who fought with Dambijantsan, interviewed by Professor Basaakhüü of Khovd in the 1970s, upwards of 4500 men flocked to Dambijantsan’s camp here on the Dund Tsenkher. Dambijantsan, who did not like disorder, had his men pick up all the loose rocks in the area of their camp and put them in piles. These piles of rocks can still be seen here today.

Campground of Dambijantsan’s men at Dund Tsenkher Gol,
with small piles of rocks they placed there.

Several skirmishes broke out during next the two months, but the Mongols were unable to dislodge the Chinese garrison, in part because they lacked adequate weapons and ammunition. Many were armed with ancient flintlocks, and some had only bows. That changed when the Mongols ambushed a relief column sent to the besieged garrison and seized eighty camel loads of modern Japanese rifles, ammunition, and other supplies. Dambijantsan’s role in the ambush is unclear. Some sources say he lead the ambush or at least took part; others maintain Magsarjav organized and led the attack himself.

Shiriin Khötöl, the site of the ambush, 9.6 miles from Khovd City. When the relief column emerged from the mouth of the canyon it was attacked by men hiding in the cliffs above.

Under Dambijantsan’s leadership the assault on Khovd was renewed. On August 6 the city surrendered and most of the Chinese shops and warehouses were plundered. The following day the fortress itself surrendered. According to one source 500 Chinese soldiers were killed over a thousand soldiers and civilians were taken prisoner. The Manchu amban too was seized. Dambijantsan wanted to kill all the prisoners, including the amban, but the Russian consul intervened and the amban and his entourage were given safe passage to Russia, from whence they eventually returned to China.

Ruins of the wall of the Khovd Fortress. This is the southwest corner where the Manchu amban’s residence was located.

Ruins of the Chinese Fortress on the right

With the fall of the Khovd fortress and the eviction of the Manchu Amban and the Chinese garrison, the vast last vestige of foreign rule was removed from Mongolia, and the Khovd Frontier Region—the current-day aimags of Khovd, Bayan-Ölgii, and parts of Uvs—was effectively brought under the control of the Bogd Khan’s government in Örgöö. As a reward for the role Dambijantsan had played in the Mongol victory at Khovd the Bogd Khan gave him two titles: Dogshin Noyon (Ferocious Prince) Khutagt and Erdene Bishrelt Khüchin Tögöldor Noyon Khutagt Nomin Khan (Jewel Pious Perfect Strength Prince Khutagt, Lord of Scriptures. He was also named Baruun Khyazgaarig llben Tokhinuullakh Said (Minister for the Pacification and Settlement of the Western Frontier). The wandering badarchin who first appeared on the scene with only two white camels was now the most powerful man in western Mongolia.

Dambijantsan spent the winter of 1912-13 at his camp on the Dund Tsenkher Gol. The site of his ger can still be seen today near the base of the mountains where the Dund Tsenkher emerges from a canyon (at N47º13.783' E091º59.841', 56.4 miles from Khovd City).

Site of Dambijantsan’s ger at Dund Tsenkher Gol

The soldiers who had fought with him and an ever larger contingent of disciples and followers who had fallen under his charismatic spell camped a half mile or so further down the valley. While living here he kept a thirteen year old boy in his ger as a servant. Treated as a virtual slave, the boy wanted to escape, but he lived in mortal fear of the dreaded Ja Lama. Soon he devised a plan to kill Dambijantsan. Every morning Dambijantsan would go out and inspect his soldiers and then come back and sit on a stool behind the stove and drink tea. The boy decided that when Dambijantsan sat down he would hand him a cup of tea with one hand and with the other grab the axe that was kept in the woodbox beside the stove and break open his skull with it. Dambijantsan came in and sat down, then grabbed the axe himself and hit the boy along the side of the head with the flat side, knocking him down. “Did you really think you could kill me with an axe?” he asked the boy. The boy was sure he was about to die, but instead Dambijantsan handed him a Buddhist scripture wrapped in a yellow cloth and said, “Our paths in life are quite different. You must go your way and I will go mine. Take this book and go to Khovd and became a monk. But never let me see you again or I will kill you.” The boy did as he was told, and eventually he became a well-known lama famous for blessing new jeeps. Before he died in the late 1980s he told people in Khovd that Dambijantsan had known his intentions because he had been able to read his mind. This one just one of the many stories of Dambijantsan’s mind-reading abilities which continue to be told down to the present day.

In the summer of 1913 Dambijantsan and his followers moved to a place called Munjaviin Ulaan, along the Khovd River sixty miles north of Khovd City (at N48º49.098' – E091º19.164').

Munjaviin Ulaan. Now nothing remains of Dambijantsan’s city.

Ovoo at Munjaviin Ulaan

Here he established a monastery known as Shashin Badrakh. The monks he recruited were subject to the strictest discipline; those who failed to live up to his expectations were beaten or sent back to their families to become herdsmen. “Few lamas, but good ones,” became Dambijantsan’ motto. But the monastery was just the beginning. Now styling himself after Peter the Great, who had created St. Petersburg as a window to the West, he envisioned a new city which would be the capital of an ideal community. He would start schools, introduce agriculture, Western technology, and in general reform society along modern lines, all the while maintaining Buddhism as the dominant religion. It was said that his ultimate goal was to create a new Western Mongol State which would eventually incorporate Xinjiang Province in China and even part of Tibet into a new Buddhist-based Inner Asian empire, the dream which had earlier been squandered by Galdan Bolshigt. Unfortunately, in order to realize his vision he soon instituted a reign of terror on anyone opposed him. According to the Diluv Khutagt:

He governed all matters on the Western Frontier dictatorially . . . sometimes he sent troops to seize and carry off people who did not obey him or went against his ideas, and inflicted all kinds of lawless torture and suffering and murder. His ferocious behavior exceeded anything told in legend and became a great cause of suffering . . . The result was that the stupid creatures who had praised everything about him and had faithfully believed in him more than if he were a true Buddha or Bodhisattva, now hated and feared him . . .

His sadistic behavior had careened out of control. It was said that he took pleasure in skinning people alive, and that he even used the skin of a Kazakh man as a meditation mat. Somehow the Ja Lama had be be reined in, but the Mongolian authorities seemed powerless against him. Finally local people appealed to the Russian government, since Dambijantsan was still technically a Russian citizen. A detachment of eighty heavily-armed Russian troops was sent to the Khovd Region and they finally managed to subdue Dambijantsan and take him into custody. One chapter of the Ja Lama’s life was over.

He was imprisoned first at Tomsk in western Siberia, then near Irkutsk, just west of Lake Baikal, and finally exiled to Yakutia, in the far north of Siberia. With the collapse of Czarist power in Russia his exile was commuted and he returned to the city of Astrakhan, on the Volga River, near where he had been born. In 1918 he returned to Mongolia and began rounding up disciples in current-day Gov-Altai Aimag. His dream of establishing a Buddhist realm in Inner Asia had not died. The last and most notorious chapter of his life was about to begin . . . to be continued . . .