Mongolia | Life & Death of the False Lama #3

Using the accounts of the Diluv Khutagt, Maiskii, the Roerichs, and Others who either knew Dambijantsan or gathered information from those who did, the findings of later researchers who had access to Mongolian and Russian archives, and my own Preliminary Research on the Ground in Mongolia, I am finally ready to piece together a rough outline of his life.

Dambijantsan, the False Lama

Admittedly, some of the most basic biographical details remain elusive. Even his actual name is uncertain. “Dambijantsan” is a Mongolian name said to be based on the Tibetan words for “standard-bearer.” George Roerich gives his name as “Ten-pei Jal-tsen (bsTsan-pa’I rgyal-mtshan),” apparently a rendering of the original Tibetan. Yet other sources suggest that his given name in Mongolian was Davaasambuu. But while Dambijantsan was ethnically Mongolian, he was born in Russia and was nominally a Russian citizen. Thus he reportedly also had the Russian, or at least semi-Russian, name of Amur Sanaev. This name would appear to be nothing more than a Russianized form of “Amursanaa.” As we shall see, Amursana was the Oirat chieftain who had led the last great Mongol revolt against the Qing Dynasty in the 1750s. Dambijantsan would eventually claim to be a descendant of Amursana, and still later his reincarnation. That he was a actual lineal descendant of the Oirat chieftain seems highly unlikely, and a reincarnation a matter of speculation. If he was not related to Amursana, is it really possible, as one Russian researcher maintains, that he was born into a family named Sanaev and given the name “Amur”? The coincidence seems to great. Or was this just another alias chosen to further enhance his connection with the illustrious Amursana, who according to legend would return and once again lead the Mongols in revolt against the Qing oppressors? In any case, as late as 1914 Dambijantsan appeared to have Russian documents giving his name as Amur Sanaev. He also traveled under the Russian alias Ichinnorov amd the Tibetan alias of Dawa Shabrong. After arriving in Mongolia in the early 1890s he would acquire a whole host of Mongolian aliases and nicknames.

Dambijantsan’s age is also a matter of dispute. His contemporaries had no clear idea of how old he was. Like the notorious Count St. Germain of eighteenth century Europe Dambijantsan had the curious trait of appearing ageless. The Diluv Khutagt, who knew him for a period of over thirty years, says simply, ““No one knew his real age. No one knew the real truth about him.” A. M. Pozdneev, writing in 1892, noted that Dambijantsan “was about thirty or forty years old.” Yet A. V. Burdukov, who would become very well acquainted with Dambijantsan, stated that when he first met him, some twenty years later in 1912, “He looked a little over forty.” If we are believe these accounts it would appear that Dambijantsan aged very little between 1891 and 1912. These discrepancies in his appearance would cause some to speculate that there was more than one Dambijantsan, and that some witnesses had confused the various characters who had assumed his name. Indeed, as we shall see. several imposters did eventually appear in Mongolia, all claiming to be Dambijantsan.

After his death various researchers would claim that the Dambijantsan was born in 1860, although the actual source of this information is never quite clear. One Mongolian scholar, apparently using a comment of Dambijantsan’s on the astrological details of his birth, would claim he was born in 1862. Lacking any more concrete information we will use 1860 as the probable date of his birth. This would make him thirty years old when he first arrived in Mongolia in 1890, fifty-two when he took part in the Siege of Khovd in 1912, and sixty-three at the time of his assassination at Gongpochuan in 1923.

As we have seen Pozdneev as far back as 1892 was aware that Dambijantsan was a Kalmyk of the Little Dörböt tribe dwelling on the Caspian Steppe north of the Caspian Sea. But even this simple fact about Dambijantsan’s life would later be obscured behind a welter of myths. In 1926 Owen Lattimore was told by caravan men on the Winding Road caravan route that Dambijantsan was variously a “a true Mongol” (i.e., Khalkh or Eastern Mongol), a Russian, or a Buryat from Siberia. “The most substantial story of all,” opined Lattimore, “is that he a Chinese from Manchuria who had served in Mongolia as a herder of ponies for the princely firm of Ta Sheng K’uei.” He also relates that one of the things most remembered about Dambijantsan by those who had known or at least seen him was his habit of changing his dress every day or so from Russian to Mongolian to Chinese and back again. This constant changing of his clothes could only have added to the confusion about his origins. Dambijantsan himself told A. V. Burdukov he was a Khalkh Mongol born at a place called Ashikh Khurgan Chuluu in the old Tüsheet Khan Aimag. That Burdukov, who spoke Mongolian, apparently believed this story was strange, since several other people who knew Dambijantsan commented that he spoke the Khalkh dialect of the Mongolian language very poorly. Even to this day people in Gov-Altai aimag remember stories about Dambijantsan’s poor command of the Khalkh Dialect and his use of the words from the Kalmyk or Western Mongolian Form of the Mongolian language.

Later evidence, including letters written by Dambijantsan himself, confirm that he was indeed a Kalmyk. One source maintains that he was born near the town of Aidarkhan, somewhere on the west bank of the Volga—the name no longer appears on modern maps—but again the original source of this information is unclear. Pozdneev’s assertion that Dambijantsan belonged to the Dörböt tribe, a subdivision of the Kalmyks, would also seem to be correct.

The people known as Kalmyks had left the main body of Oirats, or Western Mongols, most of whom were then concentrated in what is now western Mongolia and the Chinese province of Xinjiang, in the early seventeenth century and had migrated en masse westward to the steppes on either side of the Volga River north of the Caspian Sea, an area then nominally controlled by Russia. There they became the only enclave of Mongolians who practiced the traditional nomadic lifestyle in Europe. Several different tribes, including the Torgut and the Dörböt, had made the migration. Each kept its name but they became known in general as Kalmyks. Thus Dambijantsan was a Kalmyk of the Dörböt tribe. Since by the time he was born Russia had asserted full control over the area he was a Russian citizen, a factor which was to play a crucial role in his life. Yet he always identified with Oirats, or Western Mongols, from which his tribe the Dörböt had originated, and would eventually assert that his real homeland was the traditional territories of the Oirats in western Mongolia and northwest China.