Mongolia | Life of Dambijantsan | Among the Dörvöds

The Life of Dambijantsan continued:

In the early Spring of 1912 Dambijantsan and his disciple Jimbe left his Headquarters on the Dund Tsenkher Gol and traveled north to the Dörvöd Dalai Khan and the Dörvöd Zorigt Khan aimags in the the border region to the west  of the four Khalkh aimags. As their names implies, these aimags, located in what is now Uvs Aimag and northern Khovd Aimag, were in large part inhabited by Dörböd, the tribe Dambijantsan supposed belonged to back in Kalmykia. While in Dörvöd Dalai Khan Aimag Dambijantsan first meet with A. V. Burdukov, the Russian trader who would become his close friend and who would write at length about him in his book Old and New Mongolia. Burdukov at time had a homestead and trading post at Khangeltsyk, near the town Tsagaan Khairkhan in current-day Uvs Aimag, northeast  of Khyargas Nuur.  Burdukov visited Dambijantsan in a ger where he was staying:

At first we thought that they [Dambijantsan and Jimbe] were just two   badarchin, but people said no, they are very significant people. He was about 40–45 years old, stout, strongly built, with a round, purposeful face. He had a high forehead and bright, shining eyes. Although he was dressed as a Tibetan lama in a maroon gown with broad cuffless sleeves, he wore a well-made pair of Russian boots, and peeping out from under the gown was the collar of an old Russian military uniform. His accent was neither Khalkh nor Oirat but a mixture. Mausers were hung on the wall of the yurt. He knew much about events in Mongolia, Russia, and China. He inspired belief in him by others to an extraordinary degree. People came into his yurt and asked his blessing, which he always gave. He looked like someone born on the steppe and at the same time as an experienced agitator.

In the course of his conversations with Burdukov Dambijantsan spoke about India and Tibet, where he claimed to have traveled extensively. “There could be little doubt as to the man’s wide experiences and travel,” Burdukov noted, “his information about the countries he mentioned was remarkably precise and detailed . . . Ja Lama had a command not only of the Mongolian language, but of Chinese, Tibetan, and Sanskrit as well, and he also knew a bit of Russian.” (Oddly, the Diluv Khutagt claimed that Dambijantsan, despite the years he had supposedly lived in Tibet, could not speak Tibetan at all.) Maisky, traveling through the region a few years later when stories about Dambijantsan’s first appearance there were still in circulation, also commented on Dambijantsan’s extensive travels in India, Tibet and elsewhere: “A man who had gone through this kind of schooling [his various travels] and acquired some smattering of European culture would under any circumstances greatly impress the simple-minded Mongols . . .” 

But not only was he well-traveled and supposedly well-educated, he was also the successor to Amarsanaa, a claim which he never tired of repeating. Maisky’s comments on the effects this assertion had on the locals:

One can . . . easily imagine the sensation Ja Lama created among the Durbets [Dörböds] when he let them in on the “secret” that he was none other than a descendent and reincarnation of the renowned Amursana 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’s prestige in Dörvöd Dalai Khan Aimag was enhanced by all kinds of magical acts which were attributed to him. He seemed to know all the life-stories and even the most intimate secrets of all the important people in the area. People put this down to his supernatural powers of cognition and mind reading, but  as Burdukov pointed out he might well have gotten this information from the gossip of the many people who were constantly coming to him for blessings. Burdukov also mentioned that at one point he took some photographs of Dambijantan. He later inadvertently re-exposed the negative containing Dambijantsan’s image when he was taking a photo of local Mongolian noblemen. When the negative was printed the faces of the Mongol princes showed up on Dambijantsan’s sleeve. Despite Burdukov’s explanations of what had happened, the Mongols who saw this photograph insisted that this was further proof of Dambijantsan’s magical powers. HIs every act took on a special significance. He frequently gave his disciple Jimbe  severe beatings, but witnesses took this to mean that Jimbe was a great sinner and that Dambijantsan was performing a virtuous act by punishing him. In the eyes of many Dambijantsan could do no wrong.

Mongolia | Life & Death of the False Lama #18

After Dambijantsan was Deported from Mongolia in 1891, we hear nothing more about him, apart from a couple of unsubstantiated rumors, for the next twenty 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. I might note parenthetically that arguably the greatest magus of the nineteenth-century, Helena Blavatsky, also disappeared completely for twenty years, a lacuna which even her most assidious biographers have been unable to fill in, and that the likewise arguably greatest magus of the twentieth century, George Gurdjieff, also disappeared for twenty years, another lacuna which has left biographers scratching their heads in puzzlement and dismay. And need I add that Jesus of Nazareth also disappeared for twenty years, a period about which the Bible has absolutely nothing to say? It is intriguing that legend, if not historical documentation, places Blavatsky, Gurdieff, Dambijantsan, and Jesus in India and Tibet during at least part of their missing years, but this is a topic which I must put aside for the moment while I deal with Dambijantsan’s reappearance in 1910, when he suddenly materialized in the town of Karashahr, in what is now Xinjiang Province, China.

Here he sought out the Brothers Kryajev, Russian merchants who were operating in the area at the time. One of the brothers may have been P. I. Kryajev, who back in 1891 had been living in Uliastai and had been instrumental in gaining Dambijantsan’s release from the Qing authorities. Dambijantsan was traveling under an alias and had “somewhat changed exterior; his face was shaven now whereas formerly he wore a beard.” Karashahr, now known as Yanqi, just west of Bosten Lake, on the south side of the Tian Shan Range, was in an area inhabited by Torgut Mongols, many of them descendants of the Torguts who took part in the Great Migration of Kalmyk Mongols from the Caspian Steppes in Russia back to China in 1772. Today the area is in the Bayangol Mongol Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang and is still home to many Torgut Mongols.

As noted earlier, Dambijantsan probably visited this area during his 1890 Sojourn through Xinjiang. 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 along the Volga River 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 decrepit Qing Dynasty, tottering on its last legs, was about to come to an ignominious end. Perhaps he was just biding his time 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 “man got up like a lama, and they had two riding camels.” The man’s man was Jimbe, and at this point he was apparently Dambijantsan’s sole disciple. At first Dambijantsan did not give out his name, but he soon became known as Khoër Temeed Badarchin, the Wandering Monk with Two Camels, the same nickname he had gotten during his earlier stay in Mongolia Soon the rumor spread that he was either Amarsanaa himself, in accordance with the legend that Amarsanaa had in fact never died, but had learned the secret of immortality, or that he was a descendant or perhaps reincarnation of Amarsanaa, returning to avenge Amarsanaa and continue his quest to free the Mongols from the hated Manchus. The legend of Amarsanaa’s return to Mongolia in one form or another dated from the late eighteenth century, and people might well have remembered the Dambijantsan’s earlier appearance in 1890-91 when he was claiming to be Amarsanaa’s descendant or incarnation. The Russian trader Burdukov noted that upon returning to Mongolia each spring from Russia, people would “naively ask when Amarsanaa will come and save us.” Now it appeared their prayers were about to be answered.

The mysterious badarchin, according to the Diluv, “was a very powerful man and the saddlebags which his men couldn’t lift he could lift onto a camel . . . He was armed with a long old-style Mongol flintlock. Although he came from the Volga, he spoke the Khalkh dialect very well. He called himself a lama, but nobody knew if he really was one. Nobody knew his real age. Nobody knew the real truth about him.” Soon people did become aware of his real, or alleged, name, Dambijantsan, and as they repeated this name it got shortened to Dambija (the name by which many in Mongolia recognize him to this day), then finally to just Ja. Apparently from this time he first became known as Ja Lama. He also became known as Ja Bogd (bodg = holy) and Ja Bagsh (bagsh = teacher).

According to the Diluv Khutagt, Dambijantsan, ”visited the Torguud (Torgut) and Ööld banners one after another and everywhere caused everyone, great and small, to have faith in him, and spent several months in Zakhchin Da’s region.” At the time there were two Zakhchin Banners southeast of Khovd City, the Da Khoshuu and the Gün Khoshuu. Dambijantsan finally decided to set up headquarters among the Zakhchin Da Khoshuu. The word zakhchin itself means “borderer,” and the Zakhchin people were one of many ethnic groups who fell under the general rubric of Western, or Oirat Mongols. They inhabit the area to this day, centered around the now neat and tidy little sum center of Mankhan. In Dambijantsan’s day, the town was well-known as the site of a monastery known as Tögrögiin Khüree. The famous lama Namkhaijantsan (1599–1662), who became better known as the Oirat Zaya Pandita, once lived here. At the at the age of nineteen Namkhaijantsan had gone to Tibet where he was ordained as a monk by the Dalai Lama himself. He staying in Tibet for eighteen years before coming back to western Mongolia. In 1649 he returned to Tibet as the chaperone and tutor of the five-year old Oirat prince Galdan (later Galdan Bolshigt) who himself entered the monkhood. (Dambijantsan, as we shall see, adopted Galdan Boshigt as one of his role models.)

Galdan Bolshigt (1644–1697)

A formidable polymathic scholar, the Zaya Pandita is famous for inventing the so-called “Clear Script” (Tod Bichig), a modification on the Uighuro-Mongolian vertical script already in use by the Mongols. It was while studying the various dialects of the Western Mongols that Namkhaijantsan stayed at the monastery in Mankhan. Over 2,000 manuscripts on religious subjects written in Clear Script still exist in the libraries of Ulaan Baatar, including forty-seven composed between 1652 and 1662 by Zaya Pandita himself. The script is still used by Torguts in Xinjiang.

Namkhaijantsan (1599–1662), The Oirat Zaya Pandita

In 1911, when Dambijantsan arrived in the area, the Zakhchin were ruled by the 12th Zakhchin Noyon (noyon = prince). The Noyon, whose given name was Sambuu, was born in 1864, the Year of the Mouse, at a place called Khuural Tsenkher, in what is now Mankhan Sum. He was the second son of a herdsman who, although very poor, was well known as a doctor practicing traditional Mongolian medicine. Sambuu’s talents were recognized early, and when he was ten years old the 10th Noyon of the Zakhchin, Dalantai, took him on as a disciple and student. Dalantai was a very learned man and highly respected as a Dalai, a man whose knowledge was as vast as on ocean (dalai = ocean, oceanic, etc.). Under the tutorage of the 10th Noyon, Sambuu learned old Mongolia Vertical Script, the Tod Script of the Oirat Zaya Pandita, the Manchu and Tibetan languages, and also studied medicine sutras and other Tibetan medical texts. He eventually became a maaramba, a practitioner of traditional medicine, and was much respected by the Zakhchin people as a doctor and a knowledgeable and talented person in general.

Sambuu, the 12th Zakhchin Noyon

Meanwhile the 10th Noyon died and was replaced by a man named Nyamdeleg, who became the 11th Noyon. Nyamdeleg soon fell ill and his health became so bad that he was unable to fulfill his duties and had to stand down. The office of Noyon was not hereditary; it could be awarded to anyone the populace, led by the lesser noblemen, felt could best perform the job. Sambuu, well known for his knowledge and pure mindedness, was soon proclaimed the 12th Zakhchin Noyon. Ever energetic, he embarked on a campaign to upgrade the Tögrögiin Khüree and other monasteries and temples and imported skilled craftsmen from China to do the work. His goal was to make these monasteries the center of Buddhism in western Mongolia.

He also had a more militant turn of mind and with the collapse of the Manchu dynasty in the Fall of 1911 he declared himself ready to fight for Mongolian independence. Therefore he apparently had no objections when Dambijantsan, voraciously expounding on the need to eject the Manchus from western Mongolia and unite the Mongolia people, suddenly showed up in his territory and announced his intention to establish a winter camp about 20 miles south of Mankhan, on the Tsenkher Gol, where the river emerges from a canyon through the Mongol-Altai Mountain. On his peregrinations around western Mongolia Dambijantsan had already attracted a small flock of disciples and followers and these people too moved to the Tsenkher Gol camp.

Apparently it was here at his winter camp on Tsenkher Gol that on December 29, 1911, Dambijantsan did what the Diluv Khutagt called 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.

China | Beijing | Confucius Temple and Amarsanaa

After my visit to the Silk Street Market I scampered on out to the huge Tibeto-Mongolian Yonghegong Monastery. First I wanted to get my prayer beads restrung—the string on mine had become dangerously frazzled—at the Tibetan Thangka shop just down the street from the entrance of Yonghegong, but I soon discovered that since my last visit the Tibetan Thangka shop had been turned into a Tibetan restaurant and bar. They tried to lure me in for a plate of Momos and a pot of butter tea, but I resisted, since I had more pressing business. I moved on down the street to one of the many shops selling religious paraphernalia and bought a supply of Nanmu incense, made from the wood of the Nanmu Tree. Supposedly Nanmu incense was introduced into China by Lobsang Palden Yeshe, the 6th Panchen Lama of Tibet, who gave some as a gift to the Qing Emperor Qianlong on the occasion of the latter’s seventieth birthday in 1778. (The 6th Panchen Lama, it might be parenthetically noted, also wrote a famous Guidebook to Shambhala.) Unfortunately, while in Beijing being feted by Qianlong the Panchen Lama contracted smallpox and transmigrated. Rumors that he was purposely exposed to smallpox in order to elimimate him have never been confirmed. (Qianlong’s father, Yongzheng, was likewise accused of offing Zanabazar, the First Bogd Gegeen of Mongolia, at the Yellow Temple in Beijing.) In any case, Nanmu quickly became the Emperor’s favorite incense. It has the unusual quality of smelling much stronger on rainy days, and is said to clear the nose and sharpen one’s thoughts. It also drives away mosquitoes.

I had intended to pop into Yonghegong Monastery to see if the Shambhala Thangka which is supposedly in storage here had been put out on display since the last time I visited, when it was no where to be seen, but the sight of the dozen or more big tourist buses out front and the hundreds if not thousands of people milling around the entrance quickly discouraged me. It was a balmy 58º F and a lot of Chinese in addition to the usual hordes of Western and Japanese tourists were out on excursions. I had already visited the place a half dozen times or more and saw no need for braving the crowds yet again.

Instead I mosied down a side street to the Confucius Temple. Visiting here was my real reason for coming to Beijing, Tea and carpets aside. Compared with the hubbubish atmosphere prevailing at Yonghegong the Confucius Temple grounds were an oasis of calm and tranquility. Only a handful of elderly Chinese were tottering around the temple grounds, which cover 22,000 square meters or almost 5.5 acres.

Confucius (circa 551-479 BC).

Tranquil grounds of the Confucius Temple

Tranquil grounds of the Confucius Temple

Tranquil grounds of the Confucius Temple

Cypress trees at the Confucius Temple

The Confucian Temple was built during the Mongol Yuan dynasty in China by order of the Yuan Emperor Chengzong, grandson of Khubilai Khan.

Mongol Emperor Chengzong (1265-1307, r. 1294–1307)

Construction began in 1302 and was finished in 1306. It was intended as place where the emperors could go to make offerings to Confucius. The Mongols were of course not Confucianists, but they no doubt felt they had to ingratiate themselves with the Confucian-dominated Chinese bureaucracy if they wanted to successfully rule China.

Confucius was perhaps most famous for his many aphorisms. Some examples:

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it.

Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.

He who will not economize will have to agonize.

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon and star.

It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.

Men's natures are alike, it is their habits that carry them far apart.

Girl who flies airplane upside down has crack up.

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up every time we do.

Respect yourself and others will respect you.

Study the past if you would define the future.

Entrance to the main part of the temple complex

Chu Jian Cypress

Most of the cypress trees in the temple compound were planted during the Yuan Dynasty, in the fourteenth century. Many of them are named and have elaborate histories. During the Ming Dynasty, which replaced the Yuan, a wicked minister by the name of Yan Song came here to offer sacrifices. When he passed this cypress tree a high wind sprang up and a branch, driven by the wind, lifted up his black gauze hat (worn by Ming officials as a sign of rank) and exposed his face. Later the tree was said to have the ability to distinguish wicked courtiers from loyal ones. It eventually became known as the Chu Jian Cypress.

Another cypress dating back to the Yuan Dynasty

An Incense Burner. I would love to have one of these for my hovel.

The main reason I came to Beijing and to the Confucius Temple, however, was to see the monument erected by Qing Emperor Qianlong to commemorate the defeat of the Zungarians in 1755. This last great uprising of the Western or Zungarian Mongols was led by Amarsanaa. One hundred and thirty-three years after the the death of Amarsanaa, the notorious Avenger Lama Dambijantsan would claim be his descendant and/or reincarnation and embark on a campaign to overthrow Manchu rule of Mongolia.

Plaque marking the stele erected by Qianlong

Pavilion housing Qianlong’s stele commemorating the defeat of Amarsanaa and the Zungars

Qianlong’s stele commemorating the defeat of Amarsanaa and the Zungars

Turtle on which Qianlong’s stele is mounted

Although the Zungarians were defeated in 1755 the Hui, or Chinese Moslems, of Xinjiang fought against the Qing until they were finally subdued—for the time being—in 1759. From this time on Xinjiang, Now the Westernmost Province of China, was part of the Qing empire.

Pavilion housing a stele commemorating the subjugation of the Huis in 1759.

Mongolia | Life & Death of the False Lama #14

In Dambijantsan’s day, just as now, the main access from the Ili Basin to the rest of Xinjiang is via the Xinertai Pass through the Borohogo Shan. From the basin bottom the rugged western ramparts of the Borohogo Shan rise precipitously some 4500 feet to the pass. It was this formidable barrier which separated the Ili Basin from the rest of Xinjang and oriented it toward Kazakhstan to the west. Nowadays the road which switchbacks down the side of this rampart is notorious for the many accidents which occur here, especially in wintertime when heavy snow and ice storms blanket the area (I myself was in an accident on this section of road). As of 2007 a mammoth construction project was underway to built a railway tunnel through the Borohogo Shan in the Xinertai Pass area, connecting by railroad the rest of Xinjiang with the Ili Valley and the country of Kazakhstan to the west via the border town of Khorgas and thus lessening the basin’s isolation from the rest of the province.

This is the way Dambijantsan came in the spring of 1890. Just beyond the crest of the mountains he passed by 177 square-mile Lake Sayram (sayram = “blessing” in Kazakh), at 6791 feet the highest alpine lake in Xinjiang.

Sayram Lake

Sayram Lake

Bordering the lake and ramping down to the Zungarian Basin is the Bortala (bor tal = “brown steppe”) region where Amarsanaa himself was headquartered. The Oirats who had nomadized in Bortala were largely decimated after the defeat of Amarsanaa, but many of the Kalmyks who fled Russia in 1771 settled in this area. We have no record of what Dambijanstan did here, but he no doubt would have found a warm welcome among the descendants of the people from Kalmykia, where he had been born. These descendants of the Kalymks still live here, residents of the current-day Bortala Mongol Autonomous Prefecture.

From Bortala Dambijantsan traveled eastward along the southern rim of the Zungarian Basin to Urumqi, then as now the capital of Xinjiang Province. He would have found few like-minded cohorts here in this relatively new city inhabited largely by government officials colonists from elsewhere in China and he quickly moved on. He probably traveled south through the Tian Shan, either through the pass leading to the Turpan Basin or the 14,967-foot Shangli Pass to the northern edge of the Tarim Basin. More likely he took the latter, since it leads to the Bostum Lake area, where thousands of Torguts who had returned from Kalmykia to China in 1771 had been settled by Qing authorities (today the area is the Bayan Gol Mongol Autonomous Prefecture). Here among the Torguts nomads he would have found rapt listeners to his message of Mongolian independence, but unfortunately we have no record of his movements through the area. Dambijantsan probably moved east through the Turpan Basin and perhaps proceeded to the town Hami, on the border between current-day Xinjiang and Gansu provinces. Here he would have found many Oirats living in the Hami area and in the Tian Shan Mountains between Hami and Barköl to the north. But again we have no record of his passage.

The next reported sighting of the badarchin (wandering holy man) was in the Tsaidam Depression, south of Hami in current-day Qinghai Province. Here among the Khoshuut who had moved into the area with Güüsh Khan back in the early seventeenth century Dambijantsan repeated his message which by now had taken on the overtones of a messianic prophesy: he was the long-waited descendant of Amarsanaa come to free the Mongols from their oppressors.

The Kalymk party who as mentioned earlier had turned up in the Ili Basin proceeded on the Tibet. Noran Ulanov, head of the group, died of atttitude sickness en route to Lhasa and Dambin Ulianov, who in the Ili Basin had been mistaken for Dambijantsan, took over as head of the mission. By the time they arrived in Tibet the English Younghusband Expedition had already invaded the country, and on July 30, 1904 the Dalai Lama accompanied by his tutor the Buryat Agvan Dorjieff, who Damijantsan had allegedly met while they were students at Drepung, and others had fled north and would eventually turn up Mongolia. Although unable thwart the British, Ulianov did manage met with various high-ranking Tibetan officials, including the ruling Regent, Lozang Gyaltsen Lamochar, the Gandan Tri Rinpoche. He presented the Rinpoche with a document which argued that according to various ancient prophesies Buddhism would flourish in Russia and China and that therefore the Tibetans should align themselves with these two countries and not with the English, who it was claimed were basically hostile to the teachings of the Buddha. His message delivered, Ulianov and the Kalymk party started on the long journey back to Kalmykia. While passing through the Tsaidam Basin they heard from Khoshuut Mongols living there still more stories and legends about the mysterious Kalmyk who had turned up among them fourteen years earlier claiming to be a descendant of Amarsanaa and promising to liberate them from their Manchu-Chinese oppressors. Wherever Dambijantsn appeared he made an impression which would be remain years and even decades later.

From the Tsaidam east we get only faint glimpses of the badarchin. He supposedly passed through Beijing, where he claimed he had earlier studied at the college of the Jangjya Khutagt, and then quickly moved on northward to Örgöö [Ulaan Baatar], at the time the largest monastic settlement in Mongolia and home of the Eight Bogd Gegeen. But this was ground zero of Khalkh Mongolia, home of the Eastern Mongols who under Zanabazar had capitulated to the Qing back in 1691, and Dambijantsan was no doubt eager to move on westward to the lands still inhabited in part by his ancient ancestors, the Oirats. We next hear of Dambijantsan in what was then Zasagt Aimag in western Mongolia. Here he first met the boy who would be become known as the Diluv Khutagt. The budding Diluv Khutagt and his family were then probably living near Khairkhan Uul in what is now Zavkhan Aimag. In this area were born the “Nine Famous Khutagts” now honored with ovoos in Uliastai. Decades later, when he was living in the United States, the Diluv Khutagt would write:

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 leadng 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.

The Diluv Khutagt claims this happened in 1889, but he was recalling from memory events which had happened some sixty years earlier and no doubt was mistaken about the date. All other sources maintain Dambijantsan first appeared in Mongolia in 1890.

In any case, here in western Mongolia he launched into his by-now practiced line that he was the descendant of Amarsanaa (most accounts say grandson, but as mentioned, it was more likely he claimed to be the great-great-grandson of the Khoit chieftain) who had returned to free the Mongols from the Qing yoke. The charismatic badarchin and his anti-Chinese propaganda very quickly caught the attention of officials in Uliastai, the Qing military headquarters in western Mongolia.

Mongolia | Life & Death of the False Lama #12

I have already written about Amarsanaa’s Rise to Power and the deteriorating situation in Khalkh Mongolia. Events soon turned for the worse. The country had been stripped of the able-bodied men who had been sent to fight in Zungaria and impoverished by the huge amounts of horses, meat, butter and other supplies that had been requisitioned for the Qing armies. Then in the winter of 1755–56 disastrous zuds, winter ice and snow storms which prevent livestock from grazing, had hit, impoverishing many herdsmen, and on top of this a small-pox epidemic had broken out. Morale was at an all-time low when word came that in Zungaria Amarsanaa had raised the banner of revolt against the Qing Dynasty. Disaffected elements among the Khalkh Mongols soon followed his example.

Amarsanaa had apparently laid the groundwork for this uprising while in Mongolia helping to organize the Northern Route Army, further evidence that he had planned in advance to defect from his Qing overlords once Davatsi had been defeated. He had met with Khan Chingünjav and a nobleman named Rinchindorj and attempted to coordinate uprisings against the Qing in both Zungaria and Khalkh Mongolia. The Khalkh side of the plot was soon exposed and orders were issued for the arrest of the conspirators. Chingünjav escaped but several others were seized. The rebels were taken to Beijing where they were tortured and then publicly executed. To further drive his point home, Qianlong had both the Second Bogd Gegeen and the Tüsheet Khan brought to Beijing to witness the executions. The Second Bogd Gegeen (1724–1757), son of Dondovdorj, himself the son of Zanabazar’s nephew, was forced to watch his own brother die at the hand of Qing executioners.

Qianlong had meant to impress upon the Mongolians the price to be paid for rebellion against the Qing and thus ensure their good behavior, but his actions had an entirely opposite effect. Word of the executions soon reached Mongolia, along with the rumor that the Qing intended to imprison the Bogd Gegeen in China, and in response still more insurrections broke out. Qianlong had to dispatch the Bogd Gegeen and the Tüsheet Khan back to Mongolia with orders that they to quell the disturbances, but already events had overtaken them.

In the summer of 1756 Chingünjav sent a letter to Qianlong formally renouncing his allegiance to the Qing Dynasty. With a initial army of about 2,000 men he set up headquarters near Lake Khövsgöl, near the Russian border in what is now Khövsgöl Aimag, and from there appealed to other Mongols khans to join his revolt. He also sought aid the Russians, apparently promising to switch allegiance from the Qing Dynasty to the Russian Czar in exchange for help in ousting the Qing from Mongolia. Initially there were uprisings all over Mongolia and numerous Qing outposts and post stations were overrun. Flush with early successes Chingünjav attempted to organize a convocation of Mongol noblemen in Örgöö where Mongolian independence would be declared. But soon the reality of what they were doing began to sink in, and many noblemen got cold feet. The Qianlong emperor was still capable of sending enormous armies, now equipped with muskets and cannon, to Mongolia to put down the insurrectionists, and many nobleman had become quite comfortable with the perks they were receiving from the Qing government.

Most crucially, the Second Bogd Gegeen refused to support the insurrection. To isolate even further the Bogd Gegeen from the rebels a detachment of Qing troops put him under virtual house arrest. As Russian diplomat who was negotiating with the rebels at the time put it, “Where the Jebsundamba Khutukhtu is, there is Mongolia, and where Mongolia is, there, too, is the Jebsundamba Khutukhtu.” Without the support of the Bogd Gegeen the revolt was doomed.

Malcontent Mongols at the time may have muttered, “Of course the Bogd Gegeen supports the Qing; his mother was a Manchu.” The Manchus were of course the founders of the Qing Dynasty, and the grumblers would have been referring to Khichenguy Amarlinguy, a.k.a. The Peaceful Princess, who according to some accounts was the Manchu Emperor Kangxi’s own daughter (he had a lot and it was not doubt hard to keep track) and thus Qianglong’s great-aunt, or according to other versions a daughter of a first degree Qing prince. It can be said for sure that she was Qing nobility. The dates are muddled, but apparently Kangxi gave Khichenguy Amarlinguy in marriage to Zanabazar’s nephew Dondovdorj in 1697.

Dondovdorj became the Tüsheet Khan upon the death of his father Chakhuundorj, Zanabazar’s brother. He was a gay-blade who liked women and booze and even wrote poetry, perhaps a suitable occupation for a scribbling hanger-on in an khan’s entourage but hardly suitable for a khan himself. After various indiscretions involving the wives of other Mongolian noblemen—there is no word of scraps with other poets—he was finally forced to step down as Tüsheet Khan, yielding the throne to a relative. But he was not without his martial qualities and he went on to distinguish himself on the battlefield against the Zungarian Mongols lead by Galdan Bolshigt’s nephew Tsevan Ravdan. When Kangxi died in 1722 Zanabazar traveled from Mongolia to Beijing to pay his respects. In his entourage was Dondovdorj, his earlier indiscretions forgiven or forgotten.

While in Beijing, Zanabazar, divining which way the wind was blowing in post-Kangxi China and sensing his own mortality, issued some instructions on how to find his reincarnation. Dondovdorj should take as a wife, Zanabazar hinted, a Mongolian woman born in the year of the monkey or chicken and have a son by her. The boy would be the 17th incarnation of Javzandamba, just as Zanabazar was the 16th.

Dondovdorj rushed straight back to Mongolia, apparently with Khichenguy Amarlinguy in tow (and perhaps with another Manchu wife he had picked up on this trip) and married a Mongolian woman named Tsagaan-Dara-Bayartu who had been born in the year of the monkey. Zanabazar died under cloudy circumstances in Beijing in 1723. In 1724, “at daybreak on the first day of the middle of the spring moon in the Wood Dragon Year” a son was born to Dondovdorj. This boy, Luvsundandidomne, became the Second Bogd Gegeen.

Most sources say Dondovdorj’s Mongolian wife Tsagaan-Dara-Bayartu was the mother of the Second Bogd Gegeen. Yet there are legends which persist down to this day that the boy’s mother was in fact Khichenguy Amarlinguy. There are any number of variants to this tale, but one maintains that both Khichenguy Amarlinguy and Tsagaan-Dara-Bayartu had a baby around this time and that the babies were switched in their cradles so that the Manchu princess’s baby could be recognized as Bogd Gegeen. A thangka now in the Zanabazar Art Museum in Ulaan Baatar shows a woman who some monks identify as Khichenguy Amarlinguy holding the baby Bogd. This thangka, they now claim, was produced to memorialize the true story of the Bogd Gegeen’s antecedents.

In any case, Khichenguy Amarlinguy came to love her adopted country. She considered herself a Mongolian and stated that he want to be buried in Mongolia: “It is not necessary to take my corpse back to China. I became a Mongol person because of being the wife of a Mongol. It is thus necessary to bury me in Mongolia.” Her wishes were honored and after she died a temple to house her remains was built near the headwaters of a tributary of the Terelj River about thirty-six miles north of Ulaan Baatar. In the mid-nineteen thirties her tomb was dug up by thieves looking for gold statues and other valuables believed to be buried with her. Her body was burned and the exposed ashes eventually blew away. The temple, known as Günjin Süm, or the Temple of the Peaceful Princess, was heavily damaged, but the ruins have became a popular pilgrim and tourist destination.

With support among the Mongol nobility having faded away, and the Bogd Gegeen uncooperative, Chingünjav’s revolt failed and he himself attempted to escape to Russia. North of Lake Khövsgöl he and his party stopped to camp, believing they were safely across Russian border A detachment of Qing troops caught up with the party early in January of 1757 and claiming that they was still on Mongolian territory seized Chingünjav and his sons. They were taken to Beijing and subjected to torture. According to legends now retold in Mongolia, large coins with a square hole in the middle were heated until they were red-hot and then placed on Chingünjav’s back. When his seared flesh rose up through the holes in the coins it was slashed off with a razor. After these excruciating tortures he was executed in March 2, 1757.

Monument erected by Chingünjav in the Khoogiin River Valley, Khövsgöl Aimag. The exact purpose of this monument is unknown.

Chingünjav remains a hero to this day among many Mongolians for his for his ultimately quixotic stand against the Qing. At least he had stood up to the oppressors, unlike other Mongolian noblemen who were more interested in saving their Qing-granted titles and perquisites. When I was researching my book on Zanabazar, the first Bogd Gegeen of Mongolia, I was told by numerous informants that Galdan Bolshigt, the Oirat, and Chingünjav, the Khalkh, were true warriors who had fought for Mongolia while others, for instance Zanabazar himself and his relative the Second Bogd Gegeen, were wimps who had only caved in to the Qing.

A monument north of Lake Khövsgöl now marks the spot where Chingünjav was arrested. The monument is now on Mongolian territory, but local people still claim that back then it was Russian territory and thus Chingünjav had been illegally seized. There is also now a street in Ulaan Baatar named after Chingünjav. But while Galdan Bolshigt has had a brand of vodka named after him—the ultimate accolade in modern-day Mongolia—to my knowledge Chingünjav has not yet been accorded this honor.

As for the Second Bogd Gegeen, he died in late 1757 at the age of thirty-three, apparently while still under house arrest. Although in the final showdown he had sided with the Qing, or at the very least simply refused to encourage the insurrectionists, he may still have incurred the displeasure of Qianlong. There are persistence rumors that he was assassinated by Qianlong’s order. Maybe Qianlong got the idea from his father Yongzheng, who according to legend had Zanabazar, the First Bogd Gegeen, assassinated at the Yellow Temple in Beijing in 1723. In case Qianlong’s displeasure with the Second Bogd Gegeen would have lasting consequences. Not wanting any more Mongolian Bogd Gegeens becoming possible rallying points for Mongolian rebels, he declared that henceforth all incarnations of Javsandamba must be found not in Mongolia but in Tibet. All subsequent Bogd Gegeens, including the current one, now living in India, have been Tibetans.

While he was putting down the rebels in Mongolia Qianlong had by no means ignored the situation in Zungaria. By November of 1756 he had amassed an immense army of some 400,000 men and sent it west to finally, at long last, once and for all, deal with the incurably rebellious Amarsanaa and the Zungarians. He had also found an unlikely ally in his battle against the Zungarians—Kelsang Gyatso, the Seventh Dalai Lama of Tibet. According to one historian, “[Qianlong] asked him to use his religious influence among the Oirats to rouse them to the Chinese cause and to forsake Amarsanaa. This the Dalai Lama willingly did. He asked the Oirats to stay loyal to the Chinese as part of their religious duties.” This was quite a turnaround from the days of the 5th Dalai Lama, who had been put on the throne of Tibet by the Oirat chieftain Güüsh Khan, and who had whole-heartedly backed his one-time disciple Galdan Bolshigt, ruler of the Zungarian Empire (it was the Great 5th, it will be remembered who gave Galdan his title of Bolshigt, or Khan by Divine Grace). First the Second Bogd Gegeen had refused to back the Khalkh rebels against the Qing, and now the Dalai Lama was throwing his support to the Qing against the Zungarians. Those who were reading the tea leaves of Inner Asian destiny must have divined that the days of independent Mongol states were very quickly coming to an end.

The huge Qing army had no trouble seizing Ili and had soon subduing most of the Oirats, except of course for Amarsanaa. With a mere 2500 soldiers he left made a last-ditch stand against a detachment of the Qing soldiers, holding them at bay for seventeen days. Then around the end of June the ever-elusive Amarsanaa simply disappeared. Not until November 1st of 1757 did the Qing authorities find out that he had absconded to Russia.

It turned out that after disappearing from Zungaria Amarsanaa had fled west with about of 4000 followers, many of them woman and children. His father-in-law and erstwhile protector Sultan Ablai of the Kazakh Middle Horde had himself just recognized the authority of the Qing Dynasty and was under strict orders not to aide Amarsanaa. He could expect to find no quarter there. Instead he fled to Russia, where he sought asylum at the fortress of Semipalatsinsk. The Czar himself, not wanting any trouble with the Qing, declared that Amarsanaa could stay in Russia only if he settled in Kalymkia, far to the west, and agreed not to mount any further campaigns in Zungaria. But then Amarsanaa fell ill to small pox, the scourge of the nomads. He was transferred to Tobolsk, in western Siberia, and there the great warrior transmigrated on September 21, 1757, finally laid low not by the might of the Qing Empire but by a virus. He was only thirty-five at the time, but no one could say that his short life had been uneventful. He had stood up time and time again to the greatest power in East Asia and in the end had eluded capture. He would never be paraded as a prisoner before the jeering throngs in Beijing like Davatsi, or tortured to death like Chingünjav. He would became a fitting exemplar for Dambijantsan, the Dörböt from the Caspian Steppe who had his own grudge against the Qing.

Earlier, the Russians had misled Qing officials about Amarsanaa’s whereabouts, claiming that while escaping from Zungaria he had drown trying to cross the Irtysh River. The river was diligently dredged for a month but no body was found. Finally apprized of Amarsanaa’s death in Russia, Qianlong demanded that the Russian officials return his body to China so that he could make sure the surly insurgent was truly dead. “The state only needs to capture Amursana. When he has died, and his body is retrieved, the entire Zunghar affair can be called a success,” pronounced Qianlong. The Russians, who did not want to be seen as caving in to Qianlong’s demands, refused to hand other the body. Instead they offered to take it to Selenginsk, in Siberia, just north of the Russian-Mongolian border, and allow Qing officials to examine it there. Qianlong became virtually unhinged by his failure to get his hands on Amarsanaa alive or dead. Throwing a furious fit, he halted all trade between China and Russia through Mongolia and even threatened to send an army north into Siberia to smote the insolent Russians. This threat was taken quite seriously. A fortress wall was built on the exposed side of Irkutsk, then the capital of Eastern Siberia, located at the confluence of the Irkutsk and Angara rivers below Lake Baikal, in anticipation of a Qing attack. The wall is long gone, but its former path is now taken by one of Irkutsk’s main streets. By March of 1758 Qianlong had cooled down. The more diplomatic-minded members of his court finally arranged for a delegation of Manchus, Chinese, and Mongols to go to Selenginsk and examine the body. They determined that is was indeed the earthly coil of Amarsanaa. The question of Amarsanaa was settled, but the Oirats of Zungaria who had revolted time and time again against the Qing were just beginning to receive their chastisement.

Qianlong’s retaliation against the Oirats was an early precursor to what is now called ethnic cleansing. For two years Qing soldiers tracked down Oirat men, women, and child and killed them, burned all gers they found, and seized Oirat livestock. Figures vary, but according to some sources from 500,00 to 600,000 people died in this holocaust. Some may have succumbed to illnesses like small pox which swept through the decimated population. Others managed to escape to Russia, where they were granted asylum. Again figures vary, but in the end maybe ten percent of the original Oirat population survived in Zungaria after the onslaught. One historian puts it succinctly, “As a political entity the Zunghar khanate went out of existence forever.”

Huge swaths of Inner Asia steppe had been depopulated by the decimation of the Zungarian people. Some areas were given to faithful Qing subjects from Mongolia and Manchuria. Ironically, many of the Kalmyks who took part in the Great Exodus of 1771 from the Caspian Steppe back to China also ended up on the lands vacated by the extermination of their relatives, the Oirats.

Although Amarsanaa may have lived on in the minds of many of the surviving Oirats as a hero he was eventually portrayed as an arch-villain even among Eastern Mongols, some of whom had for a brief moment in time joined up with him in revolt against the Qing. Dharmatala, the Mongolian author of the above-mentioned Rosary of White Lotuses, first published in 1889, refers to Amarsanaa a “man of evil.” Although a Mongolian, Dharmatala was loyal to the Qing Dynasty—or at least was not going to say anything bad about the Qing in print—which then ruled Mongolia, and could be expected to take the Qing line regarding the Oirats. Thus he was just echoing Qianlong on Amarsanaa. According to Dharmatala, in his Rosary of White Lotuses, the emperor had proclaimed:

There will be no more disturbances in this land [Zungaria], and all its nobles and commoners are to remember to keep the path of peace. The deeds of that evil man [Amarsanaa] destroyed the kingdom and made it desolate. If even his bare name be mentioned—him who caused so much harm to so many—it will bring no good, and therefore his name is not to be uttered ever again.

Not content with just degrading Amarsanaa, Dharmatala assigns mystical powers to Qianlong:
In the old days there were no rains in Hothon [roughly the old territory of Zungarians, especially the Zungarian Basin], but after the Emperor [Qianlong] entered the country he issued the following order to the Nagas:

“From now on, all the rains, storms, thunders etc. [in Zungaria] must follow the patterns of my own country!” Thus the land became indistingable from China; the whole Hothon resounded in fear and wonder!

Nagas, it should be pointed out, are serpent-like being who in Buddhist mythology rule the underworld and watery realms, thus influencing the weather. Thus Qianlong had come to rule not only the territory of Hothon—Zungaria—but also the realms of mythical beings! And twenty-first century travelers to China’s western-most province of Xinjiang, part of which is made up of Dharmatala’s “Hothon,” might well agree that it is now largely indistinguishable from the rest of China.

A whole welter of myth later grew up around Amarsanaa and his exploits. Indeed, some suggested that he had never in fact died, but had somehow discovered the secret of immortality and was living in a cave in Russia waiting for the right moment to return and lead a new struggle for Mongolian independence. He had also been granted magical powers. Using the traditional abilities of Oirat shamans, he could call down rain and snow storms to impede his enemies and summon a rainbow to hang his deel and other gear on. Buddhists believed he was an incarnation of Mahakala, the fierce warrior Bodhisattva. He himself had supposedly prophesied that he would return to Zungaria in 120 years to avenge the destruction of the Zungarians. According to this prophesy, ten years before his return “water would flow in the deserts northeast of Khobdo [Khovd], and grass and trees would return. Four years before his return, a light gray horse would appear that would ride around the region and lead the Oirat people away.”

Amarsanaa himself did not reappear 120 years after he left, but In 1890, 133 years after his death, Dambijantsan did materialize in Zungaria claiming to be his descendant, and in 1911, 154 years after Amarsanaa’s death, Dambijantsan Would Suddenly Appear in Khovd, where he would lead many Oirats into his idealized realm, the basis for what he hoped would be a new Zungarian state.

Mongolia | The Life & Death of the False Lama #11

Earlier I elaborated on the Fall of Galdan Bolshigt.

With the elimination of Galdan Boshigt and the expulsion of the Zungarians from Khalkh Mongolia Zanabazar and his Khalkh followers were free to return to their homelands. The Zungarian state was by no means crushed however. His nephew Tsevang Ravdan (r. 1697–1627) quickly seized the reins of the Zungarian realm and rallied the Oirats of the Zungarian Basin to his banner. This new Zungarian state stretched from Hami in the east, on the current-day boundary of Xinjiang and Gansu, the Seven Rivers Region in the West, and including the old realms of Uighuristan, Kashgaria and the Ili Basin. Like so many Inner Asian chieftains before him Tsevang Ravdan set up his headquarters in the Ili River Valley, probably near Kulja.

The aging Kangxi emperor was for the moment content to consolidate his gains among the eastern Mongols in Khalkh Mongolia, the current-day country of Mongolia, and did not immediately take up the struggle against the Zungarians in the west. But his ultimate goal was to “exterminate (jiaome)” the Zungarians, to “wipe out the evil so as to have eternal peace.” In 1715 a Qing army moved beyond the western garrison city of Jiayuguan, at the Westernmost Extension of the Great Wall, and occupied Hami, then ruled by a Moslem beg. Moving on from Hami, the Qing generals hoped to set up a garrison at Barköl, on the northside of the Tian Shan, which could be used as a springboard for further advances into the Zungarian Basin. They also advanced along the southern flanks of the Tian Shan, and by 1718 had occupied Turpan, where the ruins of the Han and Tang dynasty cities of Gaochang and Jiaohe could be still be seen, reminders of former Chinese occupation of the area (major tourist attractions, they can be there today). The now emboldened generals envisioned marching on Ravdan’s headquarters in the Ili Basin far to the west, but for the time being were content to seize in Urumqi, a city just north of a major pass through the Tian Shan and the current-day capital of Xinjiang Province. And they were soon forced to abandon Urumqi and retreat back eastward.

This first attempt to wipe out the Zungarians and add their domains to the Qing Empire ended with the Kangxi emperor’s death in 1722. His son and successor, the Yongzheng emperor, was at first more interesting in consolidating his shaky hold on the throne than engaging in risky military adventures in far-off Zungaria. In 1724 he signed a peace treaty with Tsevang Ravdan which temporarily halted hostilities, and Tsevang Ravdan’s own death in 1727 resulted in another stalemate. His successor, Galdan Tsering (r. 1727–1745) soon fell out with the Yongzheng emperor. All other Mongols had capitulated to the Qing, Yongzheng pointed out to Galdan Tsering’s envoys, only the Zungarians refused to submit. His own father had defeated Galdan Bolshigt but had failed to bring the Zungarians to heel. As historian Frank Perdue points out:

the Qing goal of universal peace among humans led the Qing to endorse elimination of those humans who obstinately refused to knuckle under to the view. Humans who chose to resist the Qing terms remained human, but they had to pay the costs of their choice: “righteous extermination” (zhengjiao), designed to return the world to a rational order.

In the summer of 1729 two expeditionary forces, the West Route Army with 26,500 men and North Route army set out from Bejing with the ultimate goal of converging on the Zungarian headquarter in the Ili Valley. Not until 1731 did the West Route Army retake Urumqi, still 400 miles short of the Ili Valley. Meanwhile the North Route Army had proceeded to Khovd, in current-day Khovd Aimag in Mongolia, where they began construction of a fortress. In July of 1731 the Qing army numbered some 20,000 soldiers marched from Khovd westward towards the Zungarian Basin and the Ili River Valley beyond. The Zungarians had been tracking their advance, however, and prepared a surprise. At Khoton Lake, in current-day Bayan-Olgii Aimag, the Qing army was ambushed and nearly annihilated; only 2,000 survivors made it back to Khovd. The Qing general in charge of this debacle, Furdan, was then ordered to start construction of what was to be a huge fortress at Khovd. Intended to measure some 4.3 miles in circumference, with walls 16.5 feet high, the fortress was to eventually house a garrison of 16,000 men. Eventually this ambitious plan was abandoned, but a more modest fortress was established at Khovd. The reader should be alerted that in 1912, after the Qing Dynasty collapsed, Dambijantsan would play the leading role in Dislodging the Qing Holdouts here and demolishing the fortress.

Meanwhile the Western Route Army had been driven out of Urumqi by the Zungarians and chased the whole way back to Barkol. The news of this defeat coupling with the disaster at Kholon Lake thoroughly demoralized the not-too-stable-to-begin-with Yongzheng. He sued for peace and sent ministers to the Zungarians to negotiate a boundary between their two realms. Galdan Tsering wanted the border drawn along the western end the Khangai Mountains, which would have put most of modern-day western Mongolia, including Khovd, where the still extant ruins of the Khovd fortress are located, in the Zungarian sphere. Yongzheng favored the Mongol-Altai and Gov-Altai Mountains as the border, very roughly the current-day boundary between Mongolia and China. No agreement was reached, but Galdan Tsering dispatched a transmigrated before any further settlement could be reached. He alone had spent upward to 60 mllion taels of silver (2,280 tons) in his campaigns against the Zungarians and had failed to subdue or eliminate them. It would be left to his successor, the Qianlong emperor, to finally extinquish the Zungarian state and virtually exterminate the Zungarian people.

For the next fifteen years or so an uneasy peace reigned between the Qing and the Zungarians. In 1739 a truce was signed and formal trade relations agreed upon. Commerce soon thrived, with Inner Asian Moslems acting as middlemen in caravan traffic which revitalized the ancient Silk Road routes. But the lull in tensions did not lessen the basic antagonism between the two culture, as Frank Perdue points out,

Peace with the Zunghars did not genuinely soften Qing altitudes. The Qing regarded these barbarians as greedy, violent, and untrustworthy. The Qing believed, however, that the emperor’s grace would soften them to they would accommodate to imperial dominion. Barbarians by nature had ‘insatiable desire’ and ‘shameless greed’ but by controlling their actions and “cherishing’ them, the Qing could tame them. Tying the Zungar elites to the interior with trading links would make them less inclined to attack the frontier.

Galdan Tsering transmigrated in 1745. The ensuing succession struggles shattered whatever unity the Zungarians enjoyed among themselves and left the door open for Qing intervention. Out of the chaos which ensued would rise Amarsanaa, of whom Dambijantsan would eventually claim to be a descendant and/or an incarnation. All the various strands of Oirat-Zungarian history, including their struggles against the various Chinese dynasties down through the ages, would come together in Amarsanaa, only to be torn asunder when the Zungarian State was extinguished forever. For a brief moment in time Dambijantsan would try to reunite them in his own person.

Amarsanaa was a son of a Khoit nobleman. The Khoit were a minor tribe subordinate to the Dörböts (Dambijantsan’s tribe), themselves subordinate to the Zungars (or Choros), who under Khara Khula had claimed control over the Oirats as a whole. The rise of the Zungars to prominence in the Oirat confederation is one reason, as we have seen, that some Dörböts choose to emigrate to the Caspian Steppes, where they became part of the larger grouping known as Kalmyks. Thus by claiming to be an incarnation of Amarsanaa Dambijantsan was realigning himself with the Oirats who had remained behind in Inner Asia.

Amarsanaa mother’s was Boitalak, the daughter of Tsevang Ravdan, who as we have seen had became taishi (chieftain) of the Zungars after the death of his uncle Galdan Bolshigt in 1697. Boitalak had earlier, in 1714, married Danjung, the eldest son of Lazang Khan, himself the grandson of Güüsh Khan, who had put the Dalai Lama on the throne of Tibet in 1642. After Danjung was killed in Tibet around 1717, Boitalak married a taishi from the Khoit tribe and Amarsanaa, born in 1723, was the fruit of this coupling. The Qing emperor Qianlong would later maliciously suggest that Amarsanaa was conceived before Boitalak’s second marriage and thus being illegitimate could not himself claim to be taishi of the Khoits. Qianlong was certainly not an unbiased observer, and most historians have dismissed this slur.

Amarsanaa

Amarsanaa would have been twenty-two when Galdan Tseren, the ruler of the Zungarians, transmigrated in the early fall of 1745. In his will Galdan Tseren passed over his oldest son, nineteen year-old Lama Darja—who was considered illegitimate by some—and named his second son, fourteen year-old Tsewang Dorji Namjal as his successor. The boy soon revealed himself to be a notorious n’er-do-well. Damchø Gyatsho Dharmatala, in his Rosary of White Lotuses, Being a Clear Account of How the Precious Teachings of Buddha Appeared in the Great Hor Country, a monumental nineteenth-century history of Buddhism in Mongolia, states that Tsewang Dorji Namjal’s “favorite ways were to roam around in the villages, drinking chang [barley beer], seducing girls and indulging in carnal pleasures.” Even the staid, sober-minded author of that Tsewang Dorji Namjal’s entry in the encyclopedic Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period points out that he was “more interested in killing dogs than attending to affairs of state.” Finally fed up by his antics, in 1750 a group of noblemen led by his older brother Lama Darja seized him, put out his eyes, and sent him to Aksu, on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin in what is now Xinjiang, where he was held captive and eventually executed.

Lama Darja became the new Zungarian taishi. His new position was precarious; the Oirats nobles despised him because of his low birth—his mother had apparently been a commoner with whom Galdan Tseren had coupled with only briefly. Soon a plot was spawned to depose him and place his remaining younger brother, perhaps nine years old at the time, on the throne. Davatsi (a.k.a., Dawaci), the leader of the conspirators was the grandson of the famous—in Tibet notorious—Tseren Dondub, a general who under the command of Tsevang Ravdan invaded Tibet in 1717 and trashed numerous Red Hat (Nyingma) monasteries, including Dorje Drak and Mindroling. When I visited Dorje Drak, on the north side of the Tsangpo River, between Chitishö and Dranang, in 2003, the monks there were still grousing about this Oirat incursion, even though the monastery which had been rebuilt after its destruction by Tseren Dondub was in turn destroyed by the Red Guards in the late 1960s. The current monastery was rebuilt yet again after that.

The plots was soon revealed and Lama Darja and Davatsi came to blows. Davatsi was quickly defeated and with only about a dozen followers—among them Amarsanaa—fled westward to the Kazakh steppes, where they found refuge among the Kazakh Middle Horde led by Sultan Ablai. The Sultan, perceiving that a civil war between the two Zungarian factions would inevitably weaken the khanate, and thus be to the advantage of the Kazakhs, encouraged the two rebels, even giving Amarsanaa one of his daughters as a wife. The emboldened Amarsanaa soon snuck back to the Tarbagatai Mountain region north of Ili where his tribe the Khoit were living and managed to round up an army of a thousand men. This force, along with some Kazakh troops sent along by the Sultan to aid the rebellion, marched on Kulja, in the Ili River Valley, where Lama Darja was holed up, caught him by surprise, and on January 13, 1752, dispatched him to the Heavenly Fields. Lama Darja’s little brother, in whose name the banner of revolt had been raised, was now bypassed, and Davatsi himself—who was after all a direct descendant of great Baatar Khongtaiji, founder of the Zungarian State—assumed the title of taishi of the Zungars.

Davatsi, however, proved to “a drunken and incompetent ruler,” as one commentator has described him, and he and Amarsanaa soon fell out. There were rumors that Amarsanaa demanded that he and Davatsi divide the rule of the Zungarians between them, a proposal which Davatsi flatly rejected. Davatsi was the descendant of the great Baatar Khongtaiji; Amarsanaa the son of a minor Khoit nobleman. There was no question of them sharing power as equals. Very quickly the two became deadly enemies. In 1754 Amarsanaa, along with a following of some five thousand soldiers and 20,000 women and children, broke away from the Zungarians under Davatsi and fled to Khovd, in current-day western Mongolia, where as mentioned the Qing had established a fortress. Here he struck what one historian terms his “fateful Faustian bargain.” He now swore allegiance to the Qing emperor, just has Zanabazar had done in 1691. In return the Qing would assist him in seizing control of the Zungarian state and recognize him as sole ruler of the Zungarians, with the Qing as suzerains. Forgotten, as least for the time being, was the traditional enmity between the Zungarians and the Qing. It was the Qing under emperor Kangxi who of course had hounded to his death the greatest Zungarian khan of all, Galdan Bolshigt. In light of later events, it would appear that Amarsanaa was just biding his time, using the Qing for protection against Davatsi, until he could himself return to Zungaria and seize control of the khanate. For the moment however Amarsanaa played his role as a devoted Qing subject. With the ostensibly loyal Amarsanaa now in his pocket Qianlong saw at long last a way of finally ridding himself of the Zungars and extending the Qing empire westward into what is now the province of Xinjiang. He, the loyal grandson, would complete the task began by Kangxi and Yongzheng and finally subdue the Zungars, the last large group of nomads on China’s borders still maintaining their independence. Ironically, a Oirat, Amarsanaa, was the key to his plans.

To further solidify Amarsanaa’s new-found loyalty to the Qing the emperor Qianlong granted him and his followers land along the Orkhon River, in current day Övörkhangai Aimag, then invited him down to Beijing, where he was declared a prince of the first degree. Then in 1755 Qianlong appointed him as assistant commander of the so-called Northern Route Army, under the overall command of Bandi, an Eastern Mongol of Chingis Khan’s own Borjid clan who had held numerous important posts in the Qing administration. The army, which numbered about 100,000, was made up in large part of Khalkh Mongolians, and the Khalkh had to furnish most of the horses, food, and other supplies for the force. This was the army which would be sent to subdue the Zungarians. Thus Qianlong was using the Eastern Mongols to rid himself of the Western Mongols.

The Northern Route Army left Uliastai, then one of the Qing headquarters in Mongolia (capital of current-day Zavkhan Aimag), in March of 1755. Around the same time the Western Route Army, also numbering about 100,000 and under the command of General Yung-ch’ang, left from Barköl. The two armies linked up at Amarsanaa’s own base of Bortala (Mongolian bor = tan; tal = steppe), the grasslands ramping up from the Zungarian Basin to the eastern side of the the Borohogo Shan, in June of 1755. From there they crossed the Borohogo Shan and marched on Kulja in the Ili Basin, the headquarters of Davatsi. “They met little or no resistance and took Ili without fighting. Most Sungars [sic] simply surrendered,” concludes one historian. Davatsi and a band of followers fled southwest to Gedengshan, 110 miles from from Ili, where on July 2 they were finally cornered and defeated by Qing troops. Davatsi himself escaped over the Tian Shan Mountains and hid out for a while in Kashgar, on the western edge of the Tarim Basin. The Moslem beg of Kashgar, divining which way the wind was blowing and not wishing to alienate the Qing, seized Davatsi and turned him over to Amarsanaa in July of 1755.

That should have been the end of the Zungar taishi. Qianlong, however, realizing that he had a valuable pawn on his hands, had Davatsi brought to Beijing where he was ceremoniously paraded as a captive. Then Qianlong granted him a princedom of the first degree and a mansion in Kalgan (current-day Zhangjaikhou), on the edge Mongolian Plateau north of Beijing, to reside in. Despite his title and comfortable accommodations he was now of course totally powerless. Free to devote himself to his favorite pastime, drinking, he died four years later, in 1759, but his descendants were honored with the rank of hereditary prince of the fourth degree.

Qianlong, meanwhile, had ordered up special ceremonies in the Monasteries of Dolonnuur to celebrate his victory over the Zungarians. His elation was premature. Amarsanaa, it turned out, was not playing the role Qianlong had designed for him. Qianlong had insinuated that after Davatsi had been defeated each of the Oirat tribes would be allowing to live on their traditional lands under a ruler appointed by the Qing emperor. Amarsanaa, in reward for his part in defeating Davatsi, was appointed ruler of the Khoits, answerable of course to the Qing emperor. But now suddenly Amarsanaa revealed his much greater ambitions. Why should he now be satisfied with ruling only the Khoits, a minor tribe in the Oirat confederation? He had helped the Qing defeat the Zungars, who had previously been the dominant power among the Oirats of the Zungarian State, so why shouldn’t he be the new ruler of the all of the Oirat tribes, including the Zungars? Making no secret of his ambitions he told Bandi, the commander of the Northern Route, to inform Qianlong in Beijing that he demanded to be made overall khan of the Oirats. To make his point clear, he refused to use the official seal given him by Qianlong, and instead appropriated the seal of his father-in-law Galdan Tseren, the “the last officially recognized lead of all the Zunghars.” Apprized of Amarsanaa’s presumptuous demands, on August 20,1755 Qianlong ordered that be seized and brought to Beijing. Amarsanaa was taken into custody, but on September 24, 1755, he escaped first to the Irtysh River Valley and then to the Kazakh Steppes, where he sought refuge with his father-in-law Sultan Ablai.

Believing that the Zungarians had finally been conquered, and that Amarsanaa himself, in exile in the Kazakh steppe, no longer posed a threat, Qianlong ordered most of the 200,000-man Qing army, which was costing a fortune to maintain in Zungaria, back to China, leaving only a small detachment with General Bandi. But Qianlong had seriously under-estimated Amarsanaa’s resilience. From his bolt hole in the Kazakh steppe he snuck back into Zungaria, rallied the Oirat princes to his side, and incited a general rebellion. The small Qing detachment left behind in Zungaria proved to be no match for the newly reunited Oirats under Amarsanaa. On October 4, 1755, acknowledging his hopeless position, Bandi, commander of the Qing troops, committed suicide. Amarsanaa took control of Ili and laid claim to all of Zungaria. Very quickly he had realized his dream of being the independent ruler of the Oirats. On February 17, 1756 his followers named him the new Zungarian Khan. By late 1756 he had managed to retake Ili. Qianlong must have been beside himself; twice he thought the Zungarians had been defeated; and each time they had managed to regroup and defy Qing authority. And now not only was Zungaria in revolt, but Mongolians in Mongolia itself, Qing territory since 1691, were now opening opposing the Qing . . .