China | Beijing | Imperial College

From the Confucius Temple I passed through an archway into the Gui Zi Jian (Imperial College) complex, located just to the west. The Gui Zi Jian was created by Khölög Khan (1281–1311), who in 1308 had been named Mongol Yuan Emperor Wuzong at the old Mongol capital of Shangdu near Dolonnuur in what is now the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia.

Khölög Khan, a.k.a. Emperor Wuzong

The same year he established the Gui Zi Jian right next door to the Confucius Temple founded by his predecessor, the Mongol Yuan Emperor Chengzong. The whole complex covers 28,000 square meters, or almost seven acres. It would become the highest ranking educational institution in China during the Yuan Dynasty and remained so during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Now it is the oldest educational institution in China which has been preserved intact.

Gateway to the Gui Zi Jian
Building in the Imperial College

Building in the Imperial College

Like the Confucius Temple, the Gui Zi Jian contains numerous trees planted in the fourteenth century, during the Yuan Dynasty. Here they are known as Chinese Scholar Trees. This one was later given the name Luo Guo Huai (Hunchback) by the Qing emperor Qianlong, who said that it resembled one of his advisers, a hunchback himself.

Tree named Luo Guo Huai

This Chinese Scholar Tree was planted by Xu Heng, the president of Guo Zi Jian for a time during the Yuan Dynasty. It flourished for a while and then withered and appeared to have died. Then in 1751, in the Qing Dynasty, the tree suddenly sprang back to life during the celebration of the 6oth birthday of the mother of the Qianlong emperor, which was considered auspicous. It was given the name Fu Su Huai, meaning “Coming back to Life.” Now the main trunk is propped up with a metal support but overall the tree appears fairly healthy.

Tree named Fu Su Huai

Entrance to the Scholars’ Courtyard

Statues of Scholars in the Scholars’ Courtyard

Statues of Scholars in the Scholars’ Courtyard

Statues of Scholars in the Scholars’ Courtyard

Vegetarian restaurant just outside the entrance to the Imperial College. From the assortment of the luxury sedans parked out front this appeared to be a pretty up-scale place. I did not go in.

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.

China | Beijing | Silk Street Market | Carpets

From Maliandao Tea Street I scarpered over to the notorious Silk Street Market. This is a landmark in Beijing; it used to be an open air market but has now been moved into a large department store-style building. There are reportedly over 1700 shops in the complex and on an average weekday some 20,000 shoppers flood the place, with from 50,000 to 60,000 a day on weekends. The place is infamous for counterfeit brand-name goods and the world’s most aggressive sales people. The management of the complex has provided these helpful English Language guidelines for sales staff in the stores:

I really was not in the market for anything today but I have been coming here for years so I like to chat with the people in the shops where I have bought things before. Despite seeing tens of thousands of customers a week they always greet you like a long-lost friend. First I went to the fabric and tailor shop where I usually have my clothes made (it is impossible to buy my sizes off the shelf in China; difficult anywhere actually). It was nine o’clock on a Sunday morning and the boss of the place, a women in her fifties, was not there. When I asked one of the clerks about her she said, “She’s sleeping; when you are rich you get to sleep in.” I said I wasn’t buying anything, but had come to check out any new fabrics they had in stock. I spent an enjoyable hour lovingly caressing and fondling the heart-stoppingly elegant raw silks, luscious cashmeres, lovely satins, mind-bogglingly magnificent brocades, delectably soft cottons, and sumptuous linens, all the while chatting with the charming to say nothing of knowledgeable staff.

Delectable Fabrics and Lovely Staff

If this isn’t a sight to make your heart palpitate you better check to see if you have not already assumed room temperature.

The gracious Big Boss at the Fabrics Shop, absent on my latest visit.

From the fabric shop—actually one of probably a hundred fabric shops in the complex, a true fabric fondler’s Paradise—I mosied on over to one of the carpet shops I have frequented in the past. Here, as at the fabric shop, the boss—a Mr. Wen—was sleeping in but the eye-dazzling Ms. Chen was on the scene. I have bought carpets here before and Ms. Chen was of course thrilled to the core to see me again.

Here is a rug which I bought at this shop on an earlier visit to Beijing and which now adorns the pounded-earth floor of my hovel in Zaisan Tolgoi.

I told her I was just looking today, but she was more than happy to show me some of the new items they had in stock.

A breath-takingly gorgeous 8oo knot per-square-inch antique silk rug selling for 7500 yuan ($1098)

Another view of same luxuriously opulent carpet

Same magnificent carpet and the equally tantalizing Ms. Chen

Another mouth-wateringly luscious 600 knot per-square-inch antique (dating from the 1920s) silk carpet, this one selling for 2900 yuan ($425)

I did not buy any carpets today but promised the enchanting Ms. Chen I would be back to see her again soon.

Mongolia | Life & Death of the False Lama #8

Earlier I wrote about Dambijantsan’s Abrupt Departure from Drepung Monastery . . .

Later in life, when he was living in Mongolia, Dambijantsan regaled A. V. Burdukov with tales of his earlier travels, including sojourns in India. Maisky and Roerich also heard tell of these Indian travels. It is never quite clear when he went to India, but we might surmise that after killing his roommate he might have found it wise to remove himself to the Indian subcontinent and thereby escape severe punishment for the crime of murder from the monastic and perhaps civil authorities in Tibet. Dambijantsan, already deeply steeped in metaphysics and tantric teachings, would have found himself at home among the various yogis, fakirs, magicians, and itinerant savants of India, and would have ample opportunities for learning and expanding the wide variety of talents he would exhibit in later life. He would become legendary for his skills at hypnosis, clairvoyance, mind-reading, fortune telling and other arcane arts which were the stock and trade of India’s holy men. What talents he may have had in these areas would have been further honed during his stay on the subcontinent. By the early 1930s, almost a decade after his death, these Indian adventures had became an accepted part of his curriculum vitae. Henning Haslund at that time picked up the story circulating around the campfires of Mongolia that Dambijantsan “himself asserted that he acquired in India the supernatural qualities of the fakirs.” Beyond this we can add nothing about Dambijantsan’s alleged Indian interlude.

At some point in time in the early 1880s Dambijantsan may have gone back to Russia. In any event, he somehow managed to attach himself to the 1883–85 Inner Asian Expedition of Russian explorer and zoologist N. M. Przhevalsky (1839-1888). Przhevalsky’s earlier 1870–1873 expedition had been first serious Russian attempt to penetrate the maidenhead of virginal—at least from the Russian viewpoint—Tibet. On this first try he reached the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau and the vicinity of the headwaters of the Yangtze River before being forced to turn back. A later expedition in 1879-80, this one authorized by the Czar and backed up by a formidable detachment of armed-to-the-teeth Cossacks, got to within 150 miles of Lhasa before encountering a large contingent of the Tibetan army. In the ensuing stand-off Przhevalsky finally backed down. “Let someone else, a luckier traveler than me, proceed farther into Asia. I have done everything I could do and that was possible to do,” pouted the disheartened explorer. Russians, unlike the English a few decades later, were not yet ready to shoot their way into Lhasa.

Interestingly, upon his return to Russia Przhevalsky prepared a memorandum in which he proposed pushing the Russian border with Mongolia down to about the latitude of Örgöö, now Ulaan Baatar. Russian geographers, it seems, had opined that the mountains and mixed forest-steppe from the vicinity of Örgöö northward were really a continuation of Siberia, and thus based on landforms the border should run along the crest of Bogd Khan Uul (mountain) just south of Örgöö, beyond which lies the treeless steppe, desert steppe, and deserts of Mongolia proper. Thus Örgöö would then be in Russia. Przhevalsky had a religio-political motive for this proposal:

In future, should the English want to penetrate into Tibet from India, it is very likely that the Dalai Lama would move his residence to Urga, towards his most ardent believers there, the Mongols. Then, by, possessing Urga and patronizing the Dalai Lama, we would be able to influence the entire Buddhist world.

Przhevalsky was surprisingly prescient here. As already mentioned, in 1904 the English Younghusband Expedition did invade Tibet and the 13th Dalai Lama Did Flee to Örgöö. Of course Przhevalsky’s proposal to move the border south had not been taken serious and at the time Örgöö was still the capital of Mongolia and not a Russian city.

Przhevalsky’s 1883–1885 expedition started at Kyakhta, the entrepôt on the Russian-Mongolian border, proceeded south, presumably through Örgöö, to the Gobi Desert and then westward to the eastern spurs of the Tian Shan Mountains in Xinjiang. The expedition then veered off to the sources of Yangtze River and Qinghai Lake in modern-day Qinghai Province, China, continued on westwards to Khotan, on the southern edge of the Takhlimakan Desert, and finally northward to the huge lake of Issyk Kol in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. Thus the three-year-long expedition traversed a huge swatch of Inner Asia but did not enter Tibet proper.

In 1998 I made a pilgrimage to Przhevalsky’s Memorial Complex and Grave at the east end of Lake Issyk Kol in Kyrgyzstan.

Monument to N. M. Przhevalsky at the eastern end of Lake Issyk Kol

The Grave of N. M. Przhevalsky (1839-1888)

Dambijantsan reportedly accompanied the expedition as one of its eighteen armed escorts. At this time he was traveling under the Russian alias Irinchinov. A photograph of the escorts showing Dambijantsan at the far left is, according to one researcher, “the first pictorial record of the charismatic adventurer that can be traced hitherto.” Dambijantsan was already familiar with Inner Mongolia from his stay at Dolonuur, and assuming that he joined the expedition at its beginning in Khyakhta he now would have had ample opportunities to spy out the land of the Khalkh, the current-day country of Mongolia. At this time, however, he was just a hired-hand traveling under an alias and had not yet assumed the role of Ja Lama, the descendant/incarnation of Amursana come to free the Mongols from the yoke of the Manchus. Yet we may assume that the ambitious adventurer had his eyes wide open, and was even at this point plotting his dramatic reappearance in Mongolia as the leader of a liberation movement.

There are unsubstaniated rumors that Dambijantsan had earlier accompanied the expedition of Russian explorer Grigory Nikolayaevich Potanin (1836–1920), who traveled through western Mongolia in the years 1876–77, with stays in the towns of Khovd and Uliastai (Potanin Glacier, which flows off Khuiten Uul, the highest peak in Mongolia, in Bayan-Ölgii Aimag, is named after the Russian explorer). This claim is part of Dambijantsan lore repeated to this day in Khovd Aimag, although there does not appear to be any written documentation to support it. In any case, Khovd City and Uliastai would later play important roles in the Dambijantsan saga, and it is quite possible that he visited them before he assumed the role of Ja Lama.

While it is easy to imagine a gun-toting Dambijantsan as part of an armed escort on expeditions to the remote fastnesses of Inner Asia, it is a bit more difficult to picture him as a lawyer with a briefcase stalking the halls of a courthouse. Yet while in Mongolia in 1927 painter, mystic, and Shambhalist Nicholas Roerich, father of already mentioned George Roerich, would hear that Dambijantsan, “no ordinary bandit,” was ”a graduate of law from Petrograd University.” For a moment a vision rises before us of Dambijantsan, a Kalmyk Mongol from the sun-drenched Caspian Steppes, striding the cobblestone streets of Peter the Great’s gray, gloomy city by the Gulf of Finland. Irina Lomakina, Dambijantsan’s indefatigable Russian biographer, took the time to track down even this flimsy lead and came away with a different picture:

I couldn’t believe it at all [that Dambijantsan had studied law in St. Petersburg], so I decided to consult the historical archives of St. Petersburg, where the records of the university is stored, in order to check on whether this information was true or not. Fortunately, there was the card index of all the students who studied at that university before the revolution. I searched very carefully for any of the names which the Ja Lama may have used but didn’t find any. Moreover, I looked through all the personal files of students, entrance application forms, graduation certificates of the gymnasium, college graduation diplomas, exam papers, course papers, application forms for the higher education courses, etc. . . .

She found nothing and by the end must have seriously regretted Roerich’s off-hand comment about Dambijantsan’s studies in St. Petersburg. Thus whatever else Dambijantsan was guilty of in his long and storied life he cannot be accused of being a lawyer.

Dambijantsan himself claimed that he “served as one of the Ta Lamas or Heads of Department in the Chang-skya Khutughtu [Jangjya Khutagt) yamen at Peking, a learned ecclesiastical institution entrusted with the fixing of the calendar and other astronomical and metaphysical questions.” The Jangjya Khutagts were as we have seen incarnate lamas connected with the Monasteries in Dolonnuur where Dambijantsan may have studied as a boy. The fourth Jangjya Khutagt, who would have been alive at the time in question, was very seldom in attendance at Dolonnuur and lived almost full-time in Beijing.

The Songzhu Monastery in the old Imperial city was his full time residence in the capital. This ancient Chinese monastery, which specialized in printing sutras during the Ming Dynasty, was converted into a Tibetan monastery in 1712 by the Kangxi emperor. In 1724 it was given to Rölpé Dorjé, the second Jangjya Khutagt, and served as the residence of the subsequent Jangjya Khutagts. It did not appear, however, to have been a “learned ecclesiastical institution” of the kind where Dambijantsan supposedly served. The Yonghe Gong was the main academic monastery of Beijing, with various colleges that dealt with astronomy and calendar making, medicine, and various esoteric studies, and this may be the institution of which Dambijantsan made mention. Whether he was actually one of the Ta (or Da) Lamas there is another question altogether. Since the position would have acquired considerable academic credentials he could have held the post only after his studies at Drepung. But after his stay at Drepung he was wanted for murder in Tibet, and this would seem to preclude him from holding a high position in a Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhist institution in Beijing. Either officials in Beijing were unaware of his past, or he had just made up this episode about being a Da Lama in Beijing to further burnish his reputation after he began a famous man in Mongolia.

We have covered most everything known about the first three decades of Dambijantsan’s life. At the age of about thirty, Dambijantsan was, like Jesus at the same age, ready to begin his life in earnest. He was about to assume a new persona: the descendant of Amursana returning to the land of the Mongols in order to free them from their Qing oppressors. Up until now 1890 he had, in effect, been in training. Now he was ready to become the Ja Lama.

Mongolia | Life and Death of the False Lama #6

Earlier I wrote about the Exodus of the Kalmyks and how Dambijantsan’s tribe, the Dörböts, had been left behind in Kalmykia . . .

At the time Dambijantsan was born, at the beginning of the 1860s, Tibetan Buddhism, despite the continued pressure to convert the Kalmyks to Russian Orthodoxy, was still prevalent in Kalmykia, the land of the Kalmyks. In all likelihood Dambijantsan was born into a family which adhered to Buddhism to one degree or another. The first news we hear of him is that at the age of seven he was supposedly enrolled as a novice in a Buddhist monastery in Dolonnuur, in what is now the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. Maisky heard this story while in western Mongolia in 1919, when Dambijantsan was still alive. Dolonnuur was firmly in the orbit of the Eastern Mongols, the Chahar of Inner Mongolia and Khalkh of what was then considered Outer Mongolia, and at first glance it appears strange that a young Dörböt from the Volga River in Russia would have gravitated there. Kalmyks wishing to enter a monastery outside of Kalmykia, we would think, would have been more drawn to western China, including the modern-day provinces of Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Gansu, the traditional strongholds of the Torguts, Dörbots, and other Oirats, both those who not migrated westward in the early seventeenth century and those who had returned in the great exodus of 1771. Fred Adelman, in his introduction to Pozdneev’s Mongolia and Mongols makes precisely this objection, and John Gaunt in his doctoral thesis on Dambijantsan repeats it: “it would be unlikely to find a Volga Kalmuk at Doloon Nuur, as they were not oriented toward Inner Mongolia’s monastic net.”

The French scholar Isabelle Charleux, an expert on Inner Mongolian monasteries, offers a different interpretation: “There were many monks and students [at Dolonnuur] from all of the Mongol world, given the reputation of the Dolonnuur monasteries and their high reincarnated masters that attracted people from very far away . . . The Dolonnuur monasteries were not only connected with the Khalkh Mongols; but also with the Inner Mongolians of Alashan and Kholun Buir . . . Also the migrant population of the Chahar banners included many Oirat Mongols. If Dambijantsan’s parents were especially fond of the Dolonnuur monasteries—because they knew a lama there, because of the reputation of the monasteries, etc.—they would have sent their child there.”

A Russian researcher adds that Dambijantsan’s parents moved to Inner Mongolia “for all the usual reasons”—presumably they were traders—when he was a very small boy, which would explain how the seven-year old boy also ended up there. Therefore it is entirely possible that this entry into Dambijantsan’s curriculum vitae was not simply a later invention meant to burnish this reputation among the Khaklh Mongols but that he actually was enrolled as a monk at Dolonnuur at an early age. In any case, this is the last we hear of his parents.

Dolonnuur (doloon = seven, nuur = lake; Seven Lakes) is located in the grasslands (now suffering from increasing desertification) 210 miles north of Beijing, about fifty-two miles beyond the first major pass leading to the Mongolian Plateau.

Ovoo at the first pass on the Mongolian Plateau

Statue of Khubilai Khan at the first pass on the Mongolian Plateau

The area is much hallowed in Mongolian history. Fourteen miles from the current town of Dolonnuur is the site of Shangdu, originally established in 1256 as the headquarters of Chingis Khan’s grandson Khubilai. After Khubilai founded the Yüan Dynasty he made what is now Bejing the primary capital of his empire, but he retained Shangdu as his summer capital, where he and his court retired each year to escape the enervating heat of the North China Plain. Shangdu was destroyed in the so-called “Red Scarf Rebellion” of 1358, a precursor to the upheavals which led to the fall of the Yuan Dynasty in 1368 and the rise of the Ming Dynasty. Later the city became known to some as the Xiancheng, or Apparition City, since people claimed that at certain times the old city as it was in the days of Khubilai appeared suddenly before their eyes and then disappeared just as quickly, leaving only the ruins as we see them today. Shangdu is also remembered as the subject of Coleridge’s much celebrated poem "Xanadu”:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea . . .

Ruins of Khubilai’s Palace at Shangdu

The ruins are now a popular tourist attraction and the area still serves as a summer getaway, only now not for Mongol potentates but for Beijing’s middle classes. More important to our story, however, it was at nearby Dolonnuur that in 1691 a fateful meeting took place between the Kangxi emperor of China and Zanabazar, the First Bogd Gegeen of Mongolia and the nominal head of the Khalkh Mongols.

Tourist Camp near Shangdu

When we last left Khara Khula he was organizing the four tribes of the Oirat into the Oirat Confederation. He died in 1634 and his son Baatar-Hongtaiji assumed the throne. In 1635 the Dalai Lama officially recognized Baatar-Hongtaiji as the leader of the Oirats and gave him the title of Yerdyen. By 1640 Baatar-Hongtaiji’s realm become known as the Zungarian Khanate. The name derives from the Mongol zuun gar, “left hand“, or “eastern side;”; although the Oirats dwelt in the western end of the lands inhabited by Mongol peoples, the Choros tribe to which Khara Khula and Baatar-Hongtaiji belonged was the easternmost of the Oirat confederation and thus on the “left hand“ looking southward, as the Mongols always oriented themselves.

Following a long internecine struggle between Baatar-Hongtaiji’s offspring, replete with fratricide and rivers of blood, Galdan, probably the youngest of his eleven or so sons, seized the reins of the Zungarian Khanate. Under Galdan the Zungarian Khanate eventually encompassed a huge swath of Inner Asia, including the western edge of current-day Mongolia, the current-day Chinese province of Xinjiang, including the Silk Road cities of Hami, Turpan, and Kashgar, the legendary cities of Bukhara of Samarkand in what is now Uzbekistan, and the eastern part of current-day Kazakhstan. Although little remembered today, during Galdan’s reign the Zungarian Khanate was a formidable adversary of both Czarist Russia and Qing-Dynasty China.

Galdan would become one of the role models of Dambijantsan, and we will return for a more detailed examination of his career in good time. Suffice it to say here that in 1688 Galdan, hoping to add the territory of the Khalkh Mongols to the Zungarian Empire, invaded what is now the country of Mongolia. Meeting little opposition from the disorganized Khalkh, his army first trashed the great monastery of Erdene Zuu, built on site of the old Mongol capital of Kharkhorum, and the Monastery at Khögno Khan Uul (now known as Khögnö Taryn Khiid), just to the east. Advancing farther eastward, Galdan’s men then demolished Saridgiin Khiid, located in the Khentii Mountains north of Ulaan Baatar, the monastery which had been established by Zanabazar himself and intended to be the center of Buddhism in Mongolia. Zanabazar, his brother Chakhuundorj the Tüsheet khan, the leaders of the other Khalkh khanates, and, according to one source, at least 30,000 of their followers fled southeastward before the advance of Galdan’s troops, eventually reaching the edge of the Mongolian Plateau near Dolonnuur, land of the Chahar Mongols, who had already accepted the authority of the Qing Dynasty. Here the Khalkh Mongols, by now almost destitute, threw themselves at mercy of the Qing emperor Kangxi.

Dolonnuur was at that time already an important monastic center, with no less then twelve incarnate lamas in residence. The town, strategically located at the edge of the Mongolian plateau, was also a busy Chinese-Mongolian entrepôt. Because of deposits of copper ore nearby it became a center of mining and smelting, and its factories were well-known for their weapons, and later its workshops became better known for the bronze Buddhist Artwork of the Dolonnuur School.

Dolonnuur School White Tara in the Bogd Khan Winter Palace Museum

The Kangxi emperor, apprized of the arrival of the Khalkh Mongols in his domains, decided to meet with their leaders and if possible bring them into the fold of the Qing Dynasty. He left Beijing on May 9, 1691 and made his leisurely way north, stopping to do a spot of hunting on the way. From May 29 to June 3 Kangxi finally meet with Zanabazar and the other Khalkh leaders in Dolonnuur. A great banquet was followed by a display of Qing might in the form of cannons, newly acquired from Jesuits in Bejing, the firing of which caused the Mongols “to tremble with fear and admiration,” at least according to Qing sources. The upshot of all this was that in exchange for protection from the forces of Galdan Bolshigt and a promise from Kangxi to restore to the Khalkh their lost lands in Mongolia, Zanabazar accepted the suzerainty of the Qing Dynasty, in effect making Mongolia a province of China. The country which Chingis Khan and his sons had conquered and his grandson Khubilai had once ruled as the first emperor of the Mongol Yüan Dynasty now dominated Mongolia. Mongolia would remain under Chinese control until 1911, when the Qing Dynasty fell. Those 220 years of subjugation by the Qing Empire are seen by some as a direct consequence of Zanabazar’s capitulation to Kangxi, and as a result many Mongolians resent him to this day. Dambijantsan himself would devote the greater part of his life to undoing what Zanabazar had done and restoring the independence of Mongolia.

But that was all in the future. In 1691, In honor of his meeting with Zanabazar and the capitulation of the Mongols, Kangxi ordered the construction of what would become the Khökh Süm, or Blue Temple. (One prominent Mongolian incarnation, the Kanjurwa Khutagt [1914–1980], maintains that on the contrary Mongol nobles built the temple in honor of Kangxi, a telling interpretation of events from a Mongol viewpoint)

Front of the Khökh Süm, which is currently being restored

The Khökh Süm was completed around 1700 and it eventually began the center of a sizable monastery. About a half mile away, the Shar Süm, or Yellow Temple, was built between 1729 and 1731 and it too became the foundation of a monastery.

Ruins of the Shar Süm

Ruins of the Shar Süm

Both monasteries were overseen by a line of incarnate lamas known as the Jangjya Khutagts. Sedendonub, the first Jangjya Khutagt, was instructed by Kangxi himself to “spend the chilly wintertime in Peking and in the summertime heat govern here and the direct the local clergy.” The Jangjya Khutagts maintained residences at both the Blue Temple and and the Yellow Temple.

The Jangjya Khutagt’s residence at the Khökh Süm

Side buildings at the Jangjya Khutagt’s residence at the Khökh Süm

The second Jangjya Khutagt, Rölpé Dorjé, was described by one scholar as “an intimate of the Qianlong emperor and thus perhaps the most powerful Tibetan hierarch in the Qing Empire.” Dolonnuur’s importance as a monastic center was underlined by the fact that the Third Panchen Lama visited here during his trip to China in 1780. The Panchen Lamas along with the Dalai Lamas were the highest ranking incarnate lamas in Tibet. The Panchen Lama arrived in Dolonnuur on the 20th day of the 6th month, and according to hagiographic Tibetan accounts was greeted by one million people, although this is almost certainly an exaggeration. In any case, while in Dolonnuur the Panchen Lama reportedly “performed a purification ritual that pacified the restless demons of Mongolia.” He also gave a Yamantaka initiation to the Jangjya Khutagt and read prayers dedicated to the sacred land of Shambhala, a realm about which he had already written a guidebook entitled Shambhala Lamyig.

From Dolonnuur the Panchen Lama proceeded to the Qing Summer Resort at Jehol where he was amazed to discover not only a Huge Replica of the Potala in Lhasa, already alluded to, but also a replica of his own Tashilhunpo Monastery in Shigatse. This complex of temples and facades, known as the Xumifoushou Miao (Happiness and Longevity Temple of Mt. Sumeru) was hurriedly constructed in 1779 and early 1780 by order of the Qianlong emperor. In front of it he had placed yet another stele declaring that the complex had been built to provide the Panchen Lama with “a restful place for meditation.” The Xumifoushou Miao too is now a major tourist attraction. Unfortunately, the Panchen Lama never returned to Tibet from this trip. From Jehol he proceeded Beijing to where he contracted small pox and died in late November of 1780.

The Russian ethnographer A. M. Podzneev visited Dolonuur in 1893. By then the monastic center seems to have lost some of its luster. The Yellow Temple had some 400 monks and the Khökh Temple some 500, not a lot compared to monasteries in Lhasa in Tibet and Örgöö (now Ulaan Baatar] in Mongolia. The fourth Jangjya Khutagt, who died in 1891, spent most of his life in Beijing and had not visited Dolonnuur in fifty years. Pozdneev was by that time a very seasoned traveler in Mongolia and China but even he was shocked by conditions in Dolonnuur: “It would be hard to imagine anything dirtier and in greater disarray than Doloon Nuur’s street and alleys. The street in all Chinese cities are normally narrow and dirty, but here they are even narrower and dirtier . . . In the rainy season these ditches used as thoroughfares are so full of water and mud that some of the streets become iiterally impassable.”

Presumably this is more-or-less the same Dolonnuur Dambijantsan would have experienced in the late 1860s when he arrived there at the age of seven and became a novice monk.

The streets of Dolonnuur are in better shape today

China | Beijing | Yonghegong

As I mentioned in a previous post there is supposed to be a Shambhala Thangka in the collection of the Yonghegong, or Lama Temple in Beijing. The last time I had been there it was not out on public display, but I decided to pop in again anyhow on the outside chance that it could now be seen.

Yonghegong is the biggest surviving Buddhist temple in Beijing. Completed in 1694, it originally served as the residence of Qing Emperor Kangxi’s son Yong Zheng. In 1725, shortly after Yong Zheng became emperor, he upgraded the complex and gave it the name Yonghegong, meaning “Harmony and Peace Palace.” It was Yong Zheng who some believe ordered the assassination of Zanabazar, the First Bogd Gegeen of Mongolia in 1723. In any event, Zanabazar died that year in the Yellow Temple in Beijing. Whatever his role in Zanabazar’s death, Yong Zheng, following the instructions of his father Kangxi, built Amarbayasgalant Monastery in northern Mongolia to hold Zanabazar’s remains.

Stele in the front courtyard recounting the history of Yonghegong in Mongolian and Chinese

In 1744 Yong Zheng’s successor Qian Long turned the complex into a monastery, and along with the Yellow Temple it became an outpost of Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhism in Beijing. It survived the Cultural Revolution (1966-1977) more-or-less intact supposedly because of the direct intervention of Premier Zhou Enlai. The complex was reopened in 1981. Among the chief attractions now is the sixty-foot-tall Standing Maitreya in the Main Temple. Carved from the trunk of a white sandalwood tree, it is said to be the largest statue in the world made from a single piece of wood (duly certified in 1990 by the Guiness Book of World Records, a Chinese obsession). A whole posse of monks is on hand to prevent people from taking photographs of the wooden Maitreya, so no photos of that.

The Main Temple containing the 60-foot-high wooden Maitreya

Statute of Samantabhadra. One of the Four Buddhist Mountains of China, Emei Shan, is devoted to Samantabhadra.

I found no trace of the Shambhala thangka, which must still be in storage somewhere, so I mosied across the street to the many shops selling religious paraphernalia to stock up on Nanmu incense, made from the wood of the Nanmu tree. Supposedly Nanmu incense was introduced into China by the Panchen Lama of Tibet, who gave some as a gift to the Qing Emperor Qian Long on the occasion of the latter’s seventieth birthday. It quickly became 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.

About a block down the street from the temple entrance is a small Tibetan shop ran by a young Tibetan man and woman. They have a nice selection of thangkas, but as one might expect at this venue a little over-priced. The young man was kind enough to restring my mala for me free-of-charge. Next time you are in Beijing and need your beads restrung this is definitely the place to go.