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 #13

In an earlier post I introduced the History of the Ili Basin.

This was the Ili Basin in which Dambijantsan suddenly appeared in the spring of 1890: the ancient home of Scythians, Yueshi, Wusun, Xiongnu, Türks, and Uighurs; the heartland of the Chagatayid Khanate, headquarters of Chagatai himself, and later of Moghulstan, or Western Mongolia; the wellspring of storied rulers like Tughug Temür and Baber, founder of the Moghul Empire in India; the favored grazing grounds of Esen and the Oirats of the first Oirat Empire, later of Baatar Khontaiji and Galdan Bolshigt and their Zungarian Khanate; the domain of Tseren Ravdan, Galdan Tseren, and Davatsi; the land from which Amarsanaa had fled and vowed to return; a place steeped in history, legend, and myth, inhabited by the descendants of a people who had very nearly been completely exterminated and who now harbored in their hearts a yearning for revenge against their oppressors, and the righting of past wrongs. By 1890 the Ili Basin and the rest of the Zungarian realm had been controlled by the Qing for 133 years. Now appeared a man who proclaimed that the days of the Qing were numbered and that Mongols would once again claim their independence and retake their rightful place in the world.

One can imagine the stir Dambijantsan created among the Torgut Mongols of the Ili Basin when he announced that he was a descendant of Amarsanaa. According to many accounts he would claim to be the son of Tömörsanaa, the son of Amarsanaa and thus Amarsanaa’s grandson. In all the now-available accounts of Amarsanaa’s life, however, I have not been able to find any mention of a son named Tömörsanaa. Even the relentless researcher Podzneev, who while in Mongolia in 1892–93 no doubt dug up information aplenty on the Oirats, says that Amarsanaa, “supposedly had a son, Temüsanu [Tömörsanaa] by name,” as if he himself doubted his existence. We known Amarsanaa married the daughter of Sultan Ablai and he presumably had other wives and various liaisons, but except for an infant son who escaped with him to Russia and reportedly died in a Russian prison in 1804 the record appears mute on children. In any case, Dambijantsan’s claim to be a grandson of Amarsanaa, who died in 1757, is chronologically impossible. Later, in Mongolia, Dambijantsan would enlarge on his pedigree. Supposedly Tömörsanaa had a son named Tövsanaa, who had a son named Tögrög Naran, and it was this Tögrög Naraon who was Dambijantsan’s father. Thus he claimed to be the great-great grandson of Amarsanaa. The oft-repeated claim that Dambijantsan was Amarsanaa’s grandson may just be a misunderstanding of Mongolian genealogical usage. I myself have been told numerous times in Mongolia that so-and-so was so-and-so’s grandson when this was clearly impossible, For example I was once informed that the grandson of Zanabazar, who died in 1723, was alive and working at a hotel in Ulaan Baatar. When I pointed out that this was not possible, my informant explained, “Well, you know, great, many greats, grandson.” This may be what happened in the case of Dambijantsan. It seems highly unlikely a people as deeply concerned, if not obsessed, with genealogy as the Mongols would be taken in a story as blatantly bogus as Dambijantsan being the grandson of Amarsanaa.

Dambijantsan appeared to be about twenty-five years old at the time (he would have been thirty, according to our chronology) and was dressed as a monk. He explained that at the moment he was passing through the Ili Valley, but that he would return on a certain day and month in the year of the dragon and begin the battle to liberate the Western Mongols. By his own account—for what it is worth—he stayed in Ili City for a month and even met with the Qing amban, or governor there. Although he said Ili City he probably meant not the current city of Yining, sometimes called Ili, but Huiyuan, where the Qing Military government had established its headquarters after the defeat of Amarsanaa. From 1759 to 1864 the military governor here had authority over all of what is now Xinjiang Province, including the Zungarian, Tarim, and Turpan basins, an indication of the strategic importance attached to the area. By the mid-nineteenth century there were over 50,000 Qing troops in Xinjiang, with four-fifths of them in the Zungarian and Ili basins. In the Ili River Valley alone there were nine Qing garrisons.

In 1864 the people know as Taranchis (now-called Uighurs), Dungans (Chinese Moslems, now known as Hui) and other disaffected elements in the Ili Valley took part in a rebellion against the Qing which would spread throughout all of Xinjiang during the next decade. From this turmoil rose the legendary adventurer Ya’qub Beg who established an emirate encompassing much of Xinjiang. In 1871, however, Czarist Russian, who by that time controlled much of the Kazakh Steppe to the west, occupied the Ili Basin, ostensibly to safeguard Russian citizens living in the areas and protect Russian business interests. By 1875 the Qing had rallied their forces and began the reconquest of Xinjiang. Ya’qub Beg died in 1877—probably of a stroke, but just as with Galdan Bolshigt, the Qing made up their own story, claiming he had committed suicide—and his emirate quickly collapsed. By January of 1878 Qing armies had retaken all of Xinjiang except for the Ili Valley, which remained in Russian hands. Not until 1881 would the upper Ili Valley be ceded back to China and a boundary established roughly along the current China-Kazakhstan border. In 1884 Xinjiang Province was formally established (it is only from then that we can properly call the area Xinjiang) and a new capital established at Urumqi, the provincial capital today. Thus the Qing amban who Dambijantsan claimed to have met in Huiyuan would have been a local official and not the governor of all of Xinjiang. In any case, the Qing military headquarters in Huiyuan—now a bustling little market town famous for its picturesque Qing-era bell tower in the main square, has been restored and is now a tourist attraction.

Market town of Huiyuan — Former Qing headquarters in Xinjiang

Qing-Era Bell Tower in Huiyuan

Restored Military Headquarters in Huiyuan. This may be the place Dambijantsan claimed to have visited.

Office of Qing Amban in Huiyuan

Qing-Era Wall around Huiyuan

What is not clear from available accounts is just how many Oirats remained in the Ili Basin by this time. The Zungarians themselves when they had ruled the area had brought in so-called Taranchis (Uighurs) to develop agricultural lands and they along witth Dungans (Huis) had continued to colonize the area through the nineteenth century. There were also Eastern Mongol and Manchu settlers from what are now the Chinese provinces of Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang. The scant mention of Oirats in historical sources would seem to indicate that by that time they were a distinct minority, and they would have differed from the dominant Uighurs and Huis in both life-style and religion. It would appear that the Oirats—mostly Torguts—who still nomadized in the basin occupied the more arid grazing lands on the fringes of the rich agricultural belts along the rivers. The old core of Moghulistan had been largely taken over my non-Mongol Moslems ruled over the Qing. The hey-day of Oirat dominance in the area were now just a memory. It was among these disaffected people that Dambijantsan now spread his message that he was the descendant of Amarsanaa come to liberate the Mongols from Qing rule and restore them to their rightful place. He only spent at most a couple of months in the region, but he had certainly left an impression.

Fourteen years later, in 1904, a party of seven Kalmyks who had been sent by the Russian government on a secret mission to foment anti-British sentiment in Tibet passed through the Ili Basin on their way to Lhasa. On tributary of the Ili River they encountered a large encampment of Torgut nomads. A monk with the nomads asked the mission’s second-in-command, an emchin (doctor) and bagsh (teacher) by the name of Dambin Ulianov, if he was in fact the famous Kalmyk “Danbi Dzhal‘san,” a. k. a., Dambijantsan. Ulianov had no idea who the monk was referring to. The monk related the whole story about Dambijantsan’ sudden appearance in the Ili Valley in early 1890 and how had he had promised that he would soon return to liberate the Oirats from their Qing oppressors. Since then, apparently, there had been no word of him, but the nomads still remembered the charismatic Kalmyk and were still waiting for him to return and lead an uprising against the Manchus. As we shall see, Dambijantsan’s actual whereabouts at this time are a complete mystery.

China | Xinjiang | Yuezhi Potheads

Earlier I wrote about the Yuezhi Who lived in the Ili Basin in western Xinjiang and the Turpan Basin. While in Turpan I visited the ruins of the ancient city of Jiaohe and the nearby Yueshi graves dating to over 2000 years ago.

Yuezhi Graves

Yuezhi Graves

Yuezhi Graves

Yuezhi Graves

Now comes word that the Yuezhi (or Gushi as they are sometimes called) of Turpan were Proto-Hippy Potheads.

According to CNN:

An ancient race that lived 2,700 years ago in the Gobi Desert may have been among the first to use cannabis for medical or religious purposes. Researchers believe an ancient Gushi [Yueshi] shaman may have consumed or burned pot for medical or religious purposes.

Nearly two pounds of the plant was found stashed in the tomb of a Gushi shaman. It was high in the chemical compounds that provide its psychoactive properties.

"It had evidence of the chemical attributes of cannabis used as a drug," said Dr. Ethan Russo, an author of a study published in the Journal of Experimental Botany. "It could have been for pain control. It could have been for other medicinal properties. It could have been used as an aid to divination."

The Gushi people were a Caucasian race with light hair and blue eyes who likely migrated thousands of years ago from the steppes of Russia to what is now China. A nomadic people, they were accomplished horsemen and archers.

Chinese archaeologists excavating a network of 2,500 tombs near the town of Turpan in the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region unearthed the shaman's grave, which contained the cannabis, along with a trove of artifacts such as bridles, archery equipment and a rare harp.

Since archery equipment and pot were found together these people may have been the distant ancestors of Ted Nugent. The harp was no doubt a precursor of the electric guitar. And speaking of which, thanks to former punk-rocker and now Nyingma monk Konchog Norbu, who tipped me off to the Yuezhi-Grass Connection.

Mongolia | Life & Death of the False Lama #9

How Dambijantsan spent the late 1880s is unclear. In the spring of 1890 he suddenly appeared near the city of Kulja, on the Ili River in what is now Xinjiang Province of China. Whatever he had been doing in the previous years he was now transformed. He was no longer an aspiring member of a monastic community, nor an itinerant drifter, nor a hired-hand with Russian expeditions. Instead he made a startling announcement to all who would listen: he was the grandson of the Oirat chieftain Amursana, who had led the last great revolt again Qing rule, and he had returned to take up the struggle once again and free Mongol peoples from the tyranny of the Qing Dynasty.

The Ili Basin where Dambijantsan chose to reappear in his new guise was part of the New Frontier (xin jiang) added to the domains of the Qing Dynasty China after the defeat of Amursana in 1757, but separated as it was from the rest of Xinjiang by formidable geographical barriers it constituted a distinct domain of its own. Also, as one geographer points out, the Ili Basin is of “special interest as the historical divide between the eastern and western halves of Inner Asia.” As such it was more oriented toward the west, towards the vast steppes and deserts that stretch off to the shores of Caspian Sea. rather than to mountain-rimmed basins and depressions to the east. The Ili River was the easternmost of the rivers known to the Türks who inhabited the region in the sixth century as Jetisu, or “Seven Rivers.” Later this area would become known as Semireche, Russian for Seven Rivers. Bounded on the west by the Talas River and the east by the Ili, and including the Chu and other rivers in eastern current-day Kazakhstan, “Semireche is an area where sedentaries and nomads have met at various points in history—coexisting, overlapping, or competing—because it lends itself to both ways of life . . .”

The Ili River and the Ili Basin

The Ili River itself begins about thirty miles east of the current-day city of Yining (also know as Ili, Yili, Kulja, and Gulja), at the confluence of the Kax and the Künes rivers. Both of these rivers, which flow roughly parallel through the Ili Basin, begin about 150 miles farther east, originating from glaciers sheathing 18,044-foot Erenhaberg Shan (shan = mountain), a peak located at the nexus of the of the Tian Shan Range and the Borohogo Shan Range. The Tian Shan, which bisects Xinjiang east to west, culminates in the 22,949-foot peak of Khan Tengri, about 260 miles west of Erenhaberg Shan. This formidable range separates the Ili Basin from the huge Tarim Basin and Taklimahan Desert to the south. From the peak of Erenhaberg Shan the Borohogo Shan Range extends west to the Zungarian Alatau Mountains on the current-day border between China and Kazakhstan.

Western flanks of the Borohogo Shan

With peaks of up to 11,000 feet, this range separates the Ili Basin from the immense Zungarian Basin to the north. The Ili River itself flows 388 miles west from the confluence of the Kax and Künes rivers, emerging from the double prongs of the Tian Shan and the Borohogo Shan and flowing out onto the Khusundaka Steppe before finally debouching into the land-locked, 6,562-square-mile Lake Balhash in Kazakhstan.

The fertile Ili Basin

Up to sixty miles near the current border with Kazakhstan, well watered by rivers flowing off the flanks of the Borohogo Shan and Tian Shan ranges, with fertile riverine bottomlands bordered by rich grasslands ramping to the mountains on the north and south, and the Ili Basin was a prize that was coveted and fought over by nomads for at least 2500 years. Many of these nomads, after rising to power in this fecund land, eventually migrated elsewhere and founded great dynasties and empires. The people known as Scythians, or Saka, may have inhabited this area as early as the seventh-century B.C. After they were dislodged by the Yuezhi in the second century b.c.. they emigrated to northern India where they eventually founded a Indo-Scythian kingdom. The Yuezhi an Indo-European people described by some sources as having reddish or blonde hair, established their capital in the Ili Basin. With a population of some 400,000 people (apparently adults), they were capable of mobilizing a mounted army of 100,000 archers. The Yueshi were in turn displaced by the Wusun and moved westward to the found the Kushan Empire in what is now Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. The Kushan Empire, straddling the great trade routes between India and Inner Asia, became one of the major vectors for the dissemination of Buddhism throughout what is now Xinjiang and Transoxiana and on into China. The Wusun, who replaced them, occupied the Ili Valley and set up a capital on a tributary of the Ili River believed to be the current-day Tekäs River. At one time they numbered some 120,000 households with 630,000 individuals, including 188,000 men capable of bearing arms. As such they were a power to be reckoned with in Inner Asia. According to one Chinese annalist, “Of all the [people] of the Western Regions, the Wusun looked the most peculiar. [They] have cerulean eyes and red beards and look like Mi monkeys are their descendants.” The Wusun were eventually defeated by the Xiongnu (Hunni), who then presumably occupied the Ili Valley, although little it known about their presence in the region. By the seventh century A.D. the western branch of the Khökh Türks occupied the Ili Basin, and still others, including Sogdians, the Khara Khitai, and Uighurs would also make their homes here between the eighth and thirteenth centuries.

With the rise of the Mongol Empire the Ili Basin came into still greater prominence. In 1209, Barchug, the Uighur ruler of Uighuristan, centered around the capital city of Khocho, near current-day Turpan in eastern Xinjiang, recognized the rising power of the Mongols and prudently allied himself with Chingis Khan, thus avoiding the terrible fate of so many who opposed the Mongol khan. In appreciation, Chingis gave him one of his daughters in marriage and even referred to him as his “fifth son.” Eastern Xinjiang thus secured the Mongols moved on to western Xinjiang and the Ili Basin. Earlier, in 1204, Chingis had defeated the tribe known as the Naiman, who occupied what is now northwestern Mongolia. The Naiman chieftain Tayang Khan was killed in the battle, but his son Küchlüg escaped to the Semireche region and after various complicated machinations had by 1211 managed to overthrow the then-ruling Khara Khitai regime and usurp power for himself. Originally a Christian who had converted to Buddhism, Küchlüg soon made himself intensely unpopular in Semireche and the western Tarim Basin by his persecutions of Moslems. Apprised of Küchlüg’s unpopularity with many of his subjects, Chingis Khan sensed an opportunity to deal once and for all with this loose end who had earlier escaped from his grasp in Mongolia, and at the same time extend his reach westward. Küchlüg had also murdered of the husband of one of his granddaughters, an act for which Chingis may also have been seeking revenge.

In 1216 Chingis dispatched one of his most trusted generals, Jebe (the Arrow) with a force of some 20,000 men to the Ili Basin. At a place called Almalik, near current-day Yining, Jebe “accepted the peaceful submission of the tribes in Zungharia and Semireche” who had been alienated by Küchlüg. The Naiman renegade himself fled over the Tian Shan to Kashgar at the western end of the Tarim Basin with Jebe in pursuit. Küchlüg had worn out his welcome with the Moslem populace of Kashgar, but Jebe himself was greeted as a liberator. “It was as if the arrow of prayer hit the target of answer and acceptance,” pronounced the thirteen-century historian Juvaini, playing on Jebe’s name. Jebe, according to Juvaini’s informants, ““caused a herald to proclaim in the town that each should abide by their own religion and follow his own creed. Then we knew the existence of this people [the Mongols] to be one of the mercies of the Lord and one of the bounties of divine grace,’” Deprived of his power base in Kashgar, Küchlüg fled south over the Pamir Mountains, apparently hoping to escape to India.

The Pamirs from near Kashgar

The Gez River flowing out of the Pamirs. This is the main passageway to the Pamirs on the route from Kashgar to Pakistan. Jebe pursuited Küchlüg via this vallley. Marco Polo probably also came this way, as did the Chinese Pilgrim Xuanzang.

Jebe caught up with the wayward son of Tayang Khan in the Pamirs and killed him (according to one account, he was beheaded) near a place called Sarikol south of the current-day border town of Tashkurgan, in what is now Pakistan.

24,757-foot Muztagh Ata Mountain, on the route to Pakistan

The Pamir Highland near Sarikol where Küchlüg bit the dust

With the elimination of Küchlüg, Kashgaria (the oases cities of the western Tarim Basin) and the Semireche region, including the valleys of the Chu and Talas rivers and the Ili Basin, were all incorporated into the Mongol Empire.


Chingis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire, died in 1227. Before his death he bequeathed his realm to his four sons, with Chagatai, the second oldest, receiving a huge swath of Inner Asia from Turpan in the east to the oases cities of Bukhara and Samarkand in the west, including Lake Issuk Kol in current-day Kyrgyzstan and Ili Basin. The Chagatayids eventually established their capital at Almalik in the Ili River valley, near current-day Yining, where Jebe had earlier accepted the allegiance of the local populace. The exact location of the former Chagatayid capital of Almalik is unknown, although some local sources maintain it was near the current-day market town of Yakxamba Bazaar, about 20 miles west of Yining.

Yakxamba Bazaar on an off-day—Believed to have been the site of Almalik

After the death of Chagatai in 1243, for the next 150 years or so, until the latter part of the fourteenth century, his descendants would continue to occupy Ili Basin and surrounding territories. As with many inheritances, however, there were disputes, and large chunks of the territory left to Chagatai would be fought over by his brothers and their descendants. Ögödei, Chingis’s third son and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire after Chingis’s death, took effective control of Uighuristan, centered around Khocho (near current-day Turpan), and other settled areas of the Tarim Basin. After the death of Ögödei, Möngke, the son of Tolui, Chingis’s youngest son, eventually assumed the title of Great Khan and attempted to divide the Chagatayid khanate between himself and his cousin Batu, son of Jochi, Chingis’s oldest son and ruler of the Golden Horde which occupied much of current-day western Russia. After Möngke‘s death, Khubilai and his brother Arig Böke, sons of Tolui, fought for the title of Great Khan, with khanate of Chagatai to the west a pawn in their disputes. Upon Arig Böke’s death in 1264 Khubilai became undisputed Great Khan and founded the Yüan Dynasty, but rival relatives soon wrested away control of the western Tarim Basin which he had earlier claimed. From 1271 to 1301 Khaidu, son of Ögödei, became the de facto ruler of the Chagatai khanate, with Chagatayid princes in place as figure-head khans. After Khaidu’s death in 1301, the resurgent Chagatayids retook control of much of the original khanate, including the Ili Basin. Secure in their homeland, they now launched attacks on northern India, Afghanistan, and eastern Persia.

By the 1340s, however, the Chagatayids had split into two factions. The khan Tarmashirin, based in the oasis cities of Transoxiana, had converted to Islam in the late 1320s. In 1334 the Chagatayids in the Issuk Kul region of current-day Kyrgyzstan and the Ili Basin, adherents of Buddhism, Christianity, and shamanism, rebelled and recognized their own khan. Tarmashirin remained in control of Transoxiana, but the breakaway branch of Chagatayids now ruled the rest of Chagatai’s original patrimony. This new khanate soon acquired a new significance and a distinctive moniker. As geographer Svat Soucek points out, “Semireche and the adjacent territories, from the Talas river all the way to the upper course of the Ili, together with present-day Kyrgyzstan . . . developed a special identity, that of a Mongol homeland, to the extent of acquiring a new name, Moghulistan—in other words, Mongolia.”

One of the most famous rulers of this western extension of the Mongolia homeland was Tughluq Temür (r. 1347 to 1364), an eleventh generation descendant of Chingis Khan through Chagatai. When still a young man he had met Jamal al-Din, a member of an Islamic sect known as the Khwajas (Masters), who explained to him the teachings of Islam. As noted, Tarmashirin’s conversion to Islam was one of the reasons for the split between the two factions of Chagatayids in the 1330s. Tughluq Temür did not then accept Islam, but he promised that if he ever became khan of the Moghulistan branch of the Chagatayids he would indeed convert. By the time he did become Khan Jamal al-Din had died, but his son Arshad al-Din appeared before Tughluq Temür tent at dawn one day and made the call for morning prayers. Tughluq Temür was enraged at having his slumber disturbed, but after Arshad al-Din reminded him of his promise he agreed to convert to Islam and offered himself to be circumcised, always a dicey proposition for a adult male. Not only that, but he ordered that all his princes also convert. With the exception of one, they did, along with, according to the perhaps apocryphal account of Moslem historians, 160,000 of their followers. Whatever the actually numbers, by the mid-fourteenth century the Chagatayid Khanate was largely Islamicised.

In March of 1360 Tughluq Temür marched on Transoxiana and quickly retook the Chagatayid domains, claimed earlier by Tarmashirin. The then-ruler of Transoxiana fled to Afghanistan, but his nephew Temur switched sides and allied himself with Tughluq Temür. Later Tughluq Temür appointed his son Ilyas-khojas as viceroy of Samarkand and named Temur as the young man’s advisor. Temur would later became world famous as Tamerlane, “The Sword of Islam,” and “The Scourge of God.”

“Thus the unity of the old khanate of Jagatai [Chagatai] was restored under a forceful and dreaded khan [Tughluq Temür],” intones historian of the steppes René Grousett, “No one could have foreseen at that time that not many years later the Tamerlane who he had given his son as mentor would bring this Jagataite restoration to an end and replace it with a new empire.”

Tughluq Temür, although completely forgotten by most of the world, is well remembered in Xinjiang. His Mausoleum Complex near the village of Huocheng, about thirty miles from Yining, contains both his tomb and the tomb of his sister (according to some accounts his daughter) and is now a hallowed pilgrimage site and popular tourist destination.

The Tomb of Tughluq Temür

The coffin of Tughluq Temür

The coffin of Tughluq Temür’s sister (or daughter)

Fetishes left by pilgrims at the tomb of Tughluq Temür