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

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.