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

Earlier I elaborated on the Fall of Galdan Bolshigt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amarsanaa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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