The grave nobody has found

The Tangut kingdom of Xi Xia, in what is now north-western China, had submitted to Genghis Khan in 1209 and promised troops. When the Mongols demanded those troops for the war against Khwarazm in 1219, a Tangut minister is said to have replied that if Genghis did not have enough soldiers he should not call himself khan. Genghis did not forget it. After returning from Central Asia he led an army into Xi Xia in 1226.

The war was conducted with exceptional ferocity. City after city was taken and its population killed, and the Tangut capital at Zhongxing, near modern Yinchuan, was put under siege. The destruction was so complete that the Tangut state disappeared and its script had to be deciphered from scratch by modern scholars, as described in What they destroyed. It was during this campaign that Genghis died.

The Secret History, written in Mongolian probably within a generation of his death, is the closest source to the court. It says that in the winter of 1226 to 1227, on the way into Tangut territory, Genghis was hunting wild horses when his own horse, a reddish-grey, shied and threw him. He was badly hurt. That night he had a high fever. His officers suggested withdrawing until he recovered, but Genghis refused, saying the Tanguts would think he had lost his nerve. The campaign went on.

The text then describes the fall of the Tangut kingdom, and records his death only obliquely, saying that in the year of the pig he ascended to heaven. It gives no cause beyond the injury and fever months earlier. The silence is typical of the work, which avoids naming the deaths of the khan’s family directly, and it suggests that the court remembered the fall and the illness as the beginning of the end.

Rashid al-Din, the Persian historian who wrote for the Mongol rulers of Iran around 1300 and had access to Mongol records, says that Genghis fell ill, foresaw his death, called his sons and gave them instructions on the succession. He ordered that his death be kept secret until the Tangut king had surrendered, and that the king and the people of the capital be killed when he did. The Yuan Shi, the official history of the Mongol dynasty in China compiled in the 1360s, gives a date in the autumn of 1227 and says simply that he fell ill and died.

Marco Polo, writing in the 1290s far from the events, says that Genghis was hit in the knee by an arrow at the siege of a castle and died of the wound. John of Plano Carpini, the papal envoy who travelled to the Mongol court in 1246, was told that he had been killed by a thunderbolt, a story that probably reflects Mongol fear of lightning more than any event.

The most colourful version appears in Mongol chronicles of the seventeenth century, which say that Genghis took the captured Tangut queen as a wife and that she injured him on their wedding night before drowning herself in the Yellow River. It is a legend, written four centuries later, and it repeats a motif found elsewhere in steppe storytelling.

Most historians accept the core of the Secret History: an injury in a fall, a lingering illness, and death in August 1227 at about sixty-five, in the Liupan mountains. Some have suggested typhus or another camp disease. There is no way to know.

Secrecy was not a whim of Genghis Khan’s. It was the custom of the steppe elite, and the European envoys who reached the Mongol court in the 1240s and 1250s describe it. John of Plano Carpini says that when a leading man died he was buried in secret, in open country, seated in a tent with a table and a dish of meat and a cup of mare’s milk in front of him. A mare with her foal and a saddled horse were buried with him, so that in the next world he would have a dwelling, milk and a mount. The earth was put back and grass was encouraged to grow over the place so that nobody could find it again.

William of Rubruck, who travelled through the empire a few years later, saw the burial grounds of ordinary Mongols marked with stones and stakes, and was told that the graves of great men were hidden and guarded. The reasons were practical as well as religious. A known grave full of valuables could be robbed, and a known grave of a dead khan could be desecrated by enemies, which the Mongols themselves were not above doing to others.

The contrast with the settled empires the Mongols conquered could hardly be sharper. Chinese emperors built vast tomb complexes with spirit roads lined with stone figures, as described for an earlier dynasty in the Han China pages. Persian rulers built domed mausoleums. The Mongol rulers who later governed those countries adopted some of those habits in China and Iran, and the Ilkhan Ghazan built himself a great tomb at Tabriz. But the khans of the founding family were taken home and hidden.

The body was taken back to Mongolia. All the sources that mention the burial agree that it was secret. Rashid al-Din says that Genghis had chosen the place himself, under a solitary tree on a mountain, and that the area became a great forbidden zone, guarded by a detachment of soldiers, which nobody else was allowed to enter. Within a few years the trees had grown so thickly that even the guards could no longer tell where the tomb was.

Marco Polo adds that the funeral escort killed everyone it met on the road, telling them to go and serve their lord in the next world. He was writing decades later and may have been passing on a story told to impress foreigners, but the idea of the secret was clearly part of what visitors heard.

The likeliest area is the Khentii mountains in north-eastern Mongolia, near Burkhan Khaldun, the mountain where the young Temujin hid from his enemies and to which he returned to give thanks, as described in The sky and the shamans. Later khans of the dynasty were buried in the same region, also in secret, including Qubilai, who died in Beijing and was carried back to Mongolia. Under the Mongolian People’s Republic a large area of the Khentii, known as the Great Taboo, was closed to the public until the 1990s.

Several expeditions have looked for the tomb. A joint Japanese and Mongolian project in the early 1990s surveyed the Khentii with ground-penetrating radar. An American businessman, Maury Kravitz, spent years searching from the early 2000s and found a walled site of uncertain date. In 2010 the Valley of the Khans project, led from the University of California, San Diego, asked online volunteers to scan satellite images of the region for anything that looked man-made, and tens of thousands took part.

None of these found the grave. Each also met objections in Mongolia, where the burial place is regarded by many as sacred and where Genghis is a national founder, on the currency and at the airport. Opinion polls and public statements have repeatedly shown strong opposition to disturbing the tomb if it is found. A popular belief holds that opening it would bring disaster, and some point out that the Soviet excavation of Timur’s tomb in Samarkand was followed within days by the German invasion of 1941.

The site that most Mongolians and visitors associate with Genghis today is not a grave at all. At Ejen Khoroo in Inner Mongolia, China, a mausoleum built in the 1950s houses the shrine traditionally called the Eight White Tents, objects associated with his cult that were kept by a hereditary group of guardians, the Darkhad, for centuries. It is a place of memory rather than burial.

The empire did not collapse on his death, which is itself a measure of what he had built. His youngest son Tolui, who by Mongol custom inherited the home pastures, acted as regent. In 1229 an assembly chose the third son, Ogedei, as Great Khan, as Genghis had wished. Ogedei completed the conquest of the Jin dynasty in northern China, sent the armies that reached Hungary and Poland, and built a capital at Karakorum. The difficulties of the succession system, which split the empire within two generations, are described in The succession problem.

Searches for how Genghis died often turn into searches for how Qubilai, his grandson, died, and that answer is much clearer. Qubilai reigned as Great Khan from 1260 and as emperor of China from 1271 until his death in Beijing in February 1294, at the age of seventy-eight. His last years were unhappy. His favourite wife Chabi, his adviser on many matters, died in 1281, and his chosen heir, his son Zhenjin, died in 1285. Two invasions of Japan and campaigns in Vietnam and Java had failed.

Chinese and Persian sources describe him eating and drinking heavily in these years, growing very fat and suffering from gout. He died of illness, aged and grieving, and like his grandfather he was carried north to be buried in secret in the Khentii. His successor was Zhenjin’s son Temur. The deaths of the two most famous Mongol rulers are very different in what the sources allow us to know, and very similar in where they ended.