Greater Mongolia, by Ross Perlin

By Ross Perlin

In a curious aside that still confounds the majority of scholars, Sima Ting, in his Universal History of the Barbarian Hordes, writes that Tamerlane the Great, just hours before his death from excessive alcoholism and untreated battle wounds, proclaimed the coming of a Universal Empire of Greater Mongolia, slated to make geopolitical history exactly 666 years from the date of his own demise. Von Klapnick takes this story as a sign that the great warrior was delusional at death and forgot his own carefully crafted identity as a civilized, albeit ruthless, Persian autocrat. De Lopez—who sees Timur as the history-unique synthesis of barbarism and civilization, doomed to the dusts of the steppe—doubts the passage’s validity entirely. “It is clearly an invention,” he writes. “It is unthinkable that Timur’s passion for synthesis could have given way, at the eleventh hour, to the sirens of crude Grossdeutschland-type reveries.”

John C. believes, however. He was an acquaintance of mine in Beijing, heir to a Texas oil fortune who would have $500 wired from a Houston trust fund every Friday afternoon in preparation for weekend antics. Often, nursing a hangover, we would spend long Sunday afternoons in his high-up apartment, looking out over the gigantic cranes that dominate northern Beijing. His hookah, brought over in weapon-like pieces despite the vigilance of airport security at Bush International Airport, would be lit; he would choose a tobacco flavor; brew Persian tea; roll out a rug; start chatting.

It was John C. who first alerted me to the passage in the Universal History. Though John C.’s family was ultimately of ambiguous national origin, his friends called him “the Kazakh” and he would often be mistaken for a Central Asian by people on the streets of Beijing. Whatever his background, though, he had a deep, unexplained affection for Mongolia, and for Mongol history. My English friend Malcolm, who knew John C. only very slightly and associated him for no reason with the Riyadh expat scene he’d known growing up, thought it was due in no small measure to John’s passion for Mongolian prostitutes. I told him that almost all the prostitutes in Beijing were Mongolians, and that maybe the passion was just for prostitutes, and we left it at that.

In one sense, there is no reason not to believe in the possibility of a Greater Mongolia. Timur’s own military successes, indeed, are almost a footnote to that series of Khans who gave us, in pyrotechnic display, the word kamikaze, the patchy Altaic family of languages, a few well-turned lines by Shelley, the labyrinthine corridors of the Russian mind. It seems strange that the almost flower-petal-like fall of the Mongol hordes upon history—it’s nonsense to see such excursions as anything more than improbable, imaginative brushstrokes across Eurasia—has given us, almost more than Alexander, Caesar, Qin Shi Huang, Napoleon, or Hitler, our idea of Universal Empire. Some argue that, more than the Silk Road, the Mongols gave us Eurasia.

Then perhaps the dream of John C., or his belief in the Timur anecdote, was not so odd. Between puffs at the hookah, he would explain with hands stretched wide how—half T.E. Lawrence, half resurrected Genghis—he would rally a mob in the Soviet-style central square of Ulan Bataar. The captial city, I reminded him, had only been put on a power grid ten years earlier. “All the better,” he said, going on to detail how the hordes were patiently waiting on the steppe for the coming of a new khan, their yurts like lonely ladybugs, or soft efficient UFOs, dropped into the world’s last unowned lands.

Inner Mongolia, too, became a focus of John’s attentions in time. One night in Sanlitur, the sleazy expat bar district in Beijing, I found him with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a friend who worked for Yukos, the Russian oil company then engaged in the two-front war of fighting charges of tremendous corruption and raping the natural environment of Eastern Siberia. They were deep in conversation, speaking quietly in Russian and pouring drinks for each other almost aimlessly. I ventured to intrude. I saw that they were staring at a city plan for Hohehot, the capital of the PRC’s Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia—and a city mostly ethnically Han.

“The palace will be here,” said John C. unemphatically, pointing to the Ministry of Agriculture Center for Cattle Disease Control. The Yukos man explained: “It is thought by the historian Ivanov to be the spot of Kublai Khan’s famous speech on the virtues of Mongol power.” “We’re going by train to see it tomorrrow,” said John C., turning to me. “Come.”

Hohehot, not even true Mongolia but a long-suffering Chinese vassal, is almost entirely without traffic during the winter months. A lot of the business comes at harvest time, or in the spring, when tourists come to live in yurts on the famous yuancao (grasslands) and ride horses through the endless open space. But it was February and our train car held just me, John C., the Yukos man, and Una, a Mongolian prostitute who was a friend of John’s and who, inexplicably, did not speak the entire trip.

When we arrived, belched out of the monolithic, awfully ugly train station, we were immediately swamped by the usual taxi drivers, pedicab drivers, rickshaw peddlars, panhandlers without pans, children without mothers, people without limbs. But for these lost ones, no one seemed to be about. It was snowing ever so gently, but the Yukos man, almost shrilly, insisted that we turn our feet directly towards the Ministry of Agriculture Center for Cattle Disease Control. The wind blew in rippling sheets against our faces.

As we walked, I remembered what John C. had said to me one time about his affinity for the great Tamerlane. “I think this great project will come to fruit only with my own death,” he said. “666 years after. A Nestorian influence, possibly—the number of the devil. All of today’s cataclysms can be traced to the disjunction of East and West. All great men dream of Universal Empire. Mongolia, with her ancient energies preserved so intact, will be the agent.” I asked why the United States, his own homeland after all, did not qualify as a Universal Empire. He answered: “A civilization, by definition, cannot be an empire.” Did he mean that the only sustainable empire would be a return to pre-civilization, the destruction of all culture, the return to illiteracy and backwardness, the renaissance of our initial sameness?

I was maneuvering my mind around this so obvious paradox, this fallacy of logic, at the moment when we arrived in front of the massive concrete structure, almost windowless but for notches halfway up that might have been for archers. A sort of hulking concrete tablet of Cuneiform. The Yukos man caughed and took out a pack of cigarettes. “My king,” he said in the Mongolian dialect John C. had deemed most archaic, the one most likely to resemble the speech of Genghis. Then we all smoked. Una humped John C.’s leg as he gazed at the structure, no doubt picturing its destruction by dynamite or Greek fire and its replacement by some ziggurat of the steppes, some monument to the dream of the Future. I asked a doctor on his way in if there had been any sort of Mad Cow Disease scare this year. It seemed the only thing to ask.

Osip Mandelstam, soon to be purged in the wave of attacks against Soviet poets in 1936-37, is reputed to have spoken of his poetry as expressing “nostalgia for world culture.” I like to think that John C., whose future is so much larger and happier than ours, sometimes experiences his dream in that same form, as some sort of sickness for home. How else could he understand the descent of Little Green Men (they say it’s coming any day) as nothing more worrisome than the landing of tiny, beautiful Mongolian yurts upon the landscape of our world, as if those hordes of Sima Ting had disappeared one day in 1405 with Timur’s extinguishing breath and were now, in a spirit half of reunion half of revenge, coming home to the Empire Without Meaning—the only eternal one—they’d meant to establish all along.