8
Daughter of the Yellow Dragon
MANDUHAI WAS BORN IN 1448, THE STRONGEST AND most imperial of all the zodiac years, and the only one with a sign designated for a supernatural being: the Yellow Dragon. According to some records at the time of her birth, her parents lived well south of the Gobi, possibly near the oasis of Hami in modern Xinjiang; according to another tradition, she was born on the Tumed Plain in the vicinity of what later became the city of Hohhot, the capital of today’s Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. In either case, she grew up in relatively arid zones of what is now northern China, and this area and type of environment remained sentimentally important to her throughout her life.
By the mid-fifteenth century, the clan system created and imposed by Genghis Khan had totally deteriorated, but a new one had not yet emerged. The Mongols had returned to the political chaos that preceded their unification in 1206. Clusters of formerly unaffiliated families formed expedient amalgamations that sometimes took an ancient name or sometimes a new one. An individual’s tribal or lineage allegiance might change several times during a lifetime, and even if the group remained the same, the name could be altered.
Manduhai was a member of one such clan conglomerate, the Choros, which included members of the defunct Onggud and Kara Kitai as well as the still surviving Uighurs, Oirat, and Uriyanghai. The Choros clan had recently ascended to unprecedented power under the leadership of Esen, and Manduhai was born at the height of his power, just before he launched his campaign to exterminate the Borijin. Soon after Manduhai’s birth, around 1451, Esen appointed her father, Chororsbasi-Temur, as chingsang, an office somewhat like prime minister, of his newly united Oirat-Mongol nation. Despite this grand title, Chororsbasi-Temur and his family continued to live the pastoral life of Mongol nomads.
The Choros clan occupied part of the former Onggud territory that had been ruled by Alaqai Beki and then annexed by Khubilai Khan’s Yuan Dynasty. Soon after the fall of the dynasty in 1368, however, soldiers of the new Ming Dynasty burned the Onggud cities and killed or chased away the people. The Onggud nearly lost their tradition of literacy, and the royal family no longer functioned with enough independent power to make its own marriages. The Onggud returned to the countryside as herders while trying to maintain some meager trade that echoed pathetically the lucrative trading empire they had once commanded along the Silk Route. They had declined from the ranks of an ancient Turkic nation under the queen Alaqai Beki to being just one more of the many poor Mongol tribes struggling to survive in the ruins of a glorious, but lost, empire. It was as though the empire and cities had never even existed.
The Uighur still held a geographic base in the oases of China’s western deserts, and although significantly diminished in importance, they survived as an ethnic group. By the time that Manduhai’s father assumed responsibility for the region, the Onggud name was no longer used; the people were lumped together under a variety of other ethnic names, including Oirat and Uighur.
Manduhai’s clan recognized a special spiritual relationship with their founding Mother Tree common to many of the Turkic tribes; the Choros, like the Uighurs, acknowledged no mythological father. For the Mongols, the primary mythological dyad consisted of the Earth Mother and the Sky Father. For Manduhai’s clan, the primary spiritual pair consisted of mother and son, symbolized by the tree and her offspring or the mother wolf who raised an orphan boy.
Manduhai probably had some kinship connection to Samur Gunj, but its importance would be difficult to calculate. Manduhai was only six years old when her father, although he had been appointed by Esen, joined the resistance to Esen and particularly to the policy of exterminating the Borijin. It is not possible to determine if her father and Samur Gunj were actually allied conspirators in their opposition or merely found themselves as common enemies of Esen.
By the time Manduhai was old enough to be aware of what was happening around her, the momentary unity and vitality of the Esen era had ended. Despite her father’s role in overthrowing Esen, neither her father nor any of the other rebels could maintain control of the miniature empire Esen had assembled. Without Esen, the system collapsed back into near anarchy on the steppe.
Even the Mongol chroniclers could not keep up with the comings and goings of episodic claimants to the office of khan. For some years, no khan was mentioned, and then two young boys in succession appeared as khans with the backing of their respective mothers and other unknown players. Both boys, and apparently their mothers as well, were soon killed by rival factions. As with horses lost in a race, there was much dust and hectic movement, but no clear winner. Moreover, it did not matter who held the office because there was no united nation to rule.
During this period of renewed disintegration, fresh predators stalked the outer fringes of the steppe tribe. Just as wolves hunt the old, young, and weak, the foreign predators began circling the wounded Mongols. The new warlords created a base in the oases of the Silk Route to the west of the Gansu Corridor. These warlords bore Muslim names such as Ibrahim, Issama, and Ismayil or Ismail, but such names may have been adopted merely for commercial convenience in dealing with merchants from Muslim countries. Even Esen had once agreed to a nominal conversion to Islam in order to marry the Muslim khan’s sister and had given two sons Muslim names, but Esen never practiced the faith. The significance of the names remains unclear.
The warlords and their warriors included many of the former imperial guards, particularly the Kipchak, but also some of the Asud of Ossetia. Having lost their stronghold on the Mongolian Plateau during the campaigns of Samur’s husband, son, and grandson Esen, they fled south into the more remote areas of the Gobi and into the deserts of northern China. The warlords’ coalitions included large mixtures of a more mysterious group known alternately as Mekrit, Megrin, and Begrin, who appear only fleetingly but at important moments in the chronicles.
This new threat originated in the oases of Turfan and Hami. These two cities operated as trade centers for long-distance caravans along the thin line of oases connecting China with the Middle East and Europe, but in these days, only a trickle of the former trade flowed through. The cities now served as desert hideaways for rebels and bandits rather than crucial chains in a commercial network. Nevertheless, the oases supported a sufficient agricultural population to accommodate a small military force, and the desert around them offered protection from the Ming army or other enemies.
From a base in Turfan, a new warlord named Beg-Arslan sought to move into the vacuum of Mongol politics, replace Esen, and set up a puppet khan. He planned to make his daughter Yeke Qabar-tu into the khatun of the Mongols by finding a Borijin heir to make khan, and then marrying her to him. This move would effectively allow Beg-Arslan to run the country as the imperial father-in-law. One obstacle to that plan was Yeke Qabar-tu’s reputation as an unattractive woman. Her name meant “Big Nose,” and for the Mongols, who often referred to themselves with pride as the “No-Nose Mongols,” the prospect of siring a child with Big Nose lacked appeal. Mongols associated such noses with Westerners, mostly Europeans and Muslims, rather than with East Asians. If nothing else, her Mongol name clearly indicated that Yeke Qabar-tu’s origin, and that of her father, lay beyond the Mongol world.