The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (26 page)

Only a teenager could have had such a dream, and only an inexperienced old man could have encouraged him in it. Bayan Mongke headed off on his first major assignment. He rode into the border zone to lure the Mongols away from the Ming and to negotiate a pan-Mongol alliance. He found a receptive audience among the Mongols, who had grown weary of the Ming rule and the unfulfilled promises and obligations of the court. As a youthful soldier, apparently destined to one day become the Great Khan of the Mongol nation, Bayan Mongke excited their pride and ambition. For those prone toward imperial nostalgia and visions of Mongol glory, the dream rose again of uniting the tribes and restoring Mongol rule over China. For those who wished more material rewards, Bayan Mongke stimulated greed for the days when the Mongols controlled all the productive wealth of China and the mercantile traffic of the Silk Road.

Both the Mongols and the Ming court maintained false and often silly perceptions of themselves and each other. Every society produces its own cultural conceits, a set of lies and delusions about itself that thrives in the face of all contrary evidence. The Mongols believed that they could not be completely defeated. Even after being driven back north of the Gobi, they still pretended to be the rightful rulers of China and much of the rest of the world. The Mongol royal court was just waiting for a shift in the will of heaven that would propel them back to their rightful place as rulers of the most extensive empire on earth. To fill in the gaps between their beliefs and reality, they sat around the fire telling of clever Mongol concubines, morally lax Chinese queens, oversexed Mongol soldiers, impotent Chinese emperors, and secret pregnancies. All the tales ended with the deception of Chinese court officials and the conclusion that through some form of clever deceit, the Ming emperor was really a Mongol. Thus, the Mongols
had never been truly defeated or chased out of China, merely replaced by some of their Mongol kinsmen in another guise. The men chuckled over the stories and then headed out to hunt another marmot and gather some dried cow dung to build a fire.

These stories also served as justification for any type of raid or military expedition. They had a story that while the Ming emperor had been held captive by the Mongols, he fathered a son with a Mongol girl. Thus, if needed, they had yet one more claim to be the legitimate rulers of China and even to have the legitimate heir of the dead Ming emperor. In the intervening years, the identity of the girl and her son had been lost, but they could certainly be found if needed. The justification, however, did not matter until the Mongols had a sufficiently strong military force to rival the Ming. The story of the secret heir might be useful as a propaganda tool for legitimizing their rule if they conquered China, but it had little use in rallying Mongols to fight.

The Mongols undermined the truth of their defeats with sexual intrigue; the Ming courtiers undermined the truth of their failures by renaming and redefining it. The Chinese believed that they had never really been conquered at all. By assigning Chinese names to each of the foreign conquerors, they almost obliterated the unpleasant memory of alien domination. Periodically, the eunuchs of the court invited in a Mongol horse trader, dressed him in elegant new clothes, gave him a letter glorifying the Ming emperor, and ushered him into the court, which accepted his goods as foreign tribute and gave him lavish gifts in return. Later the eunuchs could laugh over the filthy fingers and crude manners of the barbarians as they slurped bowls of hot noodles, and then return to drawing pornographic pictures to give to the next foreign delegation.

After one hundred years in power, the Ming Dynasty had spent its initial vigor and matured into a protracted middle age. Prior to Esen’s capture of the Ming emperor, the dynasty had its confidence, even if it lacked youthful energy. After the capture, the nation suffered from a lack of both, and their traditionally exaggerated fears of the Mongols began to haunt the Chinese once again. The nervous fear
clouded every diplomatic discussion and prevented the court from uniting behind a single comprehensive policy of how to deal with the barbarian threat.

As the Ming weakened and the turmoil among the Mongols continued, renegade Mongols began making deeper and more frequent raids into Chinese territory. The renewed raiding seemed closely tied to Bayan Mongke’s coming of age and his expanding prominence at court as
jinong
, and Chinese chroniclers showed an increasing fear of him and other Mongol raiding parties.

In plotting to attack the Chinese cities, young Bayan Mongke faced an unusual foe headed by a teenage emperor of almost the same age. The Ming heir became emperor in approximately the same year that Bayan Mongke became crown prince. Their lives were marked by similar experiences of near death, years in hiding, and then sudden elevation to power at the center of a powerful court. Esen’s campaigns against their families had been the source of the early suffering for both of them.

But in addition to these odd similarities, there were marked differences as well. The power behind Bayan Mongke was his older uncle; the power behind the Chinese emperor Chenghua was his older nursemaid, Lady Wan, whom he loved.

The new emperor had been born in 1447 just before Esen captured his father. During his father’s captivity, the little crown prince Chenghua lost his position, had his name changed, was shunted aside, and lived in constant danger of being killed. The harsh uncertainty of his perilous childhood left him a nervous and introverted child, made all the worse by a severe stutter when trying to pronounce words beginning with
s, zh, ch
, and
sh
sounds. Within the closed world of his nursery, Wan nourished and entertained the shy, vulnerable boy. She dressed herself and him in military uniforms, played elaborate games, and staged colorful and exciting military charades with real soldiers.

In 1464, at age seventeen, the emperor ascended the throne when
Lady Wan was thirty-two years old. For as long as he could remember, she had been his most intimate companion and his protector, and at the appropriate time she had initiated him into sex. Although it was common for the servant women to meet an emperor’s sexual needs when required, such women came and went with little more notice than the changing flowers in a vase; but this young emperor seemed inordinately attached to his nurse.

When he became emperor, he married an appropriately aristocratic lady in order to have an official empress. She quickly learned of his attachment to Wan, and she bitterly resented it. Within weeks of being installed in her new status as the highest-ranking woman in the empire, Empress Wu claimed that the nursemaid had been discourteous to her and ordered that she be flogged in a clear show of rank and resentment. Outraged, the teenage emperor stripped his wife of her title of empress after only a month and a day in office, banishing her to a remote palace within the Imperial City, where she lived out the next forty-five years until her death.

Chenghua could not make a servant into an empress, even one as beloved as Wan, but he continued to live openly with her. Two years later, when the emperor was nineteen and Lady Wan was thirty-six, she gave birth to a son, who soon died. After the death, officials began writing memoranda to the emperor, asking him to seek relations with other women in his household in order to produce an heir and, as an intended but not stated consequence, to decrease the power of Lady Wan, her family, and her entourage. The emperor obliged by having a son with one of his wives, but the child died suddenly just after being declared the heir. Suspicion naturally fell on Lady Wan, but the emperor stood fast by her.

Following the loss of their son, the emperor showed no lessening of his commitment to Lady Wan, despite her inability to get pregnant again. Although she could not appear in court as the official empress in the gowns and clothes that accompanied the title, Lady Wan chose her own individual way of marking her identity: She often chose to
wear men’s military clothes. As the only woman at court dressed as a general, she flaunted her unique position.

The Chinese sources report that Bayan Mongke of the Mongols came into Chinese territory and met with the local Mongol leaders; they blamed the young prince for instigating the troubles that followed. Soon after the suspicious visit, Mongols on the border revolted against their Ming overlords. They rose up in 1468, exactly one hundred years after the Ming expelled the Mongol khans of the Yuan Dynasty.

Bayan Mongke was not Esen. He stirred up some mild enthusiasm with the border Mongols, stoked the ashes of past glory, and tempted their appetites for adventure and plunder. During this time, the Ming border guards, disguised as Mongol bandits, raided the goods being sent to the loyal Mongols who were helping the Ming protect the border. This system of theft had frequently been used by the underpaid and underappreciated Chinese soldiers to supplement their difficult life in a forsaken post. The local commanders, who benefited from the corruption, wrote back reports blaming all such raids on outlaw Mongols. In addition, when the Mongols loyal to the Ming attempted to send tribute to the emperor, Chinese soldiers robbed them as well, and again blamed it on other, savage Mongols living in the wild. The local Mongols lost their goods and got the blame for the robbery.

The misconduct of these Ming soldiers probably had more to do with causing the border tensions than the arrival of the ineffectively young crown prince of the Mongols. Fearful of the discontent brewing along the border, and fully aware of the danger Bayan Mongke’s visit might spark among these tentatively loyal Mongols, the Ming court sent out an expedition to capture the provocateur and reinforce its authority. If they could capture the heir to the title of Great Khan of the Yuan, they might have their ultimate triumph over the old dynasty, which still had not surrendered. By luck, the first Ming force sent to capture Bayan Mongke failed in the summer of 1468, but in the
following year, a stronger force arrived and, by cutting off the supply of food to the border Mongols, quickly starved them out by early 1469. Bayan Mongke managed to escape back north into the Gobi and on home, but the Ming forces captured the local Mongol leader and hailed the feat as another great victory over the barbarians.

The records of this time remain silent on what happened at the Mongol court during the absence of Bayan Mongke. Yet events would soon unfold to show that Manduhai, unseen and unheard, had been making her own alliances. As the aging khan weakened and the young khan dashed about on the Chinese frontier, Manduhai solidified her position, made a few allies, and prepared as best she could for the uncertain fate ahead. For her, everything up until then had been a training period in which she watched, learned, and waited. Soon she would have the opportunity to test her skills.

For the moment, she had two rivals, both about her same age and at the start of their careers. Her immediate rival for power at court and within Mongolia was Bayan Mongke. In the longer term, however, she and the Ming emperor, using intermediaries and proxies, would become involved in an indirect but lifelong struggle for control over the borderlands, while living lives that would have uncanny, and probably not coincidental, similarities.

The Falling Prince and the Rising Queen

S
EXUAL POLITICS DESTROYED THE COURT OF
M
ANDUUL
K
HAN
. The Tibetan chronicle states that the horrendous charges and countercharges about the incidents were too dreadful to repeat, but of course the author teases the reader with a hazy sketch of events displayed to tantalize more than inform. The Mongolian chroniclers more eagerly described specific details of some events while obscuring others, depending on the genealogical connections and political allegiances of the writer. Each chronicler had some personal connection to the people in the story and often wanted to protect a particular person’s reputation while placing the blame firmly on another.

Sex is always political, and in politics every relationship is potentially sexual, or at least is open to accusations of being so. Usually the sex remains just a little hidden in the domain of speculation, gossip, and rumor, but in the breakup of Manduul Khan’s court, almost every person was accused of an inappropriate relationship with someone, or several people, in the group.

Bayan Mongke came to court for sexual purposes, at least some of which were clearly stated. He had already proved his ability to father a son, and now he would be expected to do so again to carry forth the Borijin clan. As the heir, the young prince Bolkhu Jinong would also marry the wives of the old khan when he died. This custom reached
far back into steppe history and set them clearly apart from their Chinese and Muslim neighbors, who disapproved highly of this practice. As a Confucian scholar wrote of them, “They marry by succession their stepmothers, the wives of their deceased younger paternal uncles, and the wives of their deceased elder brothers.” He further described the Mongols as facing the ridicule of future generations, stating that only through “civilization and law” could the Mongols abolish these incestuous, barbaric traditions.