Mausoleum of Genghis Khan

The Mausoleum of Genghis Khan is a temple dedicated to Genghis Khan, where he is worshipped as ancestor, dynastic founder, and deity. The temple is better called the Lord's Enclosure (i.e. shrine), the traditional name among the Mongols, as it has never truly contained the Khan's body. It is the main centre of the worship of Genghis Khan, a growing practice in the Mongolian shamanism of both Inner Mongolia, where the temple is located, and Mongolia.

The temple is located in the Kandehuo Enclosure in the town of Xinjie, in the Ejin Horo Banner in the Ordos Prefecture of Inner Mongolia, in China. The main hall is actually a cenotaph where the coffin contains no body (only headdresses and accessories), because the actual tomb of Genghis Khan has never been discovered.

The present structure was built between 1954 and 1956 by the government of the People's Republic of China in the traditional Mongol style. It was desecrated and its relics destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, but it was restored with replicas in the 1980s and remains the center of Genghis Khan worship. It was named a AAAAA-rated tourist attraction by China's National Tourism Administration in 2011.

Location

The cenotaph is located at an elevation of on the Gandeli or Gande'er Prairie about southeast of Xilian and about south of the county seat of Ejin Horo Banner, Inner Mongolia. It is the namesake of its surrounding banner, whose name translates from Mongolian as "the Lord's Enclosure".

The site is north of Yulin; south of Dongsheng; and from Baotou. There is a new interchange on highway 210 leading directly to the site.

History

Early sites

After Genghis Khan died in or around Gansu on 12 July AD1227, his remains were supposedly carried back to central Mongolia and buried secretly and without markings, in accordance with his personal directions. His actual burial site remains unknown but was almost certainly not in Ejin Horo, which had only recently been conquered from the Tangut Empire. Without a body, the Mongols honored the khan's memory and spirit through his personal effects. These ceremonies allegedly date to the same year as his death. Kublai Khan built temples for his grandfather's cult in Daidu and Shangdu. Nine "palaces" for rituals concerning his cult were maintained by an imperial official in Karakorum..

After the fall of the Yuan in 1368, these permanent structures were replaced by portable mausoleums called the "eight white yurts" (''naiman tsagaan ger''). These had originally been palaces where the khan had lived, but were altered to mausoleums by Ögedei Khan. These yurts were first encamped at Avraga site at the base of the Khentii Mountains in Delgerkhaan in Mongolia's Khentii Province.

Ordos

The shrine was entrusted to caretakers known as the Darkhad. Their leader was chosen from the Borjigin clan and was known as the Jinong since the first, Kamala, had been appointed King of Jin. The Darkhad moved from the Kherlen River to the Ordos, which took its name ( Mongolian for "palaces") from the mausoleum's presence there. The caretakers oversaw commemorative and religious rituals and were visited by pilgrims. Mongol khans were also crowned at the yurts.

Under the Qing, 500 Darkhad were exempted from military service and taxation; the shrine also received 500 taels (about ) of silver each year to maintain its rituals.. The site's rituals became more local, more open to lower-class people, and more Buddhist.

The Mongolian prince Toghtakhutörü and the Darkhad built a permanent mausoleum in Setsen Khan Aimag in 1864. This traditional Chinese structure was described by a Belgian missionary in 1875. but was destroyed at the Panchen Lama's suggestion in order to end an outbreak of plague among the Darkhad in early 20th century.

Around the fall of the Qing, the mausoleum became notable as a symbol for Mongolian nationalists. The Buryat scholar Tsyben Zhamtsarano advocated a removal of the shrine to northern Mongolia . After the Mongolian Revolution, a sacrificial rite was held for Genghis Khan to "bring peace and safety to... human beings and other creatures" and to "drive out bandits, thieves, illness, and other internal and external malefactions" in 1912.. Some Mongolians planned to remove some of the ritual objects—particularly the Black Sülde, an allegedly magical heaven-sent trident—to the independent northern Mongolian territory from the Inner Mongolian shrine; in 1914, a letter from the Beijing office overseeing Mongolia and Tibet ordered Arbinbayar, the head of the Ihe Juu League, that

In 1915, Zhang Xiangwen ( t s p''Zhāng Xiāngwén'', wChang Hsiang-wen) began the scholarly controversy over the site of Genghis Khan's tomb by publishing an article claiming that it was in Ejin Horo.

During World War II, Prince Demchugdongrub, the notional leader of the Japanese puppet government in Mongolia, ordered that the mobile tomb and its relics be moved to avoid a supposed "Chinese plot to plunder it".. This was rebuffed by the local leader Shagdarjab, who claimed that the shrines could never be moved and locals would resist any attempt to do so. When he accepted Japanese weaponry to defend it, however, the Nationalist government became alarmed at the possibility of Japan using the cult of Genghis Khan to lead a Mongolian separatist movement. The yurts and their relics were to be removed to Qinghai either at their armed insistence or at Shagdarjab's invitation. (Accounts differ.) The Japanese still attempted to use the cult of Genghis Khan to fan Mongolian nationalism; from 1941–4,. the IJA colonel Kanagawa Kosaku constructed a separate mausoleum in Ulan Hot consisting of 3 main buildings in a estate.

Gansu

Once in Chinese hands, the relics did not go to Qinghai as planned. On 17 May 1939, 200 specially-selected Nationalist troops conveyed the relics to Yan'an, then the principal base of the Chinese Communists. Upon their arrival on 21 June 1939, the Communists held a large public sacrifice to Genghis Khan with a crowd of about ten thousand spectators; the Central Committee presented memorial wreathes; and Mao Zedong produced a new sign for it in his calligraphy, reading "Genghis Khan Memorial Hall" ( t s ''Chéngjísī Hán Jìniàntáng''). As part of the Second United Front, it was allowed to pass out of the Communist controlled area to Xi'an, where Shaanxi governor Jiang Dingwen officiated another religious ritual before a crowd of tens of thousands on 25 June. (Accounts vary from thirty to 200,000.) Li Yiyan, a member of the Nationalists' provincial committee, wrote the booklet ''China's National Hero Genghis Khan'' ( t s ''Zhōnghuá Mínzú Yīngxióng Chéngjísī Hán'') to commemorate the event, listing the khan as a great Chinese leader in the mold of the First Emperor, Emperor Wu, and Emperor Taizong. A few days later, the Gansu governor Zhu Shaoliang held a similar ritual. before enshrining the khan's relics at the Dongshan Dafo Dian on Xinglong Mountain in Yuzhong County. The Gansu government sent soldiers and a chief official for the shrine and brought the remaining Darkhad onto the provincial government's payroll; the original 500 Darkhad were reduced to a mere seven or eight. Following this journey, the shrine remained there for ten years.

Qinghai

At the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War, the Nationalist guard at the temple fled before the Communist advance into Gansu in the summer of 1949. Plans were put forward to move the khan's shrine to the Alxa League in western Inner Mongolia or to Mount Emei in Sichuan. Ultimately, Qinghai's local warlord Ma Pufang intervened and moved it west to Kumbum Monastery near his capital Xining, consecrating it with the help of local and Mongolian lamas under Ulaan Gegen. Following the Communist conquest of Xining a few months later, the Communist general He Banyan sacrificed three sheep to the khan and offered ceremonial scarves (''hadag'') and a banner reading "National Hero" ( ''Mínzú Yīngxióng'') to the temple housing his shrine..

Present-day mausoleum

Ejin Horo fell to the Communists at the end of 1949 and was controlled by their Northwest Bureau until the establishment of Suiyuan Province the next year. The district's Communists set up rituals honouring Genghis Khan in the early 1950s, but abolished the traditional religious offices surrounding them like the Jinong and controlled the cult through local committees with loyal Party cadres. Without the relics, they relied largely on singing and dancing groups. In 1953, the PRC's central government approved the recently-formed Inner Mongolian provincial government's request for 800,000 to create the present permanent structures. Early the next year, the central government permitted the return of the objects at Kumbum to the site being constructed at Ejin Horo. The region's chairman Ulanhu officiated at the first ritual after their return, decrying the Nationalists for having "stolen" them. After this ritual, he immediately held a second ceremony to break ground on a permanent temple to house the objects and the khan's cult, again approved and paid for by China's central government. By 1956, this new temple was completed, greatly expanding the purview of the original shrine. Rather than having eight separate shrines throughout Ejin Horo for the Great Khan, his wives, and his children, all were placed together; a further 20 sacred and venerated objects from around the Ordos were also brought to the new site. The government also mandated that the main ritual would be held in the summer rather than in the third lunar month, in order to make it more convenient for the headers to maintain their spring work schedules. With the Darkhads no longer liable for personally paying for maintenance of the shrine, most accepted these changes. An especially large celebration was held in 1962 to mark the 800th anniversary of Genghis Khan's birth.

In 1968, the Cultural Revolution's Red Guards destroyed almost everything of value at the shrine. For 10 years, the buildings themselves were turned into a salt depot as part of preparations for a potential war with the Soviet Union.

Following Deng Xiaoping's Opening Up Policy, the site was restored by 1982 and sanctioned for " patriotic education" as a AAAA-rated tourist attraction. Replicas of the former relics were made, and a great marble statue of Genghis was completed in 1989. Priests at the museum now claim that all of the Red Guards who desecrated the tomb have died in abnormal ways, suffering a kind of curse.

Inner Mongolians continued to complain about the poor state of the mausoleum. A 2001 proposal for its refurbishment was finally approved in 2004. Unrelated houses, stores, and hotels were removed from the area of the mausoleum to a separate area away and replaced with new structures in the same style as the mausoleum. The 150-million- (about $20 million) improvement plan was carried out from 2005 to 2006, improving the site's infrastructure, expanding its courtyard, and decorating and repairing its existing buildings and walls. The China National Tourism Administration named the site a AAAAA-rated tourist attraction in 2011..

On 10 July 2015, 20 tourists aged 33 to 74—10 South Africans, 9 Britons, and an Indian—were detained at Ordos Ejin Horo Airport, arrested on terrorism-related charges the next day, and ultimately deported from China after they watched a BBC
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