Khan

It actually has maritime trade, which is kind of unique in chinese history because they're not big fans of boats a lot of you will know about the treasure fleet that they go and send off and kind of disappears and then they're like we're never doing this boat stuff again also because it's something that happens in kublai khan's reign um but yeah the song have this very very built-up bureaucracy the jinn in the north are sort of flipped instead of having confucian bureaucrats be in charge of everything, you have the sort of military aristocracy of a group of people called the Jurchen.

Now, Jurchen aren't Han, what the Chinese will claim is the native Chinese people, just a whole other debate.

But they're ruling in a more militaristic style, and they've sort of abandoned the civil service exam, which during the reigns of the Khans has been around for decades.

a thousand years roughly.

And the concept of it is everyone, if you want to work in government, you take this exam.

He's seen withdrawing from government because some of his various ministers have died, including Liao Buzhong, who I mentioned earlier.

he's dead at this point his wife is dead so he decides in 1294 i'm just gonna die so he passes away and he's carried north and this is the only really the biggest on chinese thing well I take that back because it is sort of Chinese building a hidden tomb.

He goes and is buried in Mongolia in the secret burial grounds of the Khans.

But there was still one part of the old empire that Timur never got close to, and that was China.

Well, it just so happened that a new Chinese dynasty had risen to power and overpowered the Khans and pushed them right out of the capital and then out of China.

This was the Ming Dynasty.

And they overthrew the Khans in China over three decades before.

I mean, Timur was just a young whippersnapper riding around with his friend Hussein when the Mongolians were overthrown in China.

I wouldn't be surprised if China had always been on Timur's hit list.

But they'd never quite managed to finish the job.

The legacy of the great Khans of old still held enough power to stir the steps into alarming action even 400 years after Genghis had left earth.

And that was still terrifying to its settled neighbors.

The only real, permanent way of nullifying the power of the Khans was to absorb and consume them by accepting the formal surrender of the last scions of House Borjigin and rendering them into pampered and kept nobles within the realm, at last adding that winter direwolf into the imperial menagerie now as a muzzled lapdog.

It therefore wasn't even enough for Galdan to simply die.

That outcome would only leave the black horsehair banner for another to take up.

Gulligling produced a letter written by his master to the emperor.

It read, quote, Buddha teaches that humans

They were simply the next logical target, and one out of necessity since he had promised his subjects gold and treasure.

They had insulted the Mongols, betrayed them, opposed them, cruelly executed one of their predecessor Khans, and now the time for them to receive their just desserts had arrived.

Yet by the end of this conflict, a little more than two decades later, everything about Genghis himself and his vision of the Mongol place on the world stage will have undergone a complete metamorphosis.

Weatherford puts it, "...with Genghis Khan's decision to cross the Gobi and invade the Jurchen in 1211, he had begun not just another Chinese border war.

So this was some-- maybe city is perhaps a generous description for what it was.

But what we can see from the archaeology is that this is a settlement that is inhabited in, uh, contemporary to this period, early 13th century, abandoned in the 14th century, I believe, and was probably starting as a, uh, a place for some formal gatherings and for the holding of loot and sort of serving as a winter residence for the Khans.

Um, and this will be in our early parts of the 13th century prior to the establishment of Karakorum, Karakorum.

This will serve as the quasi-capital of the Mongol Empire.

This, uh, floodplain between the Onon and Kherlen or Kherlen Rivers, this is his birthplace of Genghis Khan himself.

Here, this is, uh, some forest steppe, uh, floodplain.

Um, and if you go a bit further north, you end up at the mountain Burkhan Khaldun, which is this sacred mountain to the, uh, Mongols and is still today a very holy site in Mongolia and where many of the great Khans of the early empire and probably many other members of the imperial family are buried upon.

I wanna emphasize that because, um, the later capital, Karakorum, and the preceding, uh, capitals of steppe empires such as the Gokturks or the Uyghurs are based further west in the Orhon Valley.

This powerful general of western Chagatai spent the next 15 years raiding into northern India and coming back with annual booty, and the writers respected his overall authority, but only because it sued them at the time.

They knew he had no legal claim to rule over them through a handful of puppet Khans.

While Timur was a teenager, he rode side by side with the grandson of this general, a boy named Hussein.

Hussein and Timur would develop a close bond in their youth, which would extend to their later years when life became much more dangerous.

They were their prisoners to torture and to exploit and to kill as they pleased.

It was very hard to train the Khan's son when he was a monster.

They would ride into a small village that used to be Timur's subjects, and instead of acting like kings, they acted like Khans.

Khoja chased down those who fled and shot arrows into their backs.

Well, so what happens is that Some of the groups in Mongolia in the western part of the plateau, so the Naiman, Hanites, are employing Uyghurs who are living in what we call the Tarim Basin as scribes and administrators.

So they're making census data, they're recording edicts of the Khans.

And when the Mongols conquer them in 1204, They see this system, they really like it, and they adopt it.

So the Uyghurs are brought on as chiefly the kind of scribal, administrative, bureaucratic element of the early empire.

But we actually have a decent bit of this material surviving from the 13th and 14th centuries.

You can look.

There are letters written by the Khans of the Ilkhanites sent to the popes and kings of France, which still survive in their original form.

And it's really beautiful documents.

Ichan Qala's 30-foot brick walls surround 64 acres of preserved and restored monuments and dwellings, a site where caravans once rested before launching desert treks east to Bukhara or south to ancient Persia.

The oldest structures date to the 14th century, but the city was built primarily in the 18th and 19th centuries by the Khans of the Khungrad dynasty.

a refined aristocracy of warrior kings.

It's less a bustling old-town district in the way of Samarkand or Bukhara, and more an open-air museum.

But I also saw there in the off-season what I could only presume to be Kivans walking through the silent grounds, holding hands, scanning the closed shops, crossing fake bridges over the fake canal.

Who knows what people want, I thought, or need.

My last stop in Kiva was the Nurulaboy Palace, built by one of the region's last Khans after he'd visited St. Petersburg and come away impressed by the architecture of my birthplace.

The palace is full of beautifully carved wood and elaborate plasterwork, and unlike, say, Arda Kiva, it struck me as being both over-the-top and tasteful.