A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Introduction 19
is traversed by a number of rivers descending from them and then
turning north toward Siberia.Two of these, the Orkhon and the Tula,
are associated with several crucial stages of Turkic and Mongol history.
It was along the Orkhon that the first Turkic empires had their political
and religious centers: the Kök Turks erected here their eighth-century
funerary monuments famous for commemorative inscriptions, and the
Uighur Turks had their ordubaligh or capital, Qarabalghasun, in the same
general area during the eighth and ninth centuries.When in the thirteenth
century the Mongols moved to this area from the east, replacing
the Turks, they founded here Qaraqorum as the charismatic center of
the Genghisid empire (a decision made by Genghis Khan, but carried
out only by his son Ögedey in 1235).Qaraqorum in turn dwindled with
the collapse of that empire, but the site’s charismatic role re-emerged in
1586 when the Mongols, converting to Lamaistic Buddhism, built there
the prestigious monastery Erdeni Dzu.
The Orkhon rises in the Hangai and eventually receives the Tula,
which originates in the Hentei range.It was to the valley of the Tula that
the center of religious and political gravity moved in subsequent centuries;
the at first peripatetic Urga, the headquarters of Bogdo Gegen, the
chief lama who eventually also became the political head of the theocratic
state, stabilized there by 1779.In 1924 Urga was renamed Ulan
Bator (“Red Hero” in Mongolian, where it is spelled Ulaanbaatar), a
name change symbolizing the transformation of Mongolia from a
Buddhist monarchy to a Communist republic.
The Hentei range also gives rise to two other important rivers, the
Onon and Kerulen.Although their sources lie close to those of the Tula,
they flow east and eventually cross Mongolia’s border, the Onon entering
Siberia and the Kerulen China.It was between these two rivers that
a people called Mongols emerged in the twelfth century, having moved
there from their earlier habitat, believed to have been the adjacent forest
zone to the north.When Temujin was acclaimed as their supreme leader
and assumed the title of Genghis Khan in 1206, the ceremony took
place on a sacred mountain called Burkan Kaldun somewhere among
the eastern slopes of the Hentei range near the sources of the Onon.
If the territory between the Onon and the Kerulen can be viewed as
the staging area of the Mongols readying themselves for the conquest of
the world, the immediate neighborhood to the southeast was the home
of their close relatives, the Tatars.This name and group, which appear
in the Orkhon inscriptions as well as in Chinese sources, had a
destiny inverse to that of the Mongols: as a people, the Tatars were partly