I WAS DELIGHTED to be told by a friend of
mine who knows that part of the world that the memory of Genghiz Khan is still green (or should it be red?) in the Inner Mongolian autono- mous region. The bier of the conqueror has been retrieved from the Ta Erh temple in the Chinese province of Chinghai, where it had been removed by the Kuomintang troops in 1949, and has been placed in a new mausoleum at Ezen Horoo, in the Ordos steppes, Genghiz's original burial site. For sedentary peoples like those of Western Europe it is understandable that the name of Genghiz Khan should awaken disagreeable memories of pyramids of skulls and the general devastation associated with the Mongol conquests, but it should also be remembered that the code of law prevalent in the Mongol domains was a model of its kind and that the influence of Buddhism and Nestorian Christianity combined to produce in the descendants of Genghiz a rough but vigorous civilisation, which bore its fruits when, at the time of the massacre of the inhabitants of Baghdad, Hulagu Khan was careful to spare the Christian population residing in the capital of Islam. I am glad to see the present rulers of Mongolia commemorating the founder of their people by the traditional sacrifices of food and deposition of ceremonial scarves, thereby displaying a respect for their past unemulated, alas, by our contemporary demolishers of country houses and despoilers of the best examples of Victorian railway architecture.
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