It was the first week of warm, summer weather in Ulaanbaatar, a city where the temperature was still below zero on some nights only last month.
There was a music and folklore festival on Sukhbaatar Square outside the Mongolian government palace where weeks of demonstrations toppled the prime minister last week.
A few blocks away, a wedding party was posing for pictures outside the ornate, black and gold entrance to the Genghis Khan National Museum. The museum has been open for less than three years but it has already become one of the city’s most popular landmarks and tourist attractions.
With eight floors of exhibition space beneath a gleaming domed room, the museum’s 12,000 artefacts cover 2,000 years of history surrounding the Mongol Empire. Stretching from the Sea of Japan to Hungary, it was the largest contiguous empire in human history, established by Genghis Khan and expanded by his successors.
The museum illustrates some of the innovative methods Genghis Khan brought to warfare, including new weapons technology such as lightweight bows and arrows and the use of propaganda. He sent agents to cities he planned to attack, instructing them to frighten the populace with stories of the Mongols’ savagery in the hope that they would surrender without a fight.
Many visitors to Ulaanbaatar take a day trip out of the city to view a 40 metre tall stainless steel statue of Genghis Khan, which is the claimed to be world’s tallest equestrian statue. There is another statue of him outside the government palace on Sukhbaatar Square, where foreign dignitaries on official visits bow before it to show their respect.
When Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of Russia’s State Duma, visited Ulaanbaatar two years ago, he caused public outrage by refusing to bow before the statue. Pope Francis had bowed before the statue only a couple of weeks earlier, and Vladimir Putin made the same gesture when he visited the city.
Volodin’s offence struck a deep chord among Mongolians who recalled how the memory of Genghis Khan was suppressed when the country was a communist state under heavy Soviet influence.
In Ulaanbaatar this week, they were still talking about what happened during the 800th anniversary of Genghis Khan’s birth in 1964.
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One of his descendants living in China was a leader of the Chinese autonomous region of Inner Mongolia and he persuaded the authorities to build a mausoleum of Genghis Khan.
Daramyn Timur-Ochir, a member of the politburo of Mongolia’s communist party, heard about the Chinese plan to mark the anniversary and suggested that the warlord should be commemorated in his homeland too.
The politburo decided to build a monument, issue a postage stamp, commission a documentary film, organise a scientific conference and produce a Marxist appraisal of the role of Genghis Khan in Mongolian history.
The Soviet embassy then sent a report to Moscow about the conference, complaining that the Mongolian government “declared that Mongolia’s accession to the United Nations was to the credit of Genghis Khan when it was to the credit of the people”.
When Mongolia’s communist leader Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal visited Moscow shortly afterwards, Nikita Khrushchev demanded to know what the Mongolians were thinking by issuing a postage stamp commemorating Genghis Khan. Tsedenbal returned to Ulaanbaatar and ordered that the monument that had been built for the anniversary should be destroyed, but local officials never carried out the order.
Within three months, Timur-Ochir was purged from the politburo and the Soviets later blamed the Chinese for encouraging the Mongolians to foster a cult of Genghis Khan.
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A few decades later, with Mongolia now well established as a liberal parliamentary democracy with much weaker ties to Moscow, it is China that is trying to suppress Genghis Khan’s memory.
Five years ago, the Château des ducs de Bretagne history museum in Nantes said it was postponing an exhibition about him that was due to open in February 2021.
The exhibition was developed in collaboration with the Inner Mongolia Museum in the Chinese city of Hohhot, but the museum director in Nantes called the project off following a number of interventions by the Chinese government.
The Chinese Bureau of Heritage told the museum to remove the words Genghis Khan, Empire and Mongol from the exhibition’s title and requested full control of the catalogue, explanatory texts and communications related to the exhibition. The Nantes museum claimed a proposed new synopsis included “biased rewriting aimed at making Mongolian history and culture completely disappear for the benefit of a new national story”.
The exhibition was finally staged last year without Chinese co-operation and instead of featuring objects from the museum in Hohhot, most of its exhibits came from collections in Mongolia, including the Genghis Khan National Museum in Ulaanbaatar.
