Mongolia is Awesome: Blizzard vs. the Golden Horde

Some of you may be familiar with the gaming phenomenon “World of Warcraft,” or at the very least with the enlightening South Park episode about it. Part of the brilliance of WoW lies in the fact that people keep playing it, and keep paying for it. In addition to paying the regular price of the game, gamers have to pay $20 each month to stay connected to the World part of  Warcraft, and because the game is engineered to keep people playing, Blizzard makes millions from regular subscriptions, in addition to the money from selling the game.

But Orcs and Elves are no match for the Mongols. Apparently, in Mongolia, players just don’t have to pay the monthly subscription fee. Though they have to pay for the game (and a computer), apparently there is a nationwide hacked account that gives Mongolians access to the game for free. This was described to me as “an official Mongolian server” for WoW, but what exactly “official” entails was not made completely clear. Though I doubt that it’s official in the sense of government-sponsored, this is Mongolia, and the government could be just that Awesome.

Mongolia is Awesome: Talkh Ba Sercus

What could this funny round structure be? If you thought it looks like a giant blue billboarded ger, as I did when I first saw it, then you’ve probably been in Mongolia too long. In fact, it’s actually the State Circus. Like the State Department store, this was government controlled during communist rule, and I think that, like the Department store, it has been privatized. (Though I'm not sure about this.)

Generally the circus features acrobats and jugglers, and its specialty is Mongolian contortionists. (Most cultural performances here, even a little concert performed just for me at a restaurant, feature young contortionists.) One guy I talked to said he even saw a Russian circus traveling through (with elephants!) once a few years ago. Privatization or not, this is probably pretty much what went on here during communism, too.

It amuses me (and I think it’s Awesome) that the socialist state, along with education and health care and a department store, saw fit to fund something as whimsical and unnecessary as a circus. But, of course, I have to remember that authoritarian governments often choose the obvious and unnecessary over more practical but less people-pleasing endeavors. I guess the communists had been reading their Juvenal and thinking that literal “bread and circuses” might work for them, too.

But Juvenal never met a Mongol, and as the 1990 Revolution proved, Mongolia is Awesome enough to decide eventually that bread and circuses, (and education and health care) aren’t a fair trade for freedom.

Mongolia is Awesome: Names Edition

I’ve mentioned illegal gold mining briefly before, but I didn’t include the most important detail of the movement. In some areas, illegal miners are referred to as “ninjas,” which is pretty cool, I guess. But why they are called ninjas launches this into some of the sheerest Awesomeness yet encountered.

You see, they often mine at night, and have to climb out with their great green bowls strapped to their backs. (The bowls/buckets are for panning, maybe?) Because of their resemblance to giant turtles, and their midnight activities, they were nicknamed (if you know where this is going, I love you) “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and called “ninjas” for short.

That’s right, the TMNT are real and operating in the outskirts of Mongolia. Does this make the mining companies Shredder?

 Mongols or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Does it matter?

Mongolia is Awesome: Medieval Freedom of Religion (Wait, What?)

The Mongol Empire doesn't exactly have a great reputation for mercy or compassion or pretty much anything that’s not, you know, conquering the known world and then conquering the unknown bits and then finding another known world to conquer. I can’t say they didn’t have a great PR department, though, because actually their reputation for brutality and total war was deliberately cultivated; as a result of it, some cities would raise a white flag just because they heard the word “Mongol” in order to avoid suffering the same fate as Baghdad. But centuries later, in an era with different values, people tend to remember the cruelty of the Mongols and the destruction they wreaked. One word that probably doesn’t spring to mind when we hear “Mongols”: Tolerance.

Yet the Mongol Empire was a member of a rare  breed of medieval society, the religiously tolerant one. The khans, because they conquered such vast expanses of land, governed peoples of many different religions, and they pretty much had no preference as to what religion their subjects practiced. All major religions were allowed to practice freely in lands the Mongols governed, with the result that many towns had populations and of several different religions, mostly sects of Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Nestorian Christianity, and (in certain areas) Judaism. There were no forced conversions, no purges, and the khans, to ensure stability in their realms, even had to ensure that they did not offend any particular religious community. Some khans did practice their own religion--Chinggis Khaan relied heavily on shamans, and many khans  (including the originally Nestorian Teguder turned Ahmad) converted to Islam. But most khans were decidedly unreligious, and they catered to multiple religions to gain favor with different religious communities. Kublai Khan, for example, sent messengers to Jerusalem with instructions to worship there on his behalf, and many wives and mothers of Khans were Nestorians, as I’ve pointed out. According to the European diplomat William of Rubrick, who visited Karakorum in the 1250s, the Great Khan actually asked him to participate in a religious debate at the court with a Nestorian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist. The Ilkhan Arghun is a near picture-perfect example of Mongol religious diversity, and the necessary flexibility of the Khans: He was a devout Buddhist married to a Byzantine Christian, and he had his son (who later converted to Islam) baptized into Nestorianism.

Of course, reading about the Mongol Empire of tolerance, my mind can’t help but draw comparisons between it and another tolerant realm—medieval Spain. There are plenty of differences between the nature of tolerance in the two kingdoms. The Mongol khans, as I pointed out, generally had no strong religious affiliations, and even if one did, a new khan would eventually replace him, and probably one of a different religion. In Spain, however, minority religions were usually ruled by the majority, with Christian kings allowing Muslims (and Jews) in their domains, or vice versa. This meant that although religions were tolerated, one was preferred. Furthermore, certain rulers or certain political climates would often have tragic results for minority religious communities, as eventually the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel did for tolerance itself in Spain. In the Mongol Empire, however, religiously motivated violence was not tolerated, keeping people mostly in line. Yet in both realms, the atmosphere could be tense, and outbreaks of religious violence did occur, though more frequently in Spain than in Mongol-ruled lands. Yet it was in the khans’ best interest to keep all religious communities happy, so the communities were, in a sense, forced to get along (or at least accept the existence of the others).

This is another similarity with Spanish tolerance—it was very much practically motivated. Simply put, the khans could not have held onto so much land if they insisted on a single religion. Their policy of tolerance was one meant to keep them in power, and their attempts to appease all religious groups (to gain their favor) demonstrates this. Khans who overstepped this boundary could be quickly ousted and replaced, while khans like Kublai who were careful not to step on any toes were more likely to last. The sparsely populated nature of both the Mongol realm and the Spanish meseta also necessitated this policy; there weren’t enough people to make any sort of religious demands, as everyone who could be spared was needed to work and protect the land. Furthermore, when people of certain minority religions had valuable skills or resources, it was in rulers’ best interest to accept these religions and keep these people around. This was the case with Jews in Medieval Spain; since they spoke Hebrew and often Arabic, and because of their vital position as money lenders (and their even more vital tax revenue), they were key figures in both Christian and Muslim Spanish courts. Similarly, educated Nestorian monks were valuable to Mongol khans, when neither literacy nor governance were strong suits of the Mongols. (This was likely behind Kublai’s request that Marco Polo send 100 Nestorian monks back to his capital so that they could “help convert people.”) And in both these cases, favoring minority religions could lead to unrest with the majority religions. In both Christian and Muslim-ruled Spain, courtiers often resented the presence and influence of Jews; this sometimes erupted in violence, as in the 1066 pogrom in Granada and the multiple pogroms of the fourteenth century. In the thirteenth-century Ilkhanate (the Mongol khanate governing Persia and sometimes, its surrounding lands), Islam was the majority religion, and Muslims often felt that the Mongols favored foreign religions, partially because courts were filled with educated members of the Nestorian clergy, and partially because most Ilkhans at that time were not Muslims.

So although the Mongol version of tolerance and the Spanish version of tolerance were different in significant ways, religiously diverse communities in the Middle Ages fell victim to the same sorts of woes: tension, outbreaks of violence, and a tolerance that was practical rather than ideological. I wonder if/how we have managed, in a modern world, to leave all of these woes behind.

But this isn’t a meditation; I just wanted to let everyone know that, though the Mongols may not have won Miss Congeniality at the pageant, while people (myself included) are looking to the “community of tolerance” in Spain for lessons, they may be missing out on something even more Awesome: an Empire of Tolerance.

Mongolia is Awesome: Even Before There Were People

The Gobi desert in the south of Mongolia is a paleontologist’s paradise; for whatever reasons (the heat, its aridity, and the previous creature populations, I’m guessing), the Gobi is a treasure trove of fossils. Rare finds like a pair of fighting dinosaurs and a dino-mommy hunched over her eggs were unearthed in the Gobi, most likely the result of dune collapses or sudden sandstorms. In 2006, paleontologists found 67 dinosaur skeletons in one week (which sounds like a lot to me), and many new species of dinosaurs or other ancient creatures have been discovered in Mongolia, such as this “giant parrot” dinosaur. (Personal Note: I will be in the Gobi, probably seeing a fossil or two, in a couple weeks!)

All of that is awesome, but it’s not quite Mongolia-level Awesome yet. That’s because I’ve left the kickers for the end. The only example of the skull of the Andrewsarchus was discovered in Mongolia by Roy Chapman Andrews (he’s kind of a big deal) in 1923. (Well, that’s not quite true; it was discovered by Kan Cheun Pao, a member of Andrews’s team who does not even have his own Wikipedia page. Something about that scenario seems so typical.) The Andrewsarchus is pretty freaking Awesome, and even before I got to Mongolia, I was hoping to meet one of these bad boys. Note that the BBC describes it as “the largest carnivorous land mammal ever.” Apparently their show “Walking with Beasts” also called it the “Whale-Killer” and featured a clip of two of them hunting whales. Although the BBC has maybe taken a few liberties with the information that can actually be gleaned from a piece of skull, it can’t be denied that a giant roaming carnivore with jaws that can crush bone and a silhouette like a werewolf is Awesome. And the moral of this story is that I have to find fossils of the coolest dinosaur ever and name it the ALICEOSAURUS KHAAN.

Though this was meant to be a post just about the Andrewsarchus, in my research I came across something even more Awesome about Mongolia. Maybe you have heard of velociraptors, just about the scariest and most intense dinosaurs ever, according to XKCD (my paleontological authority). They are the primary villiains in Jurassic Park, and since then they have been immortalized in popular culture and a meme or two. And you know where this is going…

All velociraptor fossils ever discovered have been found in Mongolia (Inner and Outer), and the official name of the main velociraptor species is “Velociraptor Mongoliensis.” That’s right: Steven Spielberg owes Mongolia big time.

Mongolia is Awesome: DESTROY!

That’s just how the Mongols cut and blowdry. The best part is that it’s two doors down from “Victory Fashion Shop.”

Mongolia is Awesome: Mare's Milk and Meat, Meat, Meat

When traveling to exotic locales, the food is often part of the appeal. People want to eat at authentic restaurants and savor the spices of India or the cheeses of France or the genuine, cilantro-free molé of Mexico. As for Mongolia… Well, I get a lot of sympathy from people over the food. People want to know, how awful is it? Have you eaten rancid yak butter? Fermented mare’s milk? Wouldn’t you kill for a burger? And I myself was concerned about having to eat sheep shoulder and brain or whatever. In UB, the food is generally average—There’s mediocre foreign food (i.e. cheeseburgers, pastas, sandwiches) and mediocre Mongolian food (tasteless dumplings or mutton soup). But after spending a week in the countryside, eating real actual Mongolian food, I am categorizing my Food post under “Mongolia is Awesome.” So let me explain why. 

Firstly, I want to say that with the exception of the first day of my trek from UB, I was never hungry on my trip. While actually in Darkhad, I had not a single hunger pang, nor even a feeling, “I’d like to eat now.” The reason for this is threefold: Mongolian hospitality, milk tea, and the nature of Mongolian food. Mongolians are known (at least by those who know about Mongolia) for their hospitality; they have a sort of “open door” policy on visitors, meaning that in the countryside, you can just stop by a ger and be welcomed as a guest. They’ll provide tea, food at meal times, and you can pitch your tent outside their ger. So pretty much any time maybe I might have been hungry soon, I was being offered a bowl of soup and a cup of tea. And when I say, “They’ll provide tea,” I really mean it. The first thing that any Mongolian does when you arrive in her home is pull up a stool for you (or gesture to the bed/couch) and pour you a cup of tea. It’s as necessary a rule as asking if a guest wants a drink in the States, except here it’s performed with absolute consistency.  So, visiting 3-5 gers a day, I drank a lot of tea. The other thing about Mongolian hospitality is that you’re required to accept. It’s rude not to take any of what’s offered, though you can take just a small amount, if you like. When someone offers you vodka, you at least take a sip; when someone offers you snuff, you sniff the top of the bottle if you don’t want any. So when a nomad offered me tea, I had to accept. Although theoretically I probably only had to take a sip, the American in me still found taking only a sip and not finishing to be ruder than not accepting at all, I guess. So I drank every single cup of milk tea. Even if I hadn’t been eating a lot, I imagine the constant supply of milk tea would have kept me from getting too hungry. And the final reason for my lack of hunger is that the food is always filling. Apart from being offered a lot of it, it is all dairy, meat, and flour based, which I assure you kept me very satisfied. A cup of milk tea and a khuushuur (meat wrapped in a flour shell and then fried in oil) is pretty filling. And three cups of tea (from three gers) and three khuushuurs (because they are so damn good) is beyond filling.

So what exactly did I eat in Darkhad? To be honest, I’m not 100% sure. The meat and dairy products they served me were generally pretty ambiguous. Prof C told me on the first day in Darkhad that I was eating beef, but at some point in the week, they pulled out an animal’s leg that was definitely not cow—goat, I think, or sheep. And for our journey back, we ate some neck meat that came from a bone that did not look bovine sized. (Note: I do not recommend neck meat.) And though I ate a lot of cream, the family milked both cows and yaks, so I’m not sure which it came from. (Actually, I didn’t notice them keeping the milks separate, and they always referred to both cows and yaks as “ukhur,” so I probably had a mixture of both.) So I can’t give many details as to the type of meat/milk I was eating, but I will say this: It was delicious. A diet based in meat and dairy and bread is my kind of diet. ( I do confess, though, that the lack of fruits and vegetables—or should I say, the absence of fruits and vegetables in Darkhad—really got to me. It may not be an exaggeration to say that no one has ever been as excited about pickled carrots, peppers, and cucumbers as when I was offered vegetable preserves in Ulaan Uul.) At our family’s home, we ate a lot of noodle soup with bits of meat, and one night I had just noodles mixed up with meat. Though everyone else added milk tea to theirs to make it more soupy, I loved it just as it was, and I ate two bowls of it. I had fried fish (with just the right amount of pepper ) out of a paper sleeve (from my notebook) and both meat and fish khuushuurs. While still on the drive up, we stopped by a ger for wild strawberries and cream on bread, and in Ulaan Uul, I had beef ripped straight from the bone. The most glorious food of all, though, was breakfast. Every morning I got homemade bread (with such a delicious crust) topped with some substance that was half-cream, half-butter (it reminded me of clotted cream, actually), and loads of sugar. It was amazing. Although at times I felt like maybe bread, sugar, and cream wasn’t the healthiest start to the day, I figured it’s not much worse than American breakfast cereals, and at least mine was real sugar and not corn syrup, and fresh full cream instead of the ultra-pasteurized half-water skimmed milk parents sometimes make their kids have.

And that might be the secret to Mongolian country food: It’s fresh. I got to see the family milking the cows (and even helped a tiny bit myself!), and then I got to eat that delicious milk the next morning. We bought tiny (non-GMO!) wild strawberries from kids who’d just picked them on the mountain, and we ate them by the handful. One special treat was sitting by Tsaagan Nuur (White Lake, named for the whitefish in abundance there), watching some boys pull fish out of their nets, standing by while they scaled and gutted them on the banks, and getting to eat those fish for lunch. There is nothing quite like fresh fish, and from lake to plate in less than an hour is about as fresh as it gets. (Lake-to-plate is just an analogy, though—there were no plates.) Most people in the countryside didn’t have a refrigerator, so food had to be consumed that day. If there was extra, it had to be eaten before any new food was made. And most of it was made from scratch. Though the herder families don’t grind the grain themselves, they do raise the animals whose milk and meat they eat, and they make all their bread, dumplings, noodles, etc. themselves. In the afternoons, the girls would be kneading bread dough or rolling out flour dough and cutting it into noodles, and in the mornings, the mother of the family pulled bread out of the pan and cut it into slices for us. Simple food made by hand from a farm’s own resources can be a million times better than refrigerated, cleansed, chemistried, packaged products sent from miles away. And back-to-the-basics is just so delicious. I don’t care what the gastrochefs say: Wild strawberries with fresh cream on newly baked bread… to me, that’s gourmet.


That all being said, I did have a few culinary adventures, not all of them good. The milk tea (often with salt, thus described as “salty milk tea”) took getting used to. The first few times I drank it, I literally had to hide my gagging, but now I can drink two cups at a time, though I don’t see why I would. (A note: It is often served scaldingly hot, so I used to have to wait a while before I could start on it, and even so my tongue was permanently burnt. Prof C, however, explained that you’re supposed to slurp at hot tea. The very idea of slurping was repulsive to me at first, but I have to say, it works. That may have been the hardest thing for me to get used to --even harder than sleeping on the floor, wearing clothes for 5 days straight, and Mongolian toilets-- getting over years of stringent manners education and learning how to slurp up my tea.) For a final adventure, though I had managed not to encounter all the really nasty bits of animals in Darkhad, on the way back I ended up having to try some. We stopped in Moron to sleep and for Prof C to meet up with some friends, and we stayed in his friend’s guesthouse. For lunch, a woman brought in a huge bowl filled with something that smelled kind of inedible. I looked into the bowl, and there was some sort of a head. It was sheep-sized, but it had a weird brown skin stretched over it, so it didn’t have eyes or ears or anything. The only thing that identified it as a head (besides its general shape) was a twisted black and red tongue sticking out of a gaping maw near the bottom of the shape. I was thinking, “Oh my God, I cannot eat that,” and my face probably expressed as much. Everyone else dove into it, while I sat and hid in my guidebook. At one point, though, Prof C pointed to the bowl of meat he’d just been tearing from the jawbone and said, “Alice, please, take.” And there’s that damned Mongolian rule of unrefusal. So I reached out and took a piece that looked more like meat and less like gums than the rest; it was fine, and I nodded and retreated back to my book, my duties done. Or so I thought. A minute later, Prof C picked up some gel-like snowy white bit. “Alice, eat this. It is sheep’s tail; it is very good. It is not like fat—it is like cream.” I had to assent, and he cut off a piece and handed it to me. I bit at a tiny bit. It was mostly like fat. Or, it was like eating a slimy gummy bear that tasted like sheep. As I gnawed away, Prof C explained that in Mongolia, they give babies sheep tail to suck on instead of pacifiers. So I was basically eating a nomad binky. I ate it all off the bit of hairy skin still attached, put the skin down, and thankfully I was not offered more. In fact, Prof C seemed to take pity on me and told a girl to give me some khuushuurs she was preparing.

And, in case anyone was wondering, I did get to try airag, Mongolian fermented mare’s milk! Airag is a Central Asian quirk that is just repulsive enough to get a lot of attention, as in this article. Wikitravel describes the taste as ranging "from bile-like to a mixture of lemonade and sour cream.” So although I was apprehensive, it’s actually really good for you, and it’s very Mongolian, so I wanted to try some. Luckily, I got my chance pretty soon into the countryside. On our first day trekking, we stopped to lend a wrench to a stranded family. When they’d finished with it, they offered us some mare’s milk. As he poured it into a bowl for us, Prof C told us that we should only drink a little because it was our first time. (Fermented milk products tend to cause stomach upset upon first consumption.)  Nervous about the gastrointestinal repercussions, I only had a small sip. And I have surprising news… It was fine! Maybe that says something about my taste, but I actually could have drunk a whole cup, and maybe later this trip, I will. It tasted somewhat familiar; Prof C suggested like yogurt, which is possible, though I despise yogurt. Later I realized that it might remind me of the aftertaste of Old Rosie cider, my favorite cider at the Turf Tavern at Oxford. Most people dislike or sort of hate Old Rosie (one man described it as just “quaffable”), and though I didn’t like the aftertaste, I didn’t mind it because I like the cider as a whole better than Strongbow’s. So I guess that got me used to the aftertaste, and now I can drink airag like a pro (or at least, not like an American). But I have to say, I do worry if the cider I was drinking for 6 months had an aftertaste like fermented mare’s milk…

Mongolia is Awesome: Ogedei's Secret

At the National History Museum of Mongolia yesterday, I came across quite a few interesting things (hopefully to be posted about later), but one was especially Awesome.

There are tons of reasons why the Mongol Horde had such success in battle, but one thing that kept them in tip-top shape was a bit more… inconspicuous. Apparently, underneath their chain mail (some of which was shown in the exhibit), they wore undergarments made of Chinese silk. Because silk is so tightly woven, an arrow losing speed is less likely to penetrate the fabric, so the silk works as a luxurious, soft, bulletproof vest. (Archers out there might be familiar with this idea, seen when a weak shot bounces off the cloth of a target rather than sticking in it.) This isn’t the point, though, as much as its medical advantage. Even when the point of an arrow still gets through the chain mail and silk, the silk decreases the chance that the barbs will enter the would (sources differ as to how--either by slowing its trajectory, entering the wound with the arrow, or, most likely, not ripping widely enough to allow the barbs to enter). During removal of the arrow, barbs cause a lot of damage (just picture it), so silk mitigates that damage and wounds are less likely to get infected. A medic treating a Mongol in silk would grip the fabric to pull the arrow out, leaving a cleaner wound.

So, yeah, even a Mongol’s drawers were ready for a fight.

Mongolia is Awesome: Stand Up For Your Rights!

Stalin had told Genden multiple times that he should get around to destroying Buddhist temples and purging the monks, but Genden refused to do so. Genden resented growing Soviet ambitions to control Mongolia and use it as their own satellite state, and at some point, Genden called the Soviets “Red Imperialists.” When Genden was in Moscow in 1935, he had a few too many vodkas (he was a very heavy drinker) and shouted at Stalin, “You bloody Georgian, you have become a virtual Russian Czar!” Yeah, that’s right. Genden told Stalin what everyone else was thinking years before they even knew they were thinking it.

But that’s not all: The tension swiftly escalated into physical conflict, and as the story goes, Stalin kicked Genden’s walking stick, Genden literally slapped Stalin across the face in return, and smashed Stalin’s pipe on the table. Thus he proved, in case anyone had forgotten, that the Mongolians have no fear, and they will slap mass-murdering dictators if they feel like it. Also that they hate smoking. (Kidding!)

Though one moral of this story might sound like, “You will do Awesome things if you get drunk enough,” another moral is definitely, “You will face the consequences for your drunken antics.” Back in Mongolia, Genden was voted out of office for threatening Mongolian-Russian relations, and a couple years later Stalin had him arrested and executed for being a Japanese spy and conspiring with Buddhist radicals. Although, I guess, if you’ve got to die (and you pretty much were going to die soon under that regime), you might as well have smashed Stalin’s pipe while you were alive.

Mongolia is Awesome: Who needs kegs when you can have a dragon-head fountain?

When researching Mongolia, one comes across (rather frequently, actually) facts about the country that pretty accurately reflect how just plain Awesome it is. One of the first of these I found is the following:

When Karakorum was the thriving capital of the Mongol Empire and the Mongols had more riches than they knew what to do with, they captured a French sculptor and brought him to Karakorum specifically because they wanted a goldsmith to aestheticize their excess. Then they commissioned a fountain that was a giant tree with an angel at the top and 4 dragon heads coming out of the trunk. But here’s the best part… This fountain did not dispense water, because who needs water, really? Instead, when a trumpeter blew a bugle, servants began to pump, and from one dragon’s head flowed wine, from one flowed rice wine, from one flowed honey mead, and from the last flowed airag (the fermented mare’s milk drink that is a staple of the countryside).

Do you need any more proof that Mongolia is Awesome?