The Long Journey to the Forbidden Steppe
Thank you for visiting my site and for coming here to read my first ever post.
When presenting my ideas to live audiences, I am usually asked ‘what made me start this journey?’ My answer; I blame my wife, the author John Man and the death of my dear dad at Christmas time, back in 2007.
At the time, because of the festivity period, I was having difficulty finalising my father’s burial arrangements. So my wife went and bought me John’s book ‘Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection’, to read and take my mind off matters in hand.
Khan Khenti on GoogleAs I recall, while reading the section on Genghis’s burial, I pondered; ‘how come after 800 years of looking on the same mountain in Mongolia no one has ever found his grave’. It reminded me of Einstein’s supposed quote;
‘insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’.
A Crazy Idea Came Into My Head
While reading John’s book in the late hours of the cold January night, I had an idea! ‘Maybe they were all looking in the wrong place’!
So I got up switched on the old desktop and fired up good old Google Earth. Very quickly, in half an hour or so, I convinced myself there was indeed another mountain that also fitted the facts John Man described in his book.
Conventional view on the source of the river OnonHow is the source of a river determined?
As I kept on reading, it seemed the key to the mystery was the whereabouts of the source of the River Onon. Because there, somewhere in north east Mongolia, the source rose at a mountain where the sacred burial site was supposed to be.
The mountain was called Burkhan Khaldun and convention had its location on Khan Khenti. But, no one has ever found anything up there that suggests it is a burial site, let alone where the Great Khan is buried.
Khan Khenti Burkhan Khaldun
So I began to wonder ‘how and who decided where the source of a river occured?’ And, in this case, where was the real source of the River Onon in north east Mongolia?
Solve that mystery and the whereabouts of the Great Khan’s burial site would follow. Easy Peasy; so I thought!
But very soon it dawned on me, the fundamental issue to address here was;
Where did the 13th Century Mongol chroniclers believe the source of the river Onon to be?
And so my journey began!!!
To be continued…
The discovery of the ‘Chao Pi Chi’, known in the west as ‘The Secret History of the Mongols’ (SH), resurrected interest in the largely forgotten history of the 13th Century Mongols.
With it, fascination on the whereabouts of the burial grounds of the Mongol Great Khans grew amongst academics, historians and the interested public.
Ongoing speculation led to the ‘notion’ the burial grounds were on the mountain that ‘saved’ Genghis Khan’s life, said to be located at the ‘source of the three rivers’ and emphasis on the River Onon.
Before you know what, this became accepted as ’fact’ and everyone interested in the puzzle, including me, went looking for the mountain, Burkhan Khaldun, for that was where Genghis Khan’s grave would be found!
After all, how could so many renowned and acclaimed scholars be wrong!
To my credit I did, however, take a different approach. My thinking, if after 800 years no joy had been forthcoming from looking on Burkhan Khaldun of Khan Khenti, maybe the great and the good had all been barking up the wrong ‘mountain’.
In fact, I concluded very quickly they had, as I focused on another contender a mountain some sixty miles from Khan Khenti. I remember being pretty excited about it all. At 01.30 epiphany morning, I went down to the kitchen opened the bottle of Glenfiddich, a present from Rod and Kiersten and while sipping the smooth liquor, being absolutely amazed no one else had spotted what I had seen on this other mountain, which to my mind then and even now pretty well confirmed it was ‘the’ SH sacred mountain of Burkhan Khaldun.
I code-named the mountain V2 (well actually ‘vitu’ my mother’s dialect version of Vito: V2 came later)
To be continued