7:44: Mr. Man launches on the story of Genghis Kahn’s own version of the Great Wall. Old maps showed two walls, referred to as “Genghis’s Great Wall”. No one could tell him anything about it, so he went in search of it himself.

7:45: What a trek he’s describing here. A four-wheel drive adventure out in the Gobi Desert, where “you’re not lost, you just don’t know where you are”. During his wanderings, they actually happened on someone who had heard of the wall.

7:47: They found it. An earthen wall, virtually eroded out of existence, hundreds of kilometers long, unknown to archeology, likely two millennia old. Mr. Man theorizes that it was a Han wall built as a defense against the Xiongnu.

7:50: Kynge asks, “how effective was The Great Wall”?

7:50: Answer: “The Mongols totally ignored it”. The wall was more effective in keeping the local populace inside the wall and taxed than it was in keeping the Mongols out, who invaded pretty much at will. The Mongols once invaded China and kidnapped the emperor. Another time they encircled Beijing. They could never quite figure out what to do with their advantage, though, and each time retreated to the grasslands.

7:53: Question about the Roman legion in Gansu. Apparently they wandered east after losing a battle in 45 B.C., turned up in Xinjiang around 33 B.C., and were then kidnapped. Mr. Man was told about this by his guide, who showed him around a town in western China that has built up an entire industry around the legend.

7:54: Turns out (according to Mr. Man’s research) that the whole thing is rubbish, the result of an overeager interpretation on the part of an eminent Oxford scholar of Chinese history in the 1950s.

7:57: Mr. Man delves into the origins of his Genghis Kahn book. It came from the realization that there was nothing that he could contribute to the Mongol studies field academically. He decided to focus on Genghis’s death and where he was buried, going so far as to undertake a journey to the scenes to understand how these past events break through into the present.

8:03: Question on the divide between settled cultures and nomad cultures: “history is the product of the tension between the nomad and the settled. What’s your sense of that?”

8:04: Mr. Man compares the interaction to “a bad marriage”. The problem was how to negotiate a relationship. The Mongols could crush standing armies at will, ensuring that the Han could not dominate their positions on the plains. It was always much easier to negotiate through trade. Mongols could get the products of a settled culture, while the Han could acquire security and the horses they need.

8:06: Now the question on Mr. Man’s mind is how this historic relationship is changing. Settled China is resurgent, and is now virtually on the point, for the first time, of completely tipping the balance in the favor of settled China. Through a series of transactions, a Chinese company now owns the rights to develop absolutely massive amounts of copper reserves within Inner Mongolia. Railroads have been built to transport half a million tons of copper south every year for the next 35 years. There’s also a truly extraordinary coal deposit. This may (according to Mr. Man) mean the northward creep of Han mining towns, with all of the trappings of civilization that those bring, shifting the traditional Mongolian focus towards the north and Russia south towards China. Mr. Man says that he “can’t even begin to imagine the effects that this will have on Mongolia”. For the first time ever, this unique lifestyle may be in real danger.

8:11: Kygne tells a story wherein he asks a herdsman what he thought of the Chinese. The answer, “The Chinese eat vegetables”. Kygne mulls this over and figures out that the herdsman is referring to the fact that the Chinese till the ground, something the Mongols would never do. Thrust of the question is whether the herding, grassland-based economy will remain.

8:12: Mr. Man expresses hopes that the grassland economy will remain, rather than just a shift to a capital-based economy. It’s essential to the Mongolian lifestyle, and the Mongolian economy.

8:13: Question: has the settled world misjudged the nomad people? Was Genghis a butcher, or was he just misunderstood?

8:14: Mr. Man says yes, it’s a myth. To survive in a herding lifestyle and survive a Mongolian winter, you have to be extraordinarily tough. On top of that, they had mounted archery, crucial to hunting on the plains. Mr. Man calls Genghis “a genius”. Because he experienced great violence, and knew what it was to live without the security of the herding society and without clan support, he was convinced that unity of the clans was crucial. Mr. Man lays out the unique nature of Genghis’s rise. He went from merely a family leader to an administrator, never hitting a level at which he found himself beyond his level of competence. He literally created the Mongol system of writing along with an effective system of administration. He wasn’t merely a marauding barbarian.

8:18: Question: but why conquer so far and wide?

8:18: Because he believed that Heaven above had given the world to the Mongols. Genghis started by focusing upon Northern China, but was drawn into war with the Muslim world by the annihilation of one of his trading delegations in Kazakhstan. He conquered almost half the Muslim world, nearly reaching Baghdad, before he pulled back.

8:21: A question on Chinese/Mongol identity. Why is Genghis being “Sinified”?

8:21: Mr. Man starts off on a lengthy explanation about how Kublai Kahn conquered China, and was really the first person to create China as we know it. He conquered Xinjiang, Tibet, and Yunnan, and found the limits of Chinese empire at the borders of Burma, Vietnam, and, most famously, Japan. The balancing act he had to pull off between the two geographical bases of his reign were the origin of this schizophrenic interpretation of history.

8:26: Who would Mr. Man like to meet? Genghis, Kublai, or Attilla the Hun (another one of Mr. Man’s subjects)?

8:26: He wouldn’t wanted to have met Attilla, who he calls “a robber baron all his life”, but might liked to have met Genghis, who had an incredible eye for talent. Anyone with talent became an honorary Mongol.

8:28: The next question is on Qinshihuang, the subject of two of Mr. Man’s books. Was he a pitiless tyrant, like he has been portrayed, or was he multifarious?

8:29: Like Genghis, Mr. Man thinks that Qinshihuang was someone who valued unity as highly as Genghis did. Like Genghis, he backed it up with the genius that allowed him to base this drive for unity on extremely strict legal and administrative systems.

8:31: A question from the audience: How does Mr. Man deal with the inherent unreliability of the sort of oral history that he uses so frequently?

8:31: Mr. Man launches into a lengthy explanation of “The Secret History of the Mongols”, a collection of oral histories likely compiled in the years after Genghis’s death that were collected in an attempt to explain the sort of immense changes that had taken place just in one lifetime. Apparently it was a collection of oral stories, some told, some sung, all sanctioned by Genghis to shape the past, explain the present, and give guidance to the future. Not all of them cast Genghis in a good light, including the story wherein he killed his own brother. The lecture given to him by his mother tearing him a new one is the key to the story, as an example from Genghis to future generations of how they should not behave.

8:35: Question: what does he feel is the greatest contribution of the Mongols to Western society?

8:36: The unity of east and west, and the establishment of trade routes that otherwise would never have existed. Translation: without Genghis, there never would have been a Marco Polo.

8:37: Why was the Yuan dynasty so brief? What cause its collapse?

8:37: Short answer: Kublai’s system of administration kept the Mongols apart and above the Chinese subjects that they were to rule, breeding resentment that resulted in a rebellion after only 70 years of rule. May also have been the result of a huge dying off in Yunnan that could have been the prelude to the Black Death.

8:39: What were Genghis’s views on slavery? Did the pluralities of religions in his empire make him a proponent of religious freedom?

8:40: Briefly put, he didn’t really think there was anything wrong with slavery. As far as religious freedom’s concerned, Genghis was never really able to explain, in a cosmological sense, why he, a herdsman, was chosen to lead. This uncertainty led to a certain toleration, which was expressed in Mongol society as a toleration towards a plurality of faiths.

8:42: A question from the audience: where did the secret Mongol history come from?

8:42: Was a Yuan project. Originally, the preserved copy was in Chinese to teach interpreters how to pronounce Mongolian words before they were sent to Mongolia. It was a phonetic Chinese rendering of the original Mongolian. The work to translate this from seemingly nonsensical Chinese into readable Mongolian is still going on.

8:48: The talk comes to a close. Thanks much to everyone for reading, and keep a look out for more live blogs from the BBILF on City Weekend’s site!