Though our trip around Mongolia was mostly about seeing the landscape and meeting the locals it’s pretty hard to travel around Mongolia without hearing about Genghis Kahn, the founder of the Mongol empire which caused so much trouble in China, Russia and Europe (he’s actually called Chinngis Kahn here and as he’s Mongolian I think we should go with that!)
He’s a national hero here and most of the family gers we’ve visited had a large picture of him hung in a prominent place near the place of honour. Even our hotel in Ulaan Baatar has this one hung up in the breakfast room:
Most of the biggest mountains we visited have a story of Chinngis kicking some enemy’s butt there, usually against the odds because he was apparently so awesome.
The view of him from nearby countries seems to be mainly that he was a trouble maker with a bad habit for massacres. Though I think every leader worth their salt at that time had a few massacres in their repertoire so it’s not too suprising. Mongolia itself has been the victim of a few in recent history (the Russians took it on themselves to destroy all the temples and massacre all the Lamas they could find during their recent occupation.)
We also discovered how the Mongolians got through the Great wall of China and it’s pretty simple! They just rode at it quickly on horses throwing dirt at the bottom until they’d made a ramp to get over. Genius!
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