Genghis Khan would tolerate no such act against his daughter, who ruled in the name of the greater Mongol Empire, nor could he afford to have such a dangerous enemy at his back. He dispatched an army with her to fight the rebels, whom they quickly vanquished.
After the suppression of the Onggud rebels, Genghis Khan favored the same kind of massive retaliation against the Onggud that he had become accustomed to using against the rebellious steppe tribes, such as the Tatars. The punishment meant killing every rebel and all the males in their family taller than the wheel of a Mongol cart, then redistributing the women and children among the tribes of the Mongol’s loyal allies.
Alaqai prevented the massacre. Instead of condemning the whole nation, she persuaded her father to punish only the specific assassins who had attacked Ala-Qush. Genghis Khan wanted an investigation of the killing of Ala-Qush. “Who killed our quda?” he demanded to know, “so that I can extract vengeance.” He demanded that the specific “person who violated his person” be brought to him. Genghis Khan then ordered the execution of the assailant and his family.
The Onggud ranked as possibly the luckiest people who ever rebelled against Genghis Khan, and their good fortune derived exclusively from having Alaqai as their ruler. As the empire grew larger and the army spread thinner and ever farther from home, Genghis Khan could not afford to tolerate any dissent or show any mercy. The Onggud were the only people whom he allowed to continue to exist as a nation after they revolted against him. Alaqai seemed determined to prove that he had not made a mistake in sparing the Onggud; she kept them loyal to the Mongols and integrated them into the heart of Mongol imperial administration.
Alaqai resumed her rule and took her stepson Jingue as her husband. She set about knitting the Onggud society back together again, but clearly within the realm of her father’s growing Mongol Empire. Over the next four years, while her father fought in one city after another across northern China, she ran the Onggud nation. After she had proved her loyalty to the Onggud by protecting them from the wrath of her father, her subjects never again contested her rule.
Conquering an empire is difficult; ruling it even more so. For the Mongols the task was especially challenging since they had been a nation for a mere twenty years and had had a written language for only two years longer than that. They could turn to no single group of administrators on whom to rely in the same way they counted on merchants to operate the commercial system. Muslim administrators lived by much different rules than the Chinese administrators, and both differed from the Christians. In the marketplace one could creatively combine items from different cultures: a silk gown from China, a damask belt from Persia, a sable collar from Siberia, a peacock feather from India, beads from Venice, and turquoise chips from Afghanistan. Governmental systems, administrative practices, and law, however, could not be picked apart and recombined so readily. Muslim law derived from the Koran, which could only be read in Arabic and depended on a calendar based on the flight of Muhammad; thus for the Mongols to adopt the Muslim system of administration required accepting a whole different language and religion. Similarly, Chinese administration could not be separated from the Chinese written language and calendar. Governments were far more complexly integrated than markets.
Unable to merely pick up an existing system, the Mongols had to invent a new one, and with the men busy in perpetual war, this task fell primarily to the daughters ruling the string of kingdoms along the Silk Route. As the senior queen among the Mongols and as ruler of the largest segment of the empire, Alaqai led the way in creating a government. One of her first requirements was to learn to read and write. Where or how she did so is not known. A Chinese envoy sent by the Sung royal court in South China compiled an extensive report of his visit to the Mongols, and he wrote that Alaqai had not only mastered the rudiments of literacy, she spent a lot of time reading each day. He even specified her fondness for religious scripture, but he does not state which kinds. According to the Sung envoy, she was particularly learned in medicine. She also organized medical facilities in the lands where she ruled.
From the archaeological investigations of the ruins of Olon Sume in modern Inner Mongolia, we now know that her capital contained Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist religious structures, and it probably had Confucian and Taoist institutions and clergy. The presence of so many different religions and languages within one small city illustrates the cosmopolitan and often eclectic cultural mix that became a hallmark of the Mongol Empire. The Mongols had no universal religion that they sought to impose on their subjects; instead they encouraged all religions to flourish. Mongols such as Alaqai picked and chose what appealed to them from various religious ideas, objects, and practices with as much individual taste as they expressed when they selected from local foods. Such a right of personal preference applied not merely to the queen; every Mongol enjoyed the same opportunity.
Alaqai Beki fashioned a powerful form of Mongol internationalism. As the first member of her family and nation to rule a sedentary civilization, she invented the cultural and organizational model that grew into the Mongol Empire. On a steadily increasing scale, her capital would later be used as the prototype for Ogodei’s capital of Karakorum in Mongolia; then to Khubilai Khan’s building of Shangdu in Inner Mongolia, known more commonly in the West as Xanadu; and finally to Khubilai Khan’s capital Khan Baliq, which the Chinese called Tatu and which would become Beijing.
Genghis Khan conquered northern China, and the Jin Dynasty of the Jurched surrendered to him but then fled farther south, leaving the Mongols in control of the north and with the Jurched as a buffer between them and the Southern Sung. Genghis Khan had anticipated that the Jurched would, as his new vassals, continue to administer northern China, so their flight south left him in control of the north but without a government to manage it. He could not stay in China and had no intention of administering the country himself. He turned to his daughter Alaqai, who, after her father, was already the highest-ranking Mongol south of the Gobi. When he withdrew back to Mongolia in 1215, Genghis Khan left her in charge of the Mongol territories in China. He left his garrison army of occupation under the leadership of General Muqali of the Jalayir clan, whose members constituted the majority of his warriors and who had long been loyal followers of the Borijin family, but Alaqai reigned.
As Genghis Khan became more occupied arranging the next major invasion, this time of the Muslim lands of Central Asia, he devoted less attention to northern China and depended increasingly on Alaqai, who proved progressively more capable. She acted independently, yet always in the best interests of the whole Mongol world no matter how far away she was from her father’s mobile court. Knowing that he would be away for several years, Genghis Khan designated responsibility for managing the already conquered lands in the hands of two people. He put the Mongolian Plateau, the lands north of the Gobi, under the control of his youngest brother, Temuge Otchigen, and he left the newly conquered lands south of the Gobi under the control of his daughter Alaqai Beki, giving her the title “Princess Who Runs the State.” Her authority had expanded from command of the Onggud nation of only about ten thousand members, concentrated in what is now Inner Mongolia, to being responsible for millions of people spread across northern China.
Under Alaqai’s rule, troops were regularly dispatched to aid her father in his campaigns in China and Central Asia. These troops from China included medical personnel, who did much to spread the reputation and practice of Chinese medicine to the Muslim world and the West.
Through the installation of his three daughters as queens along the Silk Route, Genghis Khan controlled the territory and the fragile commercial links connecting China with the Muslim countries. With his invasion into Central Asia in 1219, Genghis Khan began a new phase of not merely capturing the trade links, but expanding them deep into the manufacturing heart of the Middle East. Just as his conquests of China started the process of taking over Chinese manufacturing industries, his armies targeted the craft centers of the Muslim world, thereby expanding control to the two major terminuses of the Silk Route.