The temperature drops so low at night that, even under blankets, children cannot generate enough warmth to survive. They must sleep next to larger adults or at least clumped together with several other children. During the day, the child must be carefully monitored with frequent rubbing of the hands, feet, and exposed parts of the body to prevent frostbite. In a milder climate, a urine-soaked child might develop painful skin irritations with the potential for longer-term problems, but in the Gobi, the urine can quickly freeze and threaten the life of the child immediately. Even a simple fall outside can quickly lead to death if the child is too slow to get up again. In the fall and spring dust storms, a child can become lost within only a few feet of the ger and gradually be buried and suffocated in the dust.
Children typically nurse for several years, and supplement this with the rich dairy products available in the fall, but when winter sets in, the child must eat meat or very hard forms of dried and cured dairy products. To survive on the meat and harsh foods of the Gobi, the child must have the food partially chewed by an adult or much larger child in order to swallow and digest it.
Bachai did not provide the intensive care the boy needed, and after three years of neglect, Batu Mongke was still alive, but just barely. As one chronicle states, he was “suffering from a sickness of the stomach.” Another reported that he acquired “hunchback-like growth.” Manduhai learned of the child’s existence and his perilous situation, and she arranged for allies to rescue him and place him with another family. Had the existence or location of the only male descendant of Genghis Khan become generally known, it was nearly certain that one faction or another would have tried to kidnap him or kill him in pursuit of some nefarious plan.
A woman named Saichai and her husband, Temur Khadag, who is sometimes credited along with his six brothers with being the child’s rescuer, became the new foster parents for the boy, and set about trying to restore his health and rehabilitate his body. His new mother instituted a long treatment in the traditional Mongolian art of therapeutic massage or bone setting known as bariach. Gentle massage and light bone adjustment still forms a regular part of child rearing among the Mongols and is viewed as essential to the child’s body growing in a properly erect and aesthetically pleasing manner. Older people in particular, such as grandparents, sit around the ger in the idle hours, rubbing the child’s muscles and tugging at the bones and joints.
Saichai rubbed the child’s wounds with the milk of a camel that had recently given birth for the first time. The milk was prepared in a shallow wooden bowl with a veneer of silver over the wood. Both the milk and the silver had medicinal properties important to Mongol medicine. The treatment required persistent massage by rubbing the milk onto the damaged parts of the boy’s body and rubbing the warm silver bowl itself against the afflicted area. By this persistent massage of his damaged, but still growing, body, the bone setter gradually adjusted the boy’s bones and gently pushed them back into proper alignment. In the words of one chronicle, she wore through three silver bowls trying to repair Batu Mongke’s broken body. As is so often the case with suffering, the physical damages proved easier to treat than the emotional ones.
After the good care of the foster family, Manduhai sent for Batu Mongke when he was about five years old. His foster father set out with him on a horse to escort him across the Gobi to the royal court, but while crossing a stream, the boy fell from the horse and nearly drowned before the father could jump from his horse and rescue him. Since the streams of the Gobi are quite small and only rarely have water in them, it seems strange that the boy would have had so much difficulty getting up and remounting his horse unless he was already badly injured or was severely hurt in the fall. For whichever reason, he arrived at the camp of Manduhai in quite bad physical condition, and his survival remained in doubt for some time.
Manduhai’s first challenge was to install him as Great Khan in a way that people would view as legitimate. Genghis Khan left precise laws in place prescribing that the Great Khan must be elected at a khuriltai. If the candidate, and there was only one at a time, did not attract representatives of an overwhelming majority of the tribes and clans, then anyone not attending could always deny the legitimacy of the election. Genghis Khan’s descendants had violated the spirit of the law from the start. Khubilai Khan made a mockery of the khuriltai, and Khubilai’s descendants abandoned it entirely. Subsequently, a khan sought legitimacy by being installed in office before the sulde, the horsehair banner of Genghis Khan that usually remained in the area of Burkhan Khaldun. But in the turmoil of Manduul and Bayan Mongke’s battles, it temporarily disappeared or was under the control of someone not sympathetic to Manduhai’s quest.
Without the legitimizing process of the khuriltai or control of the sulde of Genghis Khan, Manduhai had to find another way to make the installation of a new Great Khan both legal and known to everyone. Manduhai needed the support of the people, and to achieve this, she also knew that she herself needed some semblance of spiritual or religious support for what she wished to undertake. Every time Genghis Khan wanted to rally his people to a cause that he thought might be difficult for them to support, he made a very public pilgrimage up the sacred mountain and prayed there until he felt that he had been granted the support.
Manduhai chose to install Batu Mongke at the hitherto seemingly unknown Shrine of Eshi Khatun, the “First Queen.” The shrine, like many others, was little more than a tattered felt tent mounted on a cart and pulled by an ox or camel from one Mongol camp to another and from one sacred site to another. The importance of a nomadic shrine to the people on the steppe far exceeded its humble and worn appearance.
Mongols worshipped male spirits on mountains or rocks piled up like a miniature mountain, called an ovoo; rocks, mountains, and cliffs constituted the bones, and therefore the male element, of the earth. Female spirits were worshipped near bodies of water, which formed the life-giving female parts of the earth, or else in caves, which were the wombs of Mother Earth. In contrast to the stationary ovoo, the ger became a sort of portable cave that allowed worshippers to honor the female spirit wherever she was taken.
Both the male sulde and the female ger had a home territory, but as befitted the needs of a nomadic society, each could be easily transported anywhere it might be needed. When the sulde needed to be moved, a mounted warrior carried it by hand. The ger was always transported on a special ceremonial cart similar to the one normally owned and driven by women. When the tribe moved into a new homeland, their shrine led the way and sanctified the land as the people followed behind.
Some elements of the shrine derived from ancient female Earth Mother worship in Inner Asia, but it also contained elements and possibly relics of Mongolian women such as Alan Goa, from whom all Mongol clans traced descent, and Hoelun, the mother of Genghis Khan. The Shrine of the First Queen may have been one or several of the Eight White Gers erected in honor of Genghis Khan’s queens at Avarga. Between the confiscation of women’s gers by Khubilai Khan and the repression of female shrines by a later form of Buddhism, little information survives about them. Had it not been for the importance of Manduhai’s visit to the Shrine of the First Queen, we would not know that it had existed.