The new Mongol nation, or Six Tumen, included Buddhists and Muslims with a mixture of the earlier Christian groups who had long since lost all contact with the outside Christian world. Manduhai and Dayan Khan did not choose among these religions, and they let their people follow any that they wanted. The government and ruling family, however, maintained a spiritual focus on a state cult formed around Genghis Khan and his shrine.
Through the work of Manduhai and Dayan Khan, “the government was rectified and humanity was united.” In this time, “peace, unity and prosperity spread throughout all the people.” Yet not all of their reforms succeeded. The effort to curtail usage of the title khan failed as each of their sons scrambled to take the title in his own domain.
After the khuriltai, Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan maintained their capital south of the Gobi and the Mongolian Plateau, along the Chinese border, in what is today Inner Mongolia. Manduhai had abandoned the quieter northern grazing grounds of the royal family favored by her first husband, Manduul Khan. The southern area served as the source and route for the trade goods out of China, and as the ideal base for the Mongol raids. The Mongols often made their camp in the Ordos, which offered them the most varied points of access into China and the Silk Route. Their presence troubled the Chinese commanders along the border and encouraged them to raid the Mongols more frequently.
The defensive wall remained more of a plan than a reality, and the Ming officers still had to defend their territory against Mongol raids. Unable or unwilling to mount substantial campaigns against them or to engage in large battles, the Chinese army occasionally struck out against the Mongols in small raids. On one such occasion in 1501, the border authorities learned that Manduhai and Dayan Khan had set up camp in a lightly defended area in the Ordos. They launched a raid, and the pair had to flee in the middle of the night, barely escaping their pursuers.
Following their near capture in the Ordos, Manduhai and Dayan Khan recognized that despite the advantages of the location, it would always be hard to defend because they were south of the Yellow River, which they could cross only in the winter, when it froze. They had escaped this time, but the mere possibility of their entrapment or capture in the Great Loop might entice other Chinese generals to mount campaigns against them. As important as the area was strategically for the Mongols and as important as it was to Manduhai as the area where she was born and grew up, the monarchs decided to move their capital back north of the Gobi into Mongolia proper.
Because Manduhai was born in the south, she understood it, but she also understood the dangers for nomadic people living there. Eight hundred years earlier, a wise Turkish khan had cautioned the steppe tribes against staying too close to the cities. In stones carved with his words and erected near Karakorum, he told them that the steppe was the best place on Earth to live. He said that the city people “give us gold, silver, and silk in abundance,” and that their words “have always been sweet and the materials of the Chinese people have always been soft.” But if you settle in their area, warned Bilge Khan, “you will die!”
One of Bilge Khan’s ministers, Tonyukuk, also recorded similar words on another set of stones, stating that Heaven would kill them as punishment for giving up their steppe freedom and submitting to the agricultural kingdoms. He encouraged the steppe people to remain always nomadic, to erect no buildings, and to resist the settled people at all costs. If they became too weak to resist, they should retreat into the mountains, but under no circumstances should they submit to rule from beyond the steppe.
The spirit of these men had certainly defined the prevailing attitude of the steppe tribes and had been one also accepted by Genghis Khan. The Mongols would die if they left Mongolia. The Mongol nation would die if the people gave up herding and settled in cities. With such strong ideas in their minds, Manduhai and Dayan Khan did not return to the ancient ruins of Karakorum for their capital. They would have no city with walls of stone or buildings of wood; there would be no palace, no market, and no temple.
Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan rejected the trappings of empire and instead withdrew to the Kherlen River near the hearth of the Borijin clan, where Genghis Khan had grown up. Along these banks, Temujin had first gathered his noble people and founded his nation in the year 1206, taking for himself the title of Genghis Khan. Most importantly, he was buried close by at a secret spot in the silence of Burkhan Khaldun. The old palace gers of his wife and mother still resided here, and Mongols came from everywhere to pray and to remember him and them.
This was the first tribal capital of the Mongols, not the imperial capital of the Mongol Empire. This was the place where Genghis Khan divided his empire among his sons and daughters. This was the place where he had invested Alaqai Beki with the Onggud nation and Al-Altun with the Uighurs, and where he had made his nuptial speeches to them, charging them with their responsibilities to their nation. This was the place where the Secret History had been written. Perhaps more than anything else that she did, this choice demonstrated Manduhai’s commitment to the ancient history of the Mongols and showed her lack of interest in maintaining the pretense of an empire or of expanding into the territory of the Chinese or the Muslims. For her people and her children, she sought a secured and protected Mongol nation of herders, not a world empire of cities and foreign lands.
After Manduhai and Dayan Khan had been only a few years in their new northern capital, a delegation of the southern tribes crossed the Gobi to request their rulers’ return. The southern tribes had grown tired of the constant bickering, and they had once again felt the oppressive raids of the warlords from the Silk Route oases and the Chinese. In particular, they mentioned that they had paid lower taxes under Manduhai and Dayan Khan than they were now required to pay under their new warlord.
Rather than going south themselves, the couple decided to send a son to govern for them. In their last official act together, Manduhai Khatun and Dayan Khan appointed their second son, Ulus Bolod, as the new jinong. Manduhai retired, turning over the control of the empire to her husband and children.
In 1508, Ulus Bolod headed south to assume his office in front of the Shrine of Genghis Khan, where his parents had created the new Mongol nation. A small group of retainers accompanied him across the Gobi, but no army seemed necessary.
Yet another warlord had begun pushing into the area. Called Ibari, or Ibrahim, he wished to replicate the power once held by Beg-Arslan and Ismayil. He and his allies incited discontent against Borijin rule. “He has come saying he will rule our country,” they complained. “Has he come saying he will rule our heads?”
Ulus Bolod arrived at the Shrine of Genghis Khan and was installed the same day in his new office of jinong by allies there. The priests who operated the shrine seemed eager to have a descendant of Genghis Khan ruling in the territory where they were now located, since this development would only enhance their own position.
On the second day, Ulus Bolod planned a long ancestral tribute of honor to Genghis Khan, thereby stressing his direct lineal descent from him and the restoration of his family’s power. This kinship connection, of course, set Ulus Bolod clearly apart from the other local leaders who did not belong to his Borijin clan. On Ulus Bolod’s way to the shrine on the second morning, he could see a large crowd gathered for the ceremony which he was about to conduct.