Before he reached the entry to the ger, an unknown enemy stepped out of the crowd and stopped him. The man claimed that Ulus Bolod owed him a horse in payment for a wrong done by some other family member. Ulus Bolod refused to give up his horse, but the man would not let him pass. In anger, Ulus Bolod pulled out his sword and sliced off the man’s head. Such a bloodletting in front of the holiest of shrines upset everyone and proved a very bad omen for Ulus Bolod.
Having arranged this confrontation, Ibari and his men rushed forward and incited the crowd against Ulus Bolod. Another man jumped out from the crowd to offer his own horse to Ulus Bolod, on which he could flee, but the conspirators already had their troops ready and they barred any escape. Ulus Bolod and the few men with him dashed into the holy tent itself for refuge, where the priests tried to protect them, but the hostile troops began shooting their arrows. In the ensuing battle at the shrine, it is said that Ulus Bolod managed to kill one of the enemy, and one of Ulus Bolod’s men wounded Ibari, but the small group could not outfight the larger force attacking them. The new jinong Ulus Bolod was killed after only one day in office.
Dayan Khan vowed revenge for the assassination of his and Manduhai’s son, calling on the Eternal Blue Sky and the spirit of Genghis Khan to help him. “May you heaven, and next, you Holy Lord know the blood which has been shed and abandoned, and the bones which lie drying.”
Dayan Khan dutifully called his army and prepared to lead them south to reinstate control over the southern tribes, chase out Ibari, and install another son as jinong. He would henceforth rule from his base located in the central part of the Mongol territories south of the Gobi, in what is today Inner Mongolia, as head of the Chakhar clan of Mongols. His sons would occupy the lands to his left and right.
Now past sixty, Manduhai lacked the stamina to ride a horse across the Gobi one more time and charge back into battle. She had been at war for more than thirty-five years. Manduhai and Dayan Khan had scarcely been apart in those years. Ever since they came together, they had shared one life between them. Now the time had come for Dayan Khan to go on without her. He was in his early forties and had many years left ahead of him to rule, but she would not be there to see it. It seemed as though there would never be an end to the violence, that as soon as one rebel or warlord was struck down, another rose to replace him. The long struggle of Manduhai to unify her nation seemed to have been in vain.
Manduhai would never again see Dayan Khan—the crippled boy whom she had dressed in large boots and stood before the Shrine of the First Queen to make him khan, the boy whom she put in a basket and took to war, and the man whom she married and with whom she raised eight children. As Dayan Khan and his sons rode south from Manduhai’s ger, it had been almost exactly three hundred years since Alaqai Beki had stood before her mother, Borte, and presented her cheek to be sniffed before riding south to assume her rule over the Onggud. From the same area near the Kherlen River, Manduhai sent her sons and husband back to complete the work that she had pursued throughout her life.
Whether Manduhai sniffed her sons on both cheeks or not we cannot now know, but maybe she casually demurred the offer of the second cheek. “I will sniff the other one when you come back.” Of course, she would not cry. As Dayan Khan and her sons rode south toward the sun, she would pick up her pail and toss milk into the air with her tsatsal. They would not look back at their wife and mother, and she would stand there throwing the milk until they passed over the horizon. As long as she was able in the closing years of her life, she would arise in the mornings and repeat the ceremony of aspersing milk for her absent husband and children. Maybe she occasionally rode off into the deserted steppe to share her pain with Mother Earth.
Manduhai remained behind to die, but the nation she had resurrected did not die. She had saved the Mongols and created a government that would protect them for generations. Her Jade Realm now stretched from the Siberian tundra and Lake Baikal in the north, across the Gobi, to the edge of the Yellow River and south of it into the Ordos.
The lands extended from the forests of Manchuria in the east, beyond the Altai Mountains, and out onto the steppes of Central Asia.
More than two centuries after Genghis Khan’s death, Queen Man-duhai revived the dying dynasty and made it vibrant and new. When she could not defeat her enemies, Manduhai eluded them, learned from her losses, and prepared for the next battle. In keeping with the Mongolian admonition, if she did not win the first seven times, she would win on the eighth. Manduhai defiantly survived every tragedy, obstacle, and horror that befell her. Just as she gave control of her life to no man, she surrendered her army to no enemy, and she relinquished her people to no foreign nation. Heaven did not grant her a great destiny; instead, in the words of the Mongol chronicle, it allowed her to shape “the destiny of her own choosing.” In history, those individuals who refuse the options presented by the circumstances of life usually end up broken. Those few who reject what life offers and still find their own path are rightfully called heroes. In creating her own destiny, she also chose the destiny for her nation.
Dayan Khan lived on and continued to lead his people down the white road of enlightenment. He restored order to the south and ruled the united Mongolia without further serious disruptions. He married two more women, and had four more sons. He led numerous campaigns. The chronicles leave a frustrating mystery in stating that his reign ended in 1517, only a few years after Manduhai’s death; yet his death is not recorded until 1543, which would have been more than thirty years after her death, when he was seventy-nine years old.
In the sixteenth century, the Mongols began converting to Buddhism. In 1578, Altan Khan and Queen Noyanchu Junggen, both descendants of Queen Manduhai and Dayan Khan, bestowed on the Tibetan monk Sonam Gyatso the old Mongolian title of dalai, meaning “sea” or “ocean,” which had first been used by Genghis Khan’s son Ogodei as his title, Dalai Khan, meaning “Sea of Power.” Henceforth the lama and his future reincarnations would bear the title Dalai Lama, “Sea of Knowledge.” Not long afterward, in 1592, another of Queen Manduhai and Dayan Khan’s descendants was discovered to be the new Dalai Lama. Reigning under the title Dalai Lama IV, he was the only Mongolian to hold the office.
Buddhism brought Mongolia to new heights of literature, arts, and architecture. The Great Wall that divided the Mongol and Chinese nations did not guarantee peace, but it brought a new stability to the region. The foreign warlords did not return, leaving the Mongols and their neighbors to work out their own trade and commercial relations.
Manduhai and Dayan Khan’s descendants managed to keep the country independent until the conquest by the Manchu in the seventeenth century. Most of the royal family continued to thrive under the Manchu and their Qing Dynasty, founded in 1644, but the country as a whole and the common people suffered wretchedly until liberation in 1911.
The lineage of Manduhai and Dayan Khan remained in power until the twentieth century. In the political turmoil of World War II, together with the prior revolution in Mongolia during the 1920s, and subsequently in China in the 1940s, most of Manduhai and Dayan Khan’s identifiable descendants were deliberately killed by various factions seeking to eradicate the past for different reasons.
Almost all Mongols recognize Queen Manduhai the Wise and Dayan Khan as the two greatest monarchs in the eight centuries of Mongolian history after Genghis Khan. For Mongols, Manduhai continues to symbolize the one person who sacrificed all to save her nation and thereby to protect them, and for this reason they often call her simply Queen Manduhai the Wise. The earlier queens faded from public memory, but elements of their stories were folded into hers so that Manduhai Khatun became the quintessential Mongol queen, combining all the others into one persona and one lifetime.