Khara Khorum

A team of archaeologists has claimed it found the palace of the famous Chinggis Khan, among the ruins of Khara Khorum, the one-time capital of the great Mongolian conqueror.

Surrounded by tall mud walls, the Mongol capital rose up out of the blank plains. People of many nationalities walked its warrens of narrow streets: Chinese, Muslims and Frenchmen.

Many of these foreigners lived in Khara Khorum involuntarily, conscripts from conquered cities.The city layout reflected their diversity: there were mosques, idol temples and even a Nestorian Christian church.

Archaeologists have found Chinese-style tiles and turret decorations that probably adorned the roofs of buildings. Khara Khorum was also a trade center, and goods from far and wide have been recovered there: silver Muslim coins, pieces of Chinese pottery, etc.

Chinggis Khans Grandson, Kublai Khan, eventually moved the capital city to Beijing and built a summer palace at Shangdu, the stately pleasure dome of Samuel Coleridge's Kublai Khan poem. You can't rule a population of 75 million from Mongolia, said Morris Rossabi, who teaches Asian history at Columbia University.

Kublai was trying to ingratiate himself with the Chinese, playing down the foreignness of his dynasty to win over his subjects, he added. Following this decision, Khara Khorum began to fade, although the Khans periodically returned to the city on the steppe

After the Mongols were expelled from China in the fourteenth century, they briefly made the city their center again, but in 1388 the Chinese obliterated it. The site remained important to various Mongol clans and in 1586 Abtaj Khan built a large Buddhist monastery there.

The Palace of the Great Khan, archaeologists now think, lies beneath the remains of this complex, much of which was destroyed by Mongolia's Communist leadership in the 1930s. Its silver fountain may never be recovered, but to historians, the real fascination of the Mongol's city is that it existed at all. Archaeologists have also unearthed evidence of glass-working and bone-carving workshops. "We found relics of the artisans' quarters and firing places and iron and metal artifacts", said Ernst Pohl, a German archaeologist.

by Jack Sabharwal
THE UB POST