The first ruler to unite the Mongols, Ghengis Khan, is still a hero to the Mongolian people. When the communists were overthrown in 1990, one of the main opposition parties was the Ghengis Khan party. You can visit Karakorum, the ancient capital, from which Ghengis Khan and his successors ruled the great Mongol empire: one of the biggest land empires in the history of the world.
The last King of Mongolia, however, was, in common with most of his predecessors, Tibetan. Mongolia formed a loosely bound, dual theocracy with Tibet, in which the latter usually took precedence, form the sixteenth century onwards, when Altan Khan, the Emperor of Mongolia was converted to the Yellow Faith of Tibetan Buddhism by two lamas whom he had taken as prisoners of war.
To find out more about his new faith, he invited the head lama from Lhasa to visit him and was so impressed by him that he conferred on him the Mongolian honorific of Dalai Lama, meaning Priest of the Ocean. The Tibetans liked the exotic foreign title and have kept it ever since, even giving it retrospectively to his predecessors, thus making him, confusingly, the third Dalai Lama.
As the Mongolians religious fervour increased, until nearly half of the male population were lamas, so did their reverence for the head of their faith in far-off Lhasa. A lamaistic dynasty, in which the number three in the Tibetan hierarchy, after the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama, was designated to rule Mongolia, replaced the system of khans that had survived since the days of Ghengis.
The Exalted Revelation, who died in 1924, was the last of the Tibetan god-kings of Mongolia. |
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