Category Archives: Mongolia

James Brooke reports on Landlocked Mongolia’s Seafaring Tradition

Mongolia, the world’s largest landlocked country, with its capital almost 1,000 miles from an ocean beach, is the latest entry in the business of flags of convenience. With Mongolia’s red, yellow and blue colors now flying on 260 ships at sea, this unlikely venture is part business, part comedy and part international intrigue.

“We earned the treasury about $200,000 last year,” Bazarragchaa Altan-Od, head of the Maritime Administration, said, slightly tense for his first interview with the world press. “We have 20 to 30 new registrations every month. The number is increasing.” …

Mongolia’s maritime niche may be North Korea, which has revived relations in recent months with the ruling Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, the former Communist party here. (On June 27, after a parliamentary election campaign that included corruption accusations against the government, the opposition Motherland Democratic Coalition unexpectedly won 36 of 76 seats. A final outcome is not expected until early July.)

North Korea flag vessels increasingly are watched around the world. Under the Proliferation Security Initiative, the United States and a dozen nations started to monitor North Korean vessels in 2003 for illicit cargos, like drugs, missiles or nuclear weapon fuel.

via The Argus

Let’s hope the Mongolia-flagged merchant fleet fares better than Kublai Khan’s invasion fleet in 13th-century Japan, which fell victim to the kamikaze. (The ships and sailors were mostly Koreans.)

Although noted for his administrative skill and policy of religious tolerance, Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan continued the trend of Mongol territorial expansion. Though he met with success in southern China, the conquest of Japan proved to be a difficult, and ultimately disastrous, endeavour. In 1274 the Mongols landed a large expeditionary force on the Japanese island of Kyushu, but this force was eventually driven off by skilled Japanese warriors. In 1281, the Mongols made another attempt, this time with an even larger force. Approximately 40,000 troops from North China and 100,000 troops from South China were transported in two huge invasion fleets that met and converged off Kyushu. But, unfortunately for the invaders and most fortunately for the Japanese, a colossal typhoon hit the coast, sinking many of the Mongol vessels. About one half of the troops perished or were captured, while those who managed to survive fled back to the Chinese mainland. It was as if the typhoon had appeared at the behest of Japan’s religious leaders, who had been fervently praying for deliverance as the invasion fleet approached. It is little wonder that the grateful Japanese termed this particular tempest Kamikaze or “divine wind.”

The Marmot’s (Final) Hole has more on Mongolia’s recent elections, in which the governing “Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party — the former Communist Party” lost its majority, thanks to a surprisingly strong showing by the Motherland Democratic Coalition.

John DeFrancis’s loathing for camels grew with every step across the desert.

The very first sight of them filled us with distaste. When they arrived at the Temple of the Larks their burdens had made them seem bigger than they actually were. After they were unloaded Martin [his Canadian traveling companion] said they seemed tiny compared to the strapping geldings he had seen at Georg’s ranch. They were made to appear even smaller by the fact that they had shed half or more of their wool, exposing big pinkish blotches of skin. Although such shedding was perfectly normal, the mangy appearance gave them an air of utter decrepitude.

This impression was heightened by the forlorn way in which their two humps lay all flopped over, like the limp watches in a Dali painting. These stand firmly erect on camels in good condition. Contrary to popular belief, the single hump of Arabian dromedaries and the two humps of our Bactrians are reservoirs of fat, not water. The limp humps of our camels showed their complete lack of any reserve of fat that they might draw on.

We might have felt pity for the beasts if they had not had about them an air of hauteur that did not at all accord with their actual appearance–ungainly bodies with spindly legs, serpentine necks with reptilian heads, misshapen faces with doubly cleft harelips and unblinking eyes, protruding mouth and jaws that chewed the cud with a silly sideways motion. They made me think of scrofulous aristocrats with frayed cuffs and dirty collars, monocle in eye and ivory-handled cane aswing. At first I felt almost guilty to have such a visceral dislike for these supercilious creatures, but then I remembered reading that camels never evoke in humans the sort of relationship that dogs and horses often do.

A camel never looks you in the eye, the way an adoring dog does. They hold their arrogant heads up high and look right past you, as if you were not there, and indeed they appear to be totally indifferent to anything in their environment. It is not that they are lost in their own thoughts, for thinking, to redirect the male conceit of Henry Higgins, is something that camels never do. It takes them several years to learn to kneel, and even then they constantly need to be reminded by a sharp downward tug at their nose-cord.

Even the basic intelligence needed for survival is lacking. Other animals learn to avoid poisonous plants, but they have given their name to a plant called “camel poison” because only they are so stupid as to eat it, with dire results that they never foresee. From time to time disaster strikes whole caravans whose camels have all succumbed to the plant.

SOURCE: In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan, by John DeFrancis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1993), p. 138

Travel rations in the Gobi were somewhat less varied in the 1930s than they are now.

We started by drinking a bowl of “brick tea.” This was tea made by hammering off a chunk from a brick measuring about 6″ x 10″ x 1″ that weighed about two and a half pounds and was formed by compressing tea leaves into the least possible space in order to reduce the cost of transportation. Such bricks were widely used as a medium of exchange in the barter trade between Chinese and Mongols.

The chunk broken off from the brick is pounded, usually in a mortar, to loosen the compacted elements. Most teas are steeped in hot water according to the taste of the drinker. Brick tea is made by boiling. Mongols and Tibetans drink tea au lait, with added milk, butter, and salt. Chinese prefer it straight.

We had ours Chinese style. At first sip the tea tasted a bit like water in which a strip of rubber has been boiled. It improved only slightly with more sips.

Next we had a bowl of roasted or parched millet. Although millet is generally considered to be poor people’s fare, especially in contrast to high-status rice and wheat, it seemed to me not a whit inferior in taste to many of our cereals that are well known to be the breakfasts of champions…. Camel drivers generally eat the millet dry, washing it down with copious bowls of brick tea. Others prefer the somewhat more efficient technique of pouring handfuls of the cereal into their tea and then slurping down the combination. This was my preference, too …

We also had a small taste of two other cereals. One was a kind of oatmeal, not the flaky sort such as graces American breakfasts, but rather a finely ground flour, also roasted or parched. We ate it in a bowl of hot tea, making a sort of porridge, with the optional addition of a bit of sugar. I found it quite tasty. The other cereal, also a parched flour, tasted like bran. We sampled a few spoonfuls in our tea, again with a bit of sugar. It too seemed to me quite palatable.

SOURCE: In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan, by John DeFrancis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1993), pp. 94-95

Whether you consider land as won or lost depends on your point of view. In America, whites exult at how the West was won, Indians mourn at how it was lost. In our travels through the western part of Inner Mongolia we saw how the Mongols were literally losing ground before the influx of land-hungry Chinese.

In the years since then, there have been some changes in Chinese policy owing to the establishment of the new regime in 1949. For one thing, the Mongols, along with other minority peoples, have been exempted from the one-child policy that has been applied to the the major part of the population, those called “Han Chinese,” so named from the great Han dynasty of 206 B.C. to A.D. 220. For another, the Mongols’ demand that their tribal lands be merged into a single unit has been at least partially met by the de-gerrymandering of the old provinces and the establishment of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. However, the boundaries are still drawn so that Chinese far outnumber Mongols there. While the population of Inner Mongolia has increased fivefold, the Mongols themselves have increased by only 50 percent. Today they comprise only 2.5 million out of a total population of 20 million.

The more things change. …

While trekking west of the Temple of the Larks [in 1935], we noted a pattern of Chinese penetration that differed somewhat from what we had encountered in the region directly north of Guihua [‘return to civilization’, now called Hohhot, which the Mongols used to call Koko Khoto ‘the Blue City’]. There the Chinese had taken over large tracts of land and settled close together in villages similar to those that dotted the farmland of North China. From these villages the peasants went out in all directions to till their plots of land.

In the area where grassland merged into gobi [‘gravel desert’], however, Chinese families lived separate from each other, a pattern more closely approximating that of the United States in the frontier days. We encountered these isolated farmsteads only at long intervals in the course of our daily marches.

Another point of difference was that some of these farmsteads doubled as trading posts. Many of the families settled in this region did some supplementary buying and selling. They either acted on their own or served as agents of the trading houses based in Guihua and Baotou. It also happened that some Chinese who started out primarily as traders took to farming and sheep-raising as sidelines. The goods sold at these trading posts were supplied by caravans belonging to the parent companies with which they were affiliated. Supplies were dropped off by caravans on their outward journey to the Black River. On the return trip the caravans picked up the items that had been acquired by barter with the Mongols.

For all these little trading posts it seemed to be a pretty miserable existence. Only the Mongol princes who permitted the alienation of tribal lands, and the Chinese authorities who promoted the whole business, made any real profit out of it all. The worst losers were ordinary Mongols, who bought and sold at prices largely set by the Chinese and saw their best-watered land being taken over by these immigrants.

SOURCE: In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan, by John DeFrancis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1993), pp. 21, 84, 118-119

Ian Buruma slaps the title “Ah, Our Manchuria” on his chapter about Japan during the 1930s in his book Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 (Modern Library Chronicles, 2003). Here’s how the chapter ends.

Even as the emperor’s troops got bogged down in China, skirmishes on the borders of Manchukuo and the Soviet Union were threatening to get out of control. Officers of the Kwantung army, such as Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, a maniacal soldier responsible for all manner of outrages before the war was over, were itching to attack the Soviet army. Tsuji was a proponent of the Strike North faction, as were most members of the Imperial Way [faction; or Kodoha]. They wanted to contain the Soviet Union by taking control of eastern Siberia. General Araki Sadao, who was, rather absurdly, Prince Konoe’s education minister, once said that if the Soviets did not cease to annoy japan, he would “have to purge Siberia as one cleans a room of flies.”

The Strike North faction was largely army based and attracted many junior officers. Those who wished to avoid a war with the Soviet Union and head south instead, where control of the rich natural resources of Southeast Asia would allow the navy to build up strength for an eventual war in the Pacific, were mostly admirals, generals, and high-ranking officers of the Control faction [Toseiha]. The emperor had no desire to go to war with the Soviets and was on the whole more sympathetic to the navy. There was, however, no consensus at all about what to do next: cut a deal with Chiang Kai-shek and retreat from China proper; patch things up with the West; prepare for an all-out war with the West; prop up a Chinese puppet regime in Nanking; get even closer to Nazi Germany; strengthen the army, strengthen the navy; strike north, strike south. But as so often happened, Tokyo’s dog was wagged by its military tail, once more in Manchuria.

Fighting broke out in the summer of 1938 on the wet and misty borderlands of Korea, Manchukuo, and the Soviet Union. Soviet troops were building a fortification on the Manchukuo side of the Tumen River, and the Japanese decided to test them. The Soviets had bombers and tanks. The Japanese had none, but they set great store on their superior “spirit.” After battling for a fortnight, there were many dead on both sides, more on the Japanese than the Russian, but nothing much was gained or lost. The emperor told his general staff to stop the war. Colonel Tsuji ordered his men to go on regardless. Spirit would see them through. Less than a year later, at Nomonhan [Khalkhin-Gol], on the border with Outer Mongolia, the Japanese, armed with Molotov cocktails, sabers, field guns, and some light tanks, attacked General Zhukov’s Soviet tank brigades. The fighting on ghastly, mosquito-infested terrain went on for months and ended in a slaughter. The flatlands were filled with Japanese corpses, feasted on by black desert vultures. More than twenty thousand Japanese died of hunger, thirst, and disease, as well as from Russian bombardments. Colonel Tsuji was duly promoted. But the plan to strike north was abandoned. From then on all the action would be to the south.

UPDATE: In the comments, Danny Yee questions whether a determined Japanese effort against the Soviets might have achieved victory and possibly even allowed the Nazis to best the Soviets in the West. It’s an interesting question of alternative history. But, judging from the book In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army, by Edward J. Drea (U. Nebraska Press, 1998), reviewed here and here, the IJA’s serious deficiencies in logistics and heavy weaponry would have made a decisive northern victory very unlikely. Plus, they were fighting against Marshal Zhukov (although the IJA might have kept him away from Stalingrad, and even Zhukov wasn’t invincible). I think the IJA would have suffered the fate of Napoleon’s army in Russia.

Drea’s lead-off chapter, “Tradition and Circumstances: The Imperial Japanese Army’s Tactical Response to Khalkhin-Gol [Jp. Nomonhan], 1939,” concludes thus:

It seems commonplace that military defeat can be salutary in nature, because it forces out incompetents and promotes innovative reforms. The popular historian Barbara Tuchman wrote, “Whereas defeat in war galvanizes military development, nothing contributes to military desuetude like total victory.” Like most generalizations it overstates the case. The way an army interprets defeat in relation to its military tradition, and not the defeat itself, will determine, in large measure, the impact an unsuccessful military campaign will have on that armed institution.

More specifically, Drea finds that the IJA blamed the defeat more on lack of training and insufficient “fighting spirit” on the part of the newly activated Twenty-third Division, which bore the brunt of the defeat. When a blunt Lt. Col. Konuma suggested that “the IJA hereafter would need equal or superior weaponry to fight foreign armies,” Maj. Gen. Endo called him an imbecile and accused him of insulting the Imperial Army.

NOTE: Gads. The new Blogger interface is at its most buggy when you try to update and republish a post already published. The first thing it does is unpublish the earlier version. Then it gets worse.