#if i say mongolian (part mongolian) from mongolia (inner mongolia)

[tianshiisdead]

girl some of the shit I've seen from posters on the uni walls and heard from classmates talking literally perfectly mirror what was said by the one woman who stabbed the Asian girl on the bus because 'Chinese are buying our houses' or whatever 😶😶😶 I'm gonna start lying abt being Chinese fr if someone asks I'll make something up, sorry beforehand for cultural appropriation I just don't want to get stabbed by someone who thinks I'm a diseased communist spy lol

[irithnova]

Inner mongolia headcanons? :3

He seems somewhat spacey if that's the right word? Like his mind is often thinking about something else

Also I think his name would be Batbold 🐱 I think Baatar (Mongolia) and Batbold (Inner Mongolia) sound cute together LZKQAK

Because many different ethnic groups live within him (I mean, he's straight up outnumbered by Han Chinese), he is more sensitive of other people's cultural norms to say the least compared to his brother in the North. Also has a better alarm for what not to say out loud

Wears his hair in two braids, has a bit of facial hair. I'd like to think he's around the same height as Mongolia, if not slightly shorter?

He tolerates Manchuria better than Mongolia does seeing as they live so close together and there are many Manchurians living in Inner Mongolia. What would really annoy Mongolia would probably only illicit a sigh from him.

On Manchuria again: They sort of have a weird relationship. For Mongolia, it's easy for him to dislike Manchuria or to be easily annoyed by Manchuria. But for Inner Mongolia, because both of them live under China , he came to the conclusion that there's really no point spending time on being angry at him all the time when they're kinda in the same boat now.

That doesn't mean that he doesn't get passive aggressive or annoyed towards Manchuria at times or has completely let go of his feelings towards what happened but Manchuria isn't exactly a threat to him anymore and if anything, is in a worse position than he is, so.

So yes. That combined with the Manchurian population in Inner Mongolia means that inner Mongolia does in fact invite him over for celebrations and trips and whatnot (Northerner solidarity finally real?).

Even if this annoys Mongolia when he comes over and visits. He finds it kind of funny anyways

Touching back on a previous point: I see inner Mongolia being a brother to Mongolia rather than being his like, child or something. This is because inner Mongolia was originally Southern Mongolia and a distinction between Northern and Southern Mongolia was only really prevalent during I guess the late 16th century or even mid during Ligdan Khan's reign?

Inner Mongolia (previously Southern Mongolia) was colonised by the Qing (Manchuria 🐱) in 1636 and Outer Mongolia (Mongolia) joined a few decades later in 1691

Between Northern and Southern/Inner Mongolia, there were some differences in the ruling families and Mongolic peoples populating each. This is kind of complicated but outer Mongolia (iirc) consisted of mainly Khalkha, Buryat, Uriankhai (umbrella term for the likes of Tuvans) groups and Inner Mongolia also had Khalkha and also Tumet and Chahar Mongol groups. There are a number of other Tumens/factions that are a part of this shitshow but I'm simplifying it for now

Despite these differences, this did not make Northern and Southern Mongolia two different entities. At least for a while

These groups, such as the Khalkha and Chahar, were Chinggisid (Genghisid), so of/loyal to the Chinggisid royal bloodline. It was under Dayan Khan that these groups were reunited after defeating the Oirats, and it was established that they were a Chinggisid people once more.

It was a strict rule in Mongolia that only those of the Chinggisid line could be Khan. Side note: the rule of Chinggisid leaders only being legitimate was so widespread throughout Central Asia which is why Timur of the Timurid Empire wanted to prove that he was Chinggisid so much, and even married a woman who was a descendant of Chagatay Khan (one of his sons).

Because of this Chinggisid heritage ordeal iirc this is why the Qing carefully planned intermarriages with inner Mongolian ruling groups so they could, in some convoluted way, claim legitimacy. Inner Mongolian nobles married with Manchurian nobles pretty extensively

So yes relationship with Manchuria can be kinda weird considering this past LMAO but he tolerates him now because. Same boat™

I make his birth date being in the late-ish 16th century because there already was a difference in the kind of factions inhabiting inner and outer Mongolia but I don't want to make him be born too early as that might be seem as legitimising Qing Imperialism/ legitimising Inner Mongolia being separated from Mongolia.

As stated previously, the difference between them can be seen in Ligdan Khan's reign. The Khalkha and Oirat factions by the early/mid 17th century were already going against Ligdan's rule, and he really only had the Chahar Mongol faction on his side

Inner Mongolia was officially annexed to the Qing in 1636 after Ligdan Khan died. His son, Ejei, was the final ruler of the Northern Yuan dynasty (Mongolia - he was coping and seething with the Yuan ending so called his territory the "Northern Yuan" lol) before the Qing finally put an end to it when Ejei was defeated in a surprise attack in 1635 and subsequently handed over the Northern Yuan imperial seal to the Qing, which was the first step to legitimising their rule before the extensive intermarriage with inner Mongolian nobility.

Inner/Southern Mongolia was the first to be annexed, Northern Mongolia held on for a bit longer but ultimately fell to the Qing too.

This (1) of the many reasons why Mongolia has a huge complex about inner Mongolia and what went down because uh. It's used to justify "Inner Mongolia is the real Mongolia" rhetoric

Because of this Mongolia is extremely fussy over inner Mongolia which does kind of annoy the latter

Once inner Mongolia and the Imperial seal was taken, this meant that the still independent Mongols in the North needed to find a new authority. Thus they turned to Tibetan Buddhism and established a new spiritual leader, Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, in 1639 (mfw tibmon real because Tibet helped Mongolia regain control of himself and a will to live once inner Mongolia was taken -)

But didn't last long lol as the Qing would install their own lamas into Mongolian monasteries so.

He is pretty chill on the surface, he's not very outwardly fussy about things and is pretty easy to talk to about whatever. Doesn't really involve himself in drama and whatnot

However he does have some. Deep seated complexes and problems that he never brings to the surface and are really hard to gage.

Mongolia however uh. Can sense them. I've already talked about this hc before but I think Mongolia has problems with anything to do with understanding mental health and doesn't show empathy easily but he's very different when it comes to inner Mongolia. He catches onto when he's upset or not feeling okay and like. Shows genuine concern.

I've said previously that Inner Mongolia gets kind of annoyed with Mongolia when Mongolia becomes too fussy about him... Mfw Inner Mongolia orders takeout for them in Mandarin when Mongolia visits and he looks up and Mongolia looks like he's seen a ghost -

I think sometimes they bicker about wrestling rules LMAO. Inner Mongolian and Outer Mongolian wrestling rules slightly differ. For example, in Inner Mongolia, you're not allowed to grab your opponents legs, whereas in outer Mongolia it's completely permissible.

Inner Mongolia also rubs in how much fancier inner Mongolian wrestling outfits are compared to outer Mongolian.

Mongolia in turn makes fun of the "Jangga" tradition in Inner Mongolia. In Inner Mongolian wrestling, some wrestlers wear a colourful ribbon necklace around their neck to signify that they're a good wrestler, as its often gained through winning many matches. But you can also acquire it if a retiring wrestler just decides to give it to you, regardless of your skill.

Mongolia voice: Isn't that just cheating lol

I think he has a good relationship with Daur. Many Daur live in Inner Mongolia and I see her being quite. Cheerful? So he likes being around her. She tries to teach him hockey :3

Really likes Uyghur food. I read that inner Mongolians often go to Uyghur restaurants when they eat out and take their (Outer) Mongolian friends there.

About Mr Uyghur again: I see them having a good bond. Love for lamb and wrestling etc lol some very similar interests but also it's a minzu to minzu thing and shared experiences of living under China.

Also because of the history between Uyghurs and Mongols but when it comes to overall history in particular, Uyghur is more familiar with Mongolia because well, he was around for longer lol

His and Mongolia's relationship isn't always good and there are definitely problems. In 1919 when China attempted to occupy outer Mongolia, a lot of the troops where Chahar Mongols from inner Mongolia 🤒

I also think inner Mongolia can get quite passive aggressive towards Mongolia when he's annoyed with him. Like the whole "well we retained our culture unlike you who uses the cyrillic script now instead of the original Mongol script"

Adding onto this and harking back to some points earlier, inner Mongolia does kind of have a superiority complex towards Mongolia because of the "Inner Mongolia is the real Mongolia" fiasco and Ejei Khan giving the Imperial seal to the Qing which lead to inner Mongolia being annexed etc etc and Northern/Outer Mongolia having to find a new authority to have a stabilised sense of identity again.

Also because he's simply a lot wealthier than Mongolia and I've heard that apparently some Mongols travel to inner Mongolia for certain healthcare?

Inner Mongolia also really. Dislikes it when Mongolia puts him on a pedestal and Mongolia often finds himself bitterly disappointed when he visits inner Mongolia and he does not act like the idealised version of himself he has in head🤒

It's ok though they do still love and care about each other KXKSKS just. Family issues I guess

Positive relationship with Tibet but kinda reels at how Mongolia and Tibet act around each other LMAO.

Ending on a more positive note, I think it's funny how it's inner Mongolia who goes around with facial hair and Mongolia who decides to be clean shaven lol

Also thank yew because you helped me out with parts of this post teehee :3

[geges]

Sorry, I'm a bit confused about what you're saying regarding the Banyue arc. Is Banyue not a mythical place based on Tangut/Xixia, which is now part of Mongolia? Since Yong An is said to be right on the border of the Gobi, I was thinking it kind of fit the Jin dynasty territory, considering they were known to fight the Tangut so much, and Tangut/Xixia was known as a semi-oasis place. The Mongolian nomads in the Gobi today are fairly dark-skinned, with some light skin too…?

banyue is a general mythical location, though you could claim it has roots in the Tangut Empire. the word Tangut itself just refers to the Tangut people. the empire itself was incredibly large, reaching through both inner and outer Mongolia, four provinces of China, and Xinjiang, so there is also no definitive people or geography to point to as a reference. the Tangut people were also not Mongolian at all, but part of a completely different tribal union, originating directly from southeast asia. they had very little peaceful connection with the Mongols outside of conflict. the banyue people were not Tangut Mongolians. additionally, the Gobi proper is not inhabited. the entire idea of us living in a sandy desert and getting dark from the sun is completely false. yes, people will travel across the Gobi, as it's often fairly temperate and mild, but it has no resources, so the nomadic people live in the steppes surrounding the desert. we get our dark skin from genetics. it's melanin. yes, most of us tan easily, but most of us are also just brown. the issue isn't with being portrayed as brown, im very proud of my skin colour, but the incredibly racist way its done. i dont want to explain why it's racist to make all your light-skinned characters thin, waifish, angelic protagonists while your dark skinned characters are large, hulking, angry, monstrous barbarians. if you cannot recognise racism at that extent, you need to seriously and honestly educate yourself. take an anti-racism class. don't make random poc explain our oppression to you because you don't understand it

[thejackmeister-mongolhistory]

Here is an answer I put on Reddit in response to the question on what Kublai Khan thought of Chinggis Khan. If you've ever read anything I put up on Kublai, you'll probably find some of it familiar.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/df01nd/what_does_kublai_khan_think_of_his_grandfather/

"Chinggis Khan (the Mongolian pronunciation of Genghis), despite his rather negative portrayal in most western literature from the 13th century to present, has quite a different reputation among the Mongols and many inner Asian peoples, dating right back to his final years. By the time of his death in August 1227, Chinggis Khan had brought the Mongol tribes from near total disunity, to near total domination of much of Asia. To quote Timothy May:

"Chinggis Khan may have died a man, but he entered the spirit world as a powerful demi-god... he not only unified Mongolia, but also rendered all potential enemies impotent. He avenged the massacre at Otrar, the death of Yesugei, the insult to Ambaghai - he was an avatar of vengeance, a god of war, and a creator hero who brought writing and stability to the Mongols. His sulde, a part of his soul or genius, took residence in the tuq or standard of the Mongols and offered protection to the ruler and to the Mongols in general. As a result, his words were sacred and became bileg, or 'wisdom', and proper behaviour for Mongols (yosun); the words, deeds and wisdom of Chinggis Khan became analogous to the sunna of the Prophet Muhammad in Islam. Since Chinggis Khan had decreed his son Ogodei his heir, this could not be disputed." (May, the Mongol Empire, 2018, pg. 70-71).

It is hard to overstate Chinggis Khan's image among the Mongols following his death. He was not just an ideal ruler, he was the ideal ruler, the bar by which nearly every would-be Khan, warlord and conqueror between the Caspian Sea and China would be compared to for the next six centuries. So strong was his legacy that it kept cousins living across the span of the Eurasian landmass working towards a common goal for decades. A unique combination of personal charisma, political, organizational and military skill, an utterly indomitable character and excellent timing lead him to unify and forge the tribes under his command into Asia's fiercest weapon.

Chinggis' shadow hung over all of his successors, who had to try to live up to him Chinggis was being mythologized before he was even dead: how could any man compare to that? Kublai had met Chinggis when he was a boy -there exists an anecdote of Chinggis rubbing animal fat on to the fingers of Kublai and his older brother Mongke after their first hunt- but was quite young when Chinggis died (Kublai was born in 1215, Chinggis died in 1227). Chinggis had many, many grandchildren, and Kublai would have been but one among them. Kublai never knew Chinggis as anything other than a immense, heroic figure, an impossible standard to live up to. That wasn't so much as issue for Kublai for the first half of his life, as there was little chance of him ever becoming Great Khan, and under the guidance of his mother Sorqaqtani Beki, took an interest in Chinese culture and took little for military roles. But when the position of Qa'an was taken by his brother Mongke in 1251 (the Toluid Revolution), Kublai was thrust into leading campaigns against the Kingdom of Dali in modern Yunnan, and then against the Song Dynasty of southern China, before ultimately becoming Qa'an after Mongke's death in 1259.

For control of this position, Kublai fought his brother Ariq Boke in a four year civil war, the first in the Empire's history. Even by then Kublai was associated with Chinese culture by more conservative Mongols, with Ariq the standard bearer of 'traditional values.' This would be an issue which haunted Kublai over the rest of his long life, and that of his successors in the Yuan Dynasty. While Kublai ultimately defeated Ariq Boke and was proclaimed Great Khan in 1264, his election was never fully recognized by the other newly emerging Khanates. Kublai is the most famous Qa'an after Chinggis, but his reign oversaw the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire into independent Khanates and difficulties portraying himself as an Emperor of China to his Chinese subjects, and as a Great Khan to his Mongol followers and the military, never fully succeeding as either. He completed the conquest of China begun by Chinggis in 1211, (1209 if we want to count the Tangut campaigns!) but his continued foreign ventures -Japan, Vietnam, Burma, Indonesia- were all failures, and he saw rebellion in Mongolia and Central Asia, his cousins Qaidu and Nayan (and others) forming barriers to Kublai's influence outside of China, even threatening the original Mongol capital of Karakorum at times.

As Kublai's life drew to a close, he was predeceased by his closest confident, his beloved wife Chabi, his chosen heir Jingim, most of his friends and skilled advisers from earlier in his life. His final years were marked by isolation and removing himself from political affairs, depressed, suffering from gout, obesity and alcoholism. Military defeats, political corruption, economic trouble and the irreversible fragmentation of the empire haunted him. The specter of Chinggis Khan's success, I feel, must have weighed him down above all. Compared to the accolades the Mongols laid upon Chinggis, I believe Kublai must have come to see himself as a failure in comparison to his illustrious grandfather. Of course, Kublai made no such public statement: it would be today like an American politician saying they though George Washington wasn't all that great. In general, little of Kublai's personal thoughts come down to us. Chinggis Khan's final years saw the utter defeat of Khwarezm and the Tangut, laying the groundwork for further expansion: while Kublai saw the Mongols pushed back and the empire fall apart.

For this reason, Kublai almost certainly held Chinggis Khan in the highest regard. Certainly, he put many a posthumous title and ceremony upon his honoured grandfather and his loyal compatriots. He ordered portraits and historical works to celebrate him, and publicly showed nothing but devotion and respect. Yet, he could very well have come to hate the comparisons to him. Chinggis was an ideal Kublai could never live up to, and try as he might, the same glory only eluded him. Had he died in 1280, we might have spoken on his successes and his what his potential could have been had he lived longer: dying in 1294 as he did, we can only imagine how Kublai suffered a sense of the empire slipping from out of his grasp, and how it was his own fault.

Sources:

Timothy May, the Mongol Empire (2018)

Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (1988). Still the most concise, readable and detailed single biography on Kublai, though it is obviously missing newer historiography."

[ariuka-munkh]

My caffeine-empowered brain’s take on some Asian countries and their reaction to China’s rise of power

Mongolia

·         Lowkey just wants to be left alone.

·         Confused 24/7.

·         Economically dependent on China but then highkey hates China with burning passion?

·         Running everywhere making allies from US, EU, Middle East, Russia, and even Africa (http://www.theniles.org/en/articles/archive/1701/)

·         That guy (who is probably high af) that always gets caught trying to sneak out with the party beers.

·         The Mongolian public: WHAT ARE THOSE CHINESE DOING IN OUR COUNTRY???

·         The Mongolian government: Cuz money.

·         The public: What??? Aren’t you worried that China is bullying Mongolia? They’re digging up our land which is not only the important part of our nomadic heritage, they’re not taking good care of the environment and are getting valuable resources. Shouldn’t Mongolia use those resources ourselves?

·         The government: We literally got no money to develop technology.

·         The public: That’s cuz you’re eating them for your own private pleasure.

·         The government: Don’t know what you mean.

·         The public: Okay. Fine. Eat. But you do realize that you’re practically making money from China when you could be making three times as much in the foreign market or using them for our own domestic products? Also, if you haven’t noticed, the people are unhappy and anxious because of China’s interests in Mongolia.

·         The government: Yeah. But we got money~

·         The public: Can you at least do something about China’s annual PMS on Mongolia?

·         The government: Can’t. We’re receiving money.

·         The public: *depressed silence*

·         The government: Don’t worry. We’re making enough money for them anti-depressant pills.

 North Korea

·         Practically one of the few countries which are dealing with China worse than Mongolia is with China.

·         If NK was a human, needs extended psychiatric help to treat all the trauma he put himself through.

·         Domestically, the Kim Dynasty is falling apart and everything is going down to that Biblical place under the Earth.

·         Mongolia: Dude. You got to like let go of the Kims now.

·         North Korea: *covering his ears with his palms* Lalalalallalalala-I can’t hear you-lalallalala-don’t know what you mean backstabber-lalalalala.

·         Perhaps the only country which can be labeled as China’s ally. But then lowkey hates China.

·         But then again, they hate every single ally of theirs and despise every single neighboring country of theirs with burning passion.

·         Internationally, only got China and Russia and few others as their allies.

·         Literally got the worst image in the world which doesn’t help their circumstances.

·         But then was one of the only few countries that shook the international community.

South Korea

·         Prone to making tear-jerkingly moving nationalistic speeches.

·         One of the few countries that are dealing with China the best (by NK and MGL standards).

·         Got long history of dealing with China’s superiority-covered inferiority complex, so knows the general to-dos.

·         Militarily strong (among top 10 of the world) and allied with the US.

·         Economically, profits greatly from China.

·         So literally needs to balance everything until things get nasty.

·         Recieves Anti-Chinese or Anti-Japanese protestors weekly.

·         The protestors: Do something about the Fine Dust!

·         The Korean government: Yes, of course, my people. We are negotiating with China as we are speaking.

·         The protestors: You say that every time!

·         Another protestors: We need solid proof!

·         Old protestors: I’m old! I can’t take this much longer. I could die tomorrow!

·         The government: Yes. We understand. We’re doing everything in our power to lessen the problem.

·         Anti-Yemeni protestors: *popping out of nowhere* Then what about the Yemeni Refugees?

·         The crowd: Yeah!

·         Someone in the crowd: They need to get out of our country.

·         The government: That is officially unable to be done. However, we’ll make sure to ensure our Korean citizens safety, of course. *turns to the nearby government worker* Psst. Is it bad timing to remind them that we signed the agreement to receive the refugees?

 Japan

·         Surprisingly, got their mess together (for a while).

·         Another Asian country that has security treaty with the US.

·         Their army which is to be used only for defense is ranked in top 10 powerful army of the world. (https://ceoworld.biz/2018/11/23/the-worlds-most-powerful-militaries-in-2018/)

·         So if they decide to militarize, uh oh.

·         Other Asian countries, including China, are skeptical of Japan still having the same motives they had during WWII.

·         Their pride can crush a nation.

·         Would rather commit Seppuku than lose face value.

·         Soft power is amazing.

·         Did the “I want to be left alone so I’ll close my borders” before it was cool, hundreds of years ago which didn’t end very well.

·         Japan: Mongoria-san, it riterarry doesn’t work.

·         Mutual dislike with China. As a result, gets into annual disputes with China.

·         Good economic partner of China, but aloof.

·         China is struggling, trying to extend its powers to Japan.

·         Might be able to deal with China’s growing influence by working with South Korea, but the two countries presidents’ don’t even look in each other’s directions.

 Taiwan

·         Saltiest about China’s growing power.

·         It was their soldiers that invaded Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang Uyghur and Tibet which helped outline China’s current borders (speak to my high school history teacher for confirmation).

·         Thankful that the world doesn’t know it was them who stirred trouble in those countries.

·         But really salty that China got all the credits and is an international player now.

·         Probably would have been worse than China if they were the world power than mainland China. (Another US in a nutshell?)

·         Resourceful. Got ears and eyes everywhere.

·         For instance, the only foreign spy in Mongolia is a Taiwanese spy. (MNB News 2016)

·         Mongolia: Bruh, like… Why?

·         Most likely salty that current day Mongolia can’t tell the difference between Taiwanese government and Chinese government even though it should remember because it’s the one country (except mainland China) that truly witnessed their invading army.

·         Economic partnership with China. Semi - under Chinese rule.

·         Allies with US and Japan, but they are not very helpful.

·         Could maybe assist the unlikely Japan-South Korea cooperation to limit China’s influence in East Asia.

 Hong Kong

·         An honorable mention city-state.

·         Literally, gives China trouble until China agrees to their demands.

·         Democracy under China’s authoritarian rule.

·         Rebellious but not violent.

·         China profits a lot from Hong Kong economically.

·         Got all the aspect of an independent nation. (No military. But Liechtenstein is still a nation with no military of its own, so) Their economy is good.

·         China knows this and put economic sanctions on them from time to time.

·         Currently cornered due to Beijing pressures on them.

 Tibet

·         Literally the one country that wants to clock China the most (and has justifiable reasons).

·         Wanted to clock China since the early 1900s.

·         Globally got the image of a peaceful neutral nation full of monks, but in truth, capable of knifing when the chance is given.  

·         Prone to breakdowns once in a while.

·         Tibet: Goddammit, China! Why are you so clingy?! *nonsensical Tibetan mutterings and curses* Where did I go wrong? Honestly, where did I go wrong? Oh yeah, It was that moment when I got invaded by Manchu. *turns to Mongolia* This is all your fault.

·         Mongolia: Yeah?

·         Tibet: You dragged all of us down!

·         Mongolia: Sure. But why, bruh?

·         Tibet: If you weren’t being cruel to Inner Mongolia, she wouldn’t have joined forces with the Manchu from the beginning! And then not only that you lost Inner Mongolia, you went ahead and joined forces with Manchu to fight your own brother. Your brother! Frigging Oirad Mongolia was the only one who had a common sense in your crazy family. Now where is he? Dead.

·         Mongolia: Yo, is you really gonna talk about all of my youthful mistakes now?

·         Tibet: Youthful mistakes, my foot. You killed your family.

·         Mongolia: I tried, man.

·         Tibet: *sarcastically* My hero.

·         Mongolia: …

·         Tibet: Do you know what I’m most pissed up about though?

·         Mongolia: …shoot.

·         Tibet: Frigging Manchu ended up going extinct and the frigging West thought it was China that beated us up.

·         Mongolia: …

·         Tibet: Say something!

·         Mongolia: I’m used to it.

·         Tibet: …I hate you so much.

·         Mongolia: Eh. *puts on sunglasses* Words can’t hurt me, these shades are Gucci.

 India

·         Another power that may be able to challenge China.

·         But got some family problems with Pakistan.

·         Had long trade business with China from the Ancient times which continues to today.

·         But occasionally defends Tibet which causes complications with China.

·         Another power that can neutralize or deal with China’s rise to power.

·         Allies with ASEAN countries but not part of them.

 Vietnam

·         Honorable mention country.

·         Wrecked both China and US in the past century.

·         Literally, should not to be messed with.

·         Another socialist government who hates both China and the US.

 Philippines

·         Got problems with drug-dealers

·         Image of the gangsta country of Asia

·         Beautiful islands

·         I have no idea about Philippines, someone needs to enlighten me.

[semi-imaginary-place]

Diamaunt the fashionista and gemstone expert of ul'dah and she has like has 5 names. All names hold history whether they continue being used or are left behind, the way that they are recorded often tells a lot about the era in which they were recorded

Diamaunt’s family split off from their original xaela clan several generations back around the time of her great-grandmother. perhaps not that generation but they did eventually adopt a doman name for day to day professional and legal use as merchants while continuing to privately use their xaela names. when they emigrated to eorzea Diamaunt took on an eorzean name and so her names are:

classic: ᠭᠱᠠᠨ, modern: агшин, romanized: Y/Gsan (i still don’t know) Dalamiq

品運刹那 (Shina’un Setsuna)

and Diamaunt!

i imagine her family also has nicknames for her too.

The first name I gave her was Setsuna (刹那) because names hold history by giving her a higan name this implies that her family left the steppe or at least has frequent enough contact with doma to take on a different name. And both are true her family name is recorded in Doma as Shina-un(品運) since her family runs a trading business. And so her legal doman name is Shina-un Setsuna. This is also because I was curious why every doman character seemed to have names that followed the same naming conventions, as opposed to say in eorzea where named follow race not citystate and I started wondering why. before the garlean invasion where was doman on the scale of socioeconomic pressure to conform names aka 1970's america to act of cultural genocide aka 1900 japan or 1600s americas where indigenous people where not allowed to be legally recognized by names in their native language, they had to have a japanese or christian etc. name.

irl Setsuna is a buddhist name that originated in Sanskrit क्षण (kṣaṇa) from the word for moment (a small transient period of time). from the indian subcontinent the word traveled with buddhist missionaries throughout asia, and reached japan though china and middle chinese. the word also reached mongolia so throughout much asia the word for moment all share an etymological root. which means that setsuna has a mongolian equivalent and by extension the higan name has a xaela equivalent. But you see xaela names aren't mongolian inspired, they're MIDDLE MONGOLIAN inspired. documentation of mongolian that i can access as an english speaker is bad as is between the 3? 4? writing systems (cyrillic, latin, historical unique, chinese) but a historical language? so much worse. anyways after a lot of digging and pain and tears I found the modern mongolian equivalent to be agshin (агшин) and the classical mongolian equivalent to be gsan (ᠭᠱᠠᠨ) so Gsan is her xaela name and the name she's always used at home

The xaela clan name is the thing I thought of last because it didn't matter as much to her story as an immigrant and as diaspora. (Mathilde and a few others have similar themes). I had Hotgo as a place holder for quite a while but then i found out their story in the alexander raids and was like ehhhh I want a bit more creative flexibility so for now her family was originally from the Dalamiq. “One of only a few Xaela tribes which has abandoned the nomadic lifestyle and built a small village on an islet in the middle of a two-malm-wide span of the great inner river. It is said they once worshipped the now-fallen lesser moon.” i like that its established that the clan settled down as a precedent for Diamaunt’s parents doing the same so it fits her family history of nomadic clan to traveling merchants to settled professional class. and making her a part of the dalamiq clan adds an interesting religious motivation to her family emigrating to eorzea that caught my attention.

[hashtagfarrakhan]

Day 18: Mother Tynnetta Muhammad

  Mother Tynnetta Muhammad was born Tynnetta Alethea Nelson on May 10, 1941, in Detroit, Michigan. Since early childhood she studied many world cultures and societies. A gifted child in oratorical and writing skills, she developed a wide range of creative expression in the performing arts, including theater and dance. She often appeared in public recitals and was a regular performer on local television stations at an early age. At age 16, Mother Tynnetta Muhammad embraced the Divine Teachings of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and received her “X” at 17 in 1958. The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s Teachings guided her to the study of the Holy Qur’an. Ever since, she remained devoted to the study of the Divine Word of God.

  She eventually married the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Leader of the Nation Of Islam in America. Together they had four children, Madeeah Muhammad, Ishmael Muhammad, Rasul Muhammad and Ahmad Muhammad. Her Study of the Holy Qur’an became the foundation of her music computational works and creative spirit. Mother Tynnetta Muhammad was self-taught without formal training in music theory or instrumentation and credited her musical expression to be - “A Gift from Allah and an answer to a Prayer.”

Mother Tynnetta Muhammad with her husband The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

   In 1959 she was chosen to be the first Muslim Woman columnist in the Pittsburgh Courier, the Lost Angeles Herald Dispatch, and the Muhammad Speaks newspapers, writing under the title “The Woman in Islam.” Mother Tynnetta wrote a weekly column in the Final Call newspaper entitled, Unveiling the Number 19. She participated in many noteworthy international conferences and authored several publications on Islam rooted in the Divine Teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad from its global perspective.

  Mother Tynnetta began the publication of the Cultural Links News Journal in 2002 to support the Honorable Elijah Muhammad Educational Foundation, a nonprofit organization which she founded in 1978 to promote the expression of the cultural arts. Through the publication of Cultural Links, Mother Tynnetta was able to promote educational programming dedicated to the study of the arts and sciences of civilization to audiences around the world.

Mother Tynnetta Muhammad pausing from reading the Holy Qur’an.

  She was the fashion designer of the Dress 19 collection and introduced the Al-Tai Fashahnn ensemble, inspired from her journey to the Al-Tai Republic in Russia. Some of her fashion designs were featured in the July 1996 issue of Essence magazine and in the Spring 2013 issue of Virtue Today Magazine.

  Mother Tynnetta Muhammad was greatly aided and supported throughout the years by the late, Alice Coltrane wife of the legendary jazz artist and genius, John Coltrane. Mother Tynnetta cultivated a lifetime and endearing friendship with the late Syretta Wright (Muhammad), former Motown performing artist, lyricist, and former wife of Stevie Wonder. Syretta is the founder of the performing artists and dance ensemble The Divine Hands. Other notable friendships include the late Miriam Makeeba, Mrs. Winnie Mandela, rap artist and movie producer, O’Shea (Ice Cube) Jackson and wife, Kimberley Jackson. Mother Tynnetta developed friendship with the Unification Church and its leadership and Founder, the Reverend and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon, affectionately referred to as “True Parents” and “Mother and Father Moon.” Through them the doors of communication and cultural links were opened to the Mongolian people.

Mother Tynnetta Muhammad with Erykah Badu and India Arie at the Millions More Movement.

  In 2009, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan introduced one of Mother Tynnetta’s original compositional works entitled Ta Ha: The Final Call Symphonic Suite to a large audience during the Saviours; Day Convention. Mother Tynnetta Muhammad was an assistant and Spiritual Helper to the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, appointed by her husband to help continue this Great Work of Divine Unity and Global Mission in the Spiritual Resurrection of Our people world-wide embracing the whole of humanity.

  She attended an International Leadership Conference in Mongolia accompanied by two outstanding Vanguard, Sister Anita Muhammad from Washington D.C. and Sister Vivian Lee from the Oakland California Bay Area. This event inspired Mother Tynnetta to present an entrepreneurial and ambassadorial training program for the MGT Vanguards in partnership with the entire MGT class. Mother Muhammad was gifted withe a psychic sense of perception seeing into the future of a new world, which will flourish upon the vibrations of peace and unlimited progress for the Righteous.

 Below is a few words from interviews Mother Tynnetta Muhammad had with Virtue Magazine:

Virtue: What things did you teach your children as they were growing up? What values did you feel were important to teach them?

Mother Tynnetta: I believe it is important to give children a strong spiritual base. they must learn to nurture God, honor and respect, prayer and cleanliness.

Virtue: What did you learn about Virtue from the Honorable Elijah Muhammad? What is the state of Virtue of women Today? What changed do we need to make as women?

Mother Tynnetta: Women are being abused in society today and children are being raped and murdered. There are psychological imbalances in male and female relationships because of the lack of respect. No virtue in a woman demonstrates the type of leadership society is under. the female energy has to give back, to give balance. Women should be trained by all women teachers. Women need to be put back in our rightful place. Keeping that family together and the virtuous is on the woman. We need to reeducate the male. We, as women, have to be aware of how we act and dress and its affect on society we are part of. The Mother’s Eye has to be attentive, even of the father.

Virtue: How can we encourage music and culture with our children?

Mother Tynnetta- First of all, each mother and father has to go inside themselves. There is a certain frequency that we all have, a certain tonality, a certain sound or temperament we all have, but because our lives have been so “noisy” or I should say our environment has been so “jammed” with so many expressions from rock and roll to rap that we have rarely touched upon these types of vibrations inside of us or even know how to respond to it when it is there. I remember coming up in school and we would go see symphonies. One does not have to be trained in musical instrument to get in touch with inner vibrations and frequency of sound. Exposing our children to nature, flowers, insects etc., will help them find that inner nitch. The more that we expose our children to museums, science museums, art museums and ballets, the better outlook they will have. I would expose my children and take them when I traveled. Today they say “mom exposed us to so many things which is why we have such a global outlook.” We must raise our children in such a way because they have the potential to become great artists and cultural benefactors. But if we are lazy and don’t make programs in which we include them, [they won’t learn as much.] Children learn by example.

Virtue: How can we as women help to be helpers or Vanguards in building a righteous Nation?

Mother Tynnetta: well, the kind of energy I had since my youth continues with me. If you put our positive energy and think of how to “grow” an idea or situation into the future, then you are going to force the mind to create for you your reality. I am saying that is most important as a Vanguard myself and having come up through the ranks as a MGT and GCC under the leadership of the late Ethel Muhammad, the eldest daughter of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. She encouraged the young people to have their own activities within the class structure. That is how I got involved with teaching the MGT and GCC juniors and we got involved with everything we wanted to and we would just report it to the MGT such as writing, poetry, etc. We even produced a book that The Honorable Elijah Muhammad approved that has stories of Islam. We had art classes and ceramics up until around 1972 or 1974, just on the edge of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s departure. What we tried to do is take our minds and be creative. We have to think positively and bring or [work] through, as much as we can, what is considered to be negativity in our environment that prevents us from being who we are.

Virtue: Good point. Thank You.

   Mother Tynnetta represented in life, from her childhood in Detroit through her matriculation and development into a world-traveler and cultured and refined woman of the Nation of Islam, her contribution to the world will impact generations. She is a Divine Woman and a great example of how a genius thinks like and what a Queen looks and acts like. A warrior, a mother, a great cook, a scholar, a scientist, the NOI ambassador of culture, a composer, musician, an actress, a dancer and much more. She work continues to inspire many in the global mission of the Teachings of The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

Watch and read some of Mother Tynnetta’s articles and lectures here:

http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/search-fcn/search-fcn.shtml?q=mother%20tynnetta%20muhammad

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mother+tynnetta

(What was written was transcribed from Saviours’ Day edition of Virtue Magazine. VirtueTodayMag.com)

[ericfruits]

Rich Chinese try camping as the authorities settle nomads

A TOUR party of 30 people in red baseball caps piles off a coach at “Swan Lake”, a yurt park in Inner Mongolia in the north of China. “I wanted to see the grasslands,” says a woman from Kunming, 2,000km to the south, who is posing for photos beside a giant bronze statue of a pointy-helmeted Mongolian warrior on horseback. The “authentic Mongolian experience” costs 380 yuan ($55) a night. Yet unlike traditional yurts with portable metal or wood frames overlaid with thick wool covers, these structures are made of sheet plastic and have beds, windows, Wi-Fi and en suite bathrooms. And instead of being dotted across the steppe, they are arranged in tightly packed clumps. Glamping, or glamorous camping, meaning camping minus the hassle and grunge, usually in pre-erected and well-appointed tents, is becoming a popular pursuit for city folk at beauty spots all over China.

The proliferation of glampsites partly reflects an overall rise in domestic tourism by 10-15% a year for much of the past decade. Rural tourism has been an important strand in this. The government has encouraged it, in the hope that it will help its campaign to cut poverty. Across the countryside nongjiale, or rural guesthouses, promote themselves as relaxing retreats from urban life. In Hunan in central China pods with transparent roofs offer campers a chance to enjoy “a special view of the sky”. Other glampsites house customers in geodesic domes. New camp and caravan parks are appearing all over the country. The government hopes a further 2,000 will open by 2020.

Most of China’s glampers are not seeking glorious solitude. They seem unperturbed by experiencing the wilderness in crowds. The southern shore of Qinghai Lake in the eastern part of the Tibetan plateau is lined with a range of yurts, sleeping pods and other structures. A single campsite in Hubei can accommodate 8,000 people. Many offer entertainment too. The Swan Lake tourists enjoy Mongolian banquets and dancing in a giant concrete yurt.

While glamping has gained ground, China’s genuine campers—nomadic herdsmen—have been settled, often forcibly, under successive policies that have divided common land, banned free grazing and compelled households to move. Nearly half of China’s 2m registered nomads had become sedentary by 2010 (the most recent date for which data exist). Most were members of one of China’s ethnic minorities, including Tibetans, Mongolians and Kazakhs. The sightseers and campsite owners, by contrast, are usually ethnic Han, who make up some 92% of China’s population.

The Chinese government boasts that relinquishing the nomadic lifestyle represents “enormous strides towards modernity” and refers to the annual migration of pastoralists’ herds as a dangerous “ordeal”. Yet in recent years herders have staged repeated protests at forced relocation, appropriation or pollution of their grazing lands and poor compensation. Many lack the skills to find work in cities; those remaining on the grasslands often struggle to make a living now that grazing has been curtailed. Some also see resettlement as part of a broader erosion of their ethnic identity. The happy glampers at Swan Lake and elsewhere, it seems safe to assume, are unaware of all that.

This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline "Love yurts"

http://ift.tt/2vSgamJ

[deniscollins]

‘When Can We Go to School?’ Nearly 300 Million Children Are Missing Class.

Students are now out of school in China, South Korea, Iran, Japan, France, Pakistan, some parts of the U.S. and elsewhere — some for only a few days, others for weeks on end. In Italy, all schools and universities will remain closed until March 15. Day cares and nannies are already overbooked. If you were a manager and many of your employees had grade school children, what, if anything, would you do to address this problem? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

The coronavirus epidemic reached deeper into daily life across the world on Wednesday, with a sweeping shutdown of all schools in Italy and warnings of school closures in the United States, intensifying the educational upheaval of nearly 300 million students globally.

Only a few weeks ago, China, where the outbreak began, was the only country to suspend classes. But the virus has spread so quickly that by Wednesday, 22 countries on three continents had announced school closures of varying degrees, leading the United Nations to warn that “the global scale and speed of the current educational disruption is unparalleled.”  

Students are now out of school in South Korea, Iran, Japan, France, Pakistan and elsewhere — some for only a few days, others for weeks on end. In Italy, suffering one of the deadliest outbreaks outside China, officials said Wednesday that they would extend school closures beyond the north, where the government has imposed a lockdown on several towns, to the entire nation. All schools and universities will remain closed until March 15, officials said.

On the West Coast of the United States, the region with the most American infections so far, Los Angeles declared a state of emergency on Wednesday, advising parents to steel themselves for school closures in the nation’s second-largest public school district. Washington State, which has reported at least 10 deaths from the outbreak, has closed some schools, while on the other side of the country in New York, newly diagnosed cases have led to the closure of several schools as well.  

The speed and scale of the educational tumult — which now affects 290.5 million students worldwide, the United Nations says — has little parallel in modern history, educators and economists contend. Schools provide structure and support for families, communities and entire economies. The effect of closing them for days, weeks and sometimes even months could have untold repercussions for children and societies at large.

“They’re always saying, ‘When can we go out to play? When can we go to school?’” said Gao Mengxian, a security guard in Hong Kong whose two daughters have been stuck at home because school has been suspended since January.

In some countries, older students have missed crucial study sessions for college admissions exams, while younger ones have risked falling behind in reading and math. Parents have lost wages, tried to work at home or scrambled to find child care. Some have moved  children to new schools in areas unaffected by the coronavirus, and lost milestones like graduation ceremonies or last days of school.

“I don’t have data to offer, but can’t think of any instances in modern times where advanced economies shut down schools nationally for prolonged periods of time,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

In Hong Kong, families like Ms. Gao’s have struggled to maintain some semblance of normalcy.

Ms. Gao, 48, stopped working to watch her daughters and started scrimping on household expenses. She ventures outside just once a week and spends the most time helping her girls, 10 and 8, with online classes, fumbling through technology that leaves her confused and her daughters frustrated.

Governments are trying to help. Japan is offering subsidies to help companies offset the cost of parents’ taking time off. France has promised 14 days of paid sick leave to parents of children who must self-isolate, if they have no choice but to watch their children.

But the burdens are widespread, touching corners of society seemingly unconnected to education. In Japan, schools have canceled bulk food deliveries for lunches they will no longer serve, hurting farmers and suppliers. In Hong Kong, an army of domestic helpers has been left unemployed after wealthy families enrolled their children in schools overseas.

Julia Bossard, a 39-year-old mother of two in France, said she had been forced to rethink her entire routine since her older son’s school was closed for two weeks for disinfection. Her days now consist of helping her children with homework and scouring supermarkets for fast-disappearing pasta, rice and canned food. “We had to reorganize ourselves,” she said.

Online and Alone

School and government officials have sought to keep children learning — and occupied — at home. The Italian government created a web page to give teachers access to videoconference tools and ready-made lesson plans. Mongolian television stations are airing classes. Iran’s government has made all children’s internet content free.

Students even take online physical education: At least one school in Hong Kong requires students — in gym uniform — to follow along as an instructor demonstrates push-ups onscreen. Each student’s webcam provides proof.

The offline reality, though, is challenging.  Technological hurdles and unavoidable distractions  pop up when children and teenagers are left to their own devices — literally.

Thira Pang, a 17-year-old high school student in Hong Kong, has been repeatedly late for class because her internet connection is slow. She now logs on 15 minutes early.

“It’s just a bit of luck to see whether you can get in,” she said.

The new classroom at home poses greater problems for younger students, and their older caregivers. Ruby Tan, a teacher in Chongqing, a city in southwestern China that suspended school last month, said many grandparents were helping with child care so that the parents can go to work. But the grandparents do not always know the technology.

“They don’t have any way of supervising the children’s learning, and instead let them develop bad habits of not being able to focus during study time,” Ms. Tan said.

Some interruptions are unavoidable. Posts on Chinese social media show teachers and students climbing onto rooftops or hovering outside neighbors’ homes in search of a stronger internet signal. One family in Inner Mongolia packed up its yurt and migrated elsewhere in the grasslands for a better web connection, a Chinese magazine reported.

The closings have also altered the normal milestones of education. In Japan, the school year typically ends in March. Many schools are now restricting the ceremonies to teachers and students.

When Satoko Morita’s son graduated from high school in Akita Prefecture, in northern Japan, on March 1, she was not there. It will be the same for her daughter’s ceremony at elementary school.

“My daughter asked me, ‘What’s the point of attending and delivering speeches in the ceremony without parents?’” she said.

For Chloe Lau, a Hong Kong student, the end of her high school education came abruptly. Her last day was supposed to be April 2, but schools in Hong Kong will not resume until at least April 20.

A Burden on Women

With the closings, families must rethink how they support themselves and split household responsibilities. The burden has fallen particularly hard on women, who across the world are still largely responsible for child care.

Babysitters are in short supply or leery of taking children from hard-hit regions.

The 11-year-old son of Lee Seong-yeon, a health information manager at a hospital in Seoul, South Korea, has been out of class since the government suspended schools nationwide on Monday. South Korea has the highest number of coronavirus cases outside China.

Working from home was never an option for Ms. Lee: She and her husband, also a hospital employee, have more work duties than ever. So Ms. Lee’s son spends each weekday alone, eating lunchboxes of sausage and kimchi fried rice premade by Ms. Lee.

“I think I would have quit my job if my son were younger, because I wouldn’t have been able to leave him alone at home,” Ms. Lee said.

Still, she feels her career will suffer. “I try to get off work at 6 p.m. sharp, even when others at the office are still at their desks, and I run home to my son and make him dinner,” she said. “So I know there is no way I am ever going to be acknowledged for my career at work.”

For mothers with few safety nets, options are even more limited.

In Athens,  Anastasia Moschos said she had been lucky. When her 6-year-old son’s school was closed for a week, Ms. Moschos, 47, an insurance broker, left her son with her father, who was visiting. But if the schools stay closed, she may have to scramble for help.

“The assumption is that everyone has someone to assist,” she said. “That’s not the case with me. I’m a single mother, and I don’t have help at home.”

Even mothers able to leave affected areas have trouble finding child care. Cristina Tagliabue, a communications entrepreneur from Milan, the center of Italy’s outbreak, recently moved with her 2-year-old son to her second home in Rome. But no day care facility would  accept her son because other parents did not want anyone from Milan near their children, Ms. Tagliabue said.

The closings in Italy — which include day care in addition to schools and universities — are likely to create problems for parents nationwide.

Ms. Tagliabue has turned down several job proposals, she said, since she is unable to work at home without a babysitter for her young child.

“It’s right to close schools, but that has a cost,” she said. “The government could have done something for mothers — we are also in quarantine.”

Beyond the Classroom

The epidemic has shaken entire industries that rely on the rituals of students in school and parents at work.

School administrators in Japan, surprised by the abrupt decision to close schools, have rushed to cancel orders for cafeteria lunches, stranding suppliers with unwanted groceries and temporarily unneeded employees.

Kazuo Tanaka, deputy director of the Yachimata School Lunch Center in central Japan, said it scrapped orders for ingredients to make about 5,000 lunches for 13 schools. It would cost the center about 20 million yen, nearly $200,000, each month that school was out, he said.

“Bakeries are blown,” said Yuzo Kojima, secretary general at the National School Lunch Association. “Dairy farmers and vegetable farmers will be hit. The workers at the school lunch centers cannot work.”

To blunt the effects, Japan’s government is offering financial help to parents, small businesses and health care providers. But school lunch officials said they had not heard about compensation for their workers.

In Hong Kong, many among its sizable population of domestic helpers have been jobless as affluent parents have enrolled children overseas.

Demand for nannies had already dropped by a third when the outbreak began, because many companies allowed parents to work from home, said Felix Choi, the director of Babysitter.hk, a nanny service. Now some expatriate families have left the city rather than wait out the closings.

“Over 30 percent of our client base is Western expat families, and I’m not seeing many of them coming back to Hong Kong at this moment,” Mr. Choi said. “Most of them informed us they will only come back after school restarts.”

[kristablogs]

The answer to lactose intolerance might be in Mongolia

Mongolians subsist on a dairy-heavy diet, even though most are lactose intolerant. (Matthäus Rest/)

Lake Khövsgöl is about as far north of the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar as you can get without leaving the country. If you’re too impatient for the 13-hour bus ride, you can take a prop plane to the town of Murun, then drive for three hours on dirt roads to Khatgal, a tiny village nestled against the lake’s southern shore. The felt yurts that dot the surrounding green plains are a throwback to the days—not so long ago—when most Mongolians lived as subsistence herders.

In July 2017, archaeogeneticist Christina Warinner headed there to learn about the population’s complex relationship with milk. In Khatgal, she found a cooperative called Blessed by Yak, where families within a few hours’ drive pooled the bounty from their cows, goats, sheep, and yaks to supply tourists with heirloom dairy products.

Warinner watched for hours as Blessed by Yak members transformed the liquid into a dizzying array of foods. Milk was everywhere in and around these homes: splashing from swollen udders into wooden buckets, simmering in steel woks atop fires fueled by cow dung, hanging in leather bags from riblike wooden rafters, bubbling in specially made stills, crusting as spatters on the wood-lattice inner walls. The women even washed their hands in whey. “Working with herders is a five-senses experience,” Warinner says. “The taste is really strong; the smell is really strong. It reminds me of when I was nursing my daughter, and everything smelled of milk.”

Each family she visited had a half-dozen dairy products or more in some stage of production around a central hearth. And horse herders who came to sell their goods brought barrels of airag, a slightly alcoholic fizzy beverage that set the yurts abuzz.

Airag, made only from horse milk, is not to be confused with aaruul, a sour cheese, created from curdled milk, that gets so hard after weeks drying in the sun that you’re better off sucking on it or softening it in tea than risking your teeth trying to chew it. Easier to consume is byaslag, rounds of white cheese pressed between wooden boards. Roasted curds called eezgi look a little like burnt popcorn; dry, they last for months stored in cloth bags. Carefully packed in a sheep-stomach wrapper, the buttery clotted cream known as urum—made from fat-rich yak or sheep milk—will warm bellies all through the winter, when temperatures regularly drop well below zero.

Warinner’s personal favorite? The “mash” left behind when turning cow or yak milk into an alcoholic drink called shimin arkhi. “At the bottom of the still, you have an oily yogurt that’s delicious,” she says.

Her long trip to Khatgal wasn’t about culinary curiosity, however. Warinner was there to solve a mystery: Despite the dairy diversity she saw, an estimated 95 percent of Mongolians are, genetically speaking, lactose intolerant. Yet, in the frost-free summer months, she believes they may be getting up to half their calories from milk products.

Scientists once thought dairying and the ability to drink milk went hand in hand. What she found in Mongolia has pushed Warinner to posit a new explanation. On her visit to Khatgal, she says, the answer was all around her, even if she couldn’t see it.

Sitting, transfixed, in homes made from wool, leather, and wood, she was struck by the contrast with the plastic and steel kitchens she was familiar with in the US and Europe. Mongolians are surrounded by microscopic organisms: the bacteria that ferment the milk into their assorted foodstuffs, the microbes in their guts and on the dairy-soaked felt of their yurts. The way these invisible creatures interact with each other, with the environment, and with our bodies creates a dynamic ecosystem.

That’s not unique. Everyone lives with a billions-strong universe of microbes in, on, and around them. Several pounds’ worth thrive in our guts alone. Researchers have dubbed this wee world the microbiome and are just beginning to understand the role it plays in our health.

Some of these colonies, though, are more diverse than others: Warinner is still working on sampling the Khatgal herders’ microbiomes, but another team has already gathered evidence that the Mongolian bacterial makeup differs from those found in more-industrial areas of the world. Charting the ecosystem they are a part of might someday help explain why the population is able to eat so much dairy—​and offer clues to help people everywhere who are lactose intolerant.

Warinner argues that a better understanding of the complex microbial universe inhabiting every Mongolian yurt could also provide insight into a problem that goes far beyond helping folks eat more brie. As communities around the world abandon traditional lifestyles, so-called diseases of civilization, like dementia, diabetes, and food intolerances, are on the rise.

Warinner is convinced that the Mongolian affinity for dairy is made possible by a mastery of bacteria 3,000 years or more in the making. By scraping gunk off the teeth of steppe dwellers who died thousands of years ago, she’s been able to prove that milk has held a prominent place in the Mongolian diet for millennia. Understanding the differences between traditional microbiomes like theirs and those prevalent in the industrialized world could help explain the illnesses that accompany modern lifestyles—and perhaps be the beginning of a different, more beneficial approach to diet and health.

Nowadays, Warinner does her detective work at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History’s ancient DNA lab, situated on the second floor of a high-rise bioscience facility overlooking the historic center of the medieval town of Jena, Germany. To prevent any errant DNA from contaminating its samples, entering the lab involves a half-hour protocol, including disinfection of foreign objects, and putting on head-to-toe Tyvek jumpsuits, surgical face masks, and eye shields. Inside, postdocs and technicians wielding drills and picks harvest fragments of dental plaque from the teeth of people who died long ago. It’s here that many of Warinner’s Mongolian specimens get cataloged, analyzed, and archived.

Her path to the lab began in 2010, when she was a postdoctoral researcher in Switzerland. Warinner was looking for ways to find evidence of infectious disease on centuries-old skeletons. She started with dental caries, or cavities—spots where bacteria had burrowed into the tooth enamel. To get a good look, she spent a lot of time clearing away plaque:​ mineral deposits scientists call “calculus,” and that, in the absence of modern dentistry, accumulate on teeth in an unsightly brown mass.

Around the same time, Amanda Henry, now a researcher at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, put calculus scraped from Neanderthal teeth under the microscope and spotted starch grains trapped in the mineral layers. The results provided evidence that the population ate a diverse diet that included plants as well as meat.

Hearing about the work, Warinner wondered if looking at specimens from a medieval German cemetery might yield similar insights. But when she checked for food remains under the microscope, masses of perfectly preserved bacteria blocked her from doing so. “They were literally in your way, obscuring your view,” she recalls. The samples were teeming with microbial and human genes, preserved and protected by a hard mineral matrix.

Warinner had discovered a way to see the tiny organisms in the archaeological record, and with them, a means to study diet. “I realized this was a really rich source of bacterial DNA no one had thought of before,” Warinner says. “It’s a time capsule that gives us access to information about an individual’s life that is very hard to get from other places.”

The dental calculus research dovetailed with rising interest in the microbiome, rocketing Warinner to a coveted position at Max Planck. (In 2019, Harvard hired her as an anthropology professor, and she now splits her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Jena, overseeing labs on two continents.) Her TED talks have racked up more than 2 million views. “I never expected to have an entire career based on something people spend lots of time and money trying to get rid of,” she quips.

That grimy dental buildup, Warinner has learned, preserves more than just DNA. In 2014, she published a study in which she and her colleagues looked at the teeth of Norse Greenlanders, seeking insight into why Vikings abandoned their settlements there after just a few hundred years. She found milk proteins suspended in the plaque of the area’s earliest settlers—and almost none in that of people buried five centuries later. “We had a marker to trace dairy consumption,” Warinner says.

This discovery led Warinner to turn to one of the biggest puzzles in recent human evolution: Why milk? Most people in the world aren’t genetically equipped to digest dairy as adults. A minority of them—including most northern Europeans—​have one of several mutations that allows their bodies to break down the key sugar in milk, lactose, beyond early childhood. That ability is called lactase persistence, after the protein that processes lactose.

Until recently, geneticists thought that dairying and the ability to drink milk must have evolved together, but that didn’t prove out when investigators went looking for evidence. Ancient DNA samples from all across Europe suggest that even in places where lactase persistence is common today, it didn’t appear until 3000 BCE—long after people domesticated cattle and sheep and started consuming dairy products. For 4,000 years prior to the mutation, Europeans were making cheese and eating dairy despite their lactose intolerance. Warinner guessed that microbes may have been doing the job of dairy digestion for them.

To prove it, she began looking for places where the situation was similar. Mongolia made sense: There’s evidence that herding and domestication there dates back 5,000 years or more. But, Warinner says, direct evidence of long-ago dairy consumption was absent—until ancient calculus let her harvest it straight from the mouths of the dead.

Ancient plaque shows Mongolians have eaten dairy for millennia. (Courtesy Christina Warinner/)

Starting in 2016, in her Jena lab, Warinner and her team scraped the teeth of skeletons buried on the steppes thousands of years ago and excavated by archaeologists in the 1990s. Samples about the size of a lentil were enough to reveal proteins from cow, goat, and sheep milk. By tapping the same remains for ancient DNA, Warinner could go one step further and show that they belonged to people who lacked the gene to digest lactose—​just like modern Mongolians do.

Samples of the microbiome from in and around today’s herders, Warinner realized, might offer a way to understand how this was possible. Though it’s estimated that just 1 in 20 Mongolians has the mutation allowing them to digest milk, few places in the world put as much emphasis on dairy. They include it in festivities and offer it to spirits before any big trip to ensure safety and success. Even their metaphors are dairy-based: “The smell from a wooden vessel filled with milk never goes away” is the rough equivalent of “old habits die hard.”

Down the hall from the ancient DNA lab, thousands of microbiome samples the team has collected over the past two summers pack tall industrial freezers. Chilled to minus 40 degrees F—colder, even, than the Mongolian winter—the collection includes everything from eezgi and byaslag to goat turds and yak-udder swabs. Hundreds of the playing-card-size plastic baggies new mothers use to freeze breast milk contain raw, freshly squeezed camel, cow, goat, reindeer, sheep, and yak milk.

Warinner’s initial hypothesis was that the Mongolian herders—​past and present—​were using lactose-​eating microbes to break down their many varieties of dairy, making it digestible. Commonly known as fermentation, it’s the same bacteria-assisted process that turns malt into beer, grapes into wine, and flour into bubbly sourdough.

Fermentation is integral to just about every dairy product in the Mongolian repertoire. While Western cheeses also utilize the process, makers of Parmesan, brie and Camembert all rely on fungi and rennet—​an enzyme from the stomachs of calves—to get the right texture and taste. Mongolians, on the other hand, maintain microbial cultures called starters, saving a little from each batch to inoculate the next.

Ethnographic evidence suggests that these preparations have been around a very, very long time. In Mongolian, they’re called khöröngö, a word that’s derived from the term for wealth or inheritance. They are living heirlooms, typically passed from mother to daughter. And they require regular care and feeding. “Starter cultures get constant attention over weeks, months, years, generations,” says Björn Reichhardt, a Mongolian-​speaking ethnographer at Max Planck and member of Warinner’s team responsible for collecting most of the samples in the Jena freezers. “Mongolians tend to dairy products the way they would an infant.” As with a child, the environment in which they’re nurtured is deeply influential. The microbial makeup of each family’s starters seems to be subtly different.

After returning from Khatgal in 2017, Warinner launched the Heirloom Microbe project to identify and catalog the bacteria the herders were using to make their dairy products. The name reflected her hope that the yurts harbored strains or species ignored by industrial labs and corporate starter-​culture manufacturers. Perhaps, Warinner imagined, there would be a novel strain or some combination of microbes Mongolians were using to process milk in a way that Western science had missed.

So far, she’s found Enterococcus, a bacterium common in the human gut that excels at digesting lactose but was eliminated from US and European dairy commodities decades ago. And they’ve spotted some new strains of familiar bacteria like Lactobacillus. But they haven’t identified any radically different species or starters—no magic microbes ready to package in pill form. “It doesn’t seem like there is a range of superbugs in there,” says Max Planck anthropologist Matthäus Rest, who works with Warinner on dairy research.

The reality might be more daunting. Rather than a previously undiscovered strain of microbes, it might be a complex web of organisms and practices—the lovingly maintained starters, the milk-soaked felt of the yurts, the gut flora of individual herders, the way they stir their barrels of airag—that makes the Mongolian love affair with so many dairy products possible.

Warinner’s project now has a new name, Dairy Cultures, reflecting her growing realization that Mongolia’s microbial toolkit might not come down to a few specific bacteria. “Science is often very reductive,” she says. “People tend to look at just one aspect of things. But if we want to understand dairying, we can’t just look at the animals, or the microbiome, or the products. We have to look at the entire system.”

The results could help explain another phenomenon, one that affects people far from the Mongolian steppes. The billions of bacteria that make up our microbiomes aren’t passive passengers. They play an active—if little understood—role in our health, helping regulate our immune systems and digest our food.

Over the past two centuries, industrialization, sterilization, and antibiotics have dramatically changed these invisible ecosystems. Underneath a superficial diversity of flavors—​mall staples like sushi, pad thai, and pizza—​food is becoming more and more the same. Large-scale dairies even ferment items like yogurt and cheese using lab-grown starter cultures, a $1.2 billion industry dominated by a handful of industrial producers. People eating commoditized cuisine lack an estimated 30 percent of the gut microbe species that are found in remote groups still eating “traditional” diets. In 2015, Warinner was part of a team that found bacteria in the digestive tracts of hunter-gatherers living in the Amazon jungle that have all but vanished in people consuming a selection of typical Western fare.

“People have the feeling that they eat a much more diverse and global diet than their parents, and that might be true,” Rest says, “but when you look at these foods on a microbial level, they’re increasingly empty.”

A review paper in Science in October 2019 gathered data from labs around the world beginning to probe if this dwindling variety might be making us sick. Dementia, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers are sometimes termed diseases of civilization. They’re all associated with the spread of urban lifestyles and diets, processed meals, and antibiotics. Meanwhile, food intolerances and intestinal illnesses like Crohn’s disease and irritable bowel disease are on the rise.

Comparing the microbiome of Mongolian herders to samples from people consuming a more industrialized diet elsewhere in the world could translate into valuable insights into what we’ve lost—and how to get it back. Identifying the missing species could refine human microbiome therapies and add a needed dose of science to probiotics.

There might not be much time left for this quest. Over the past 50 years, hundreds of thousands of Mongolian herders have abandoned the steppes, their herds, and their traditional lifestyle, flocking to Ulaanbaatar. Around 50 percent of the country’s population, an estimated 1.5 million people, now crowds into the capital.

In summer 2020, Warinner’s team will return to Khatgal and other rural regions to collect mouth swabs and fecal specimens from herders, the last phase in cataloging the traditional Mongolian micro-biome. She recently decided she’ll sample residents of Ulaanbaatar too, to see how urban dwelling is altering their bacterial balances as they adopt new foods, new ways of life, and, in all likelihood, newly simplified communities of microbes.

Something important, if invisible, is being lost, Warinner believes. On a recent fall morning, she was sitting in her sunlit office in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography on Harvard’s campus. Mostly unpacked from her latest trans-Atlantic move, she was contemplating a creeping, yurt-by-yurt extinction event.

It’s a conundrum vastly different in size, but not in scale, from those facing wildlife conservationists the world over. “How do you restore an entire ecology?” she wondered. “I’m not sure you can. We’re doing our best to record, catalog, and document as much as we can, and try to figure it out at the same time.”

Preserving Mongolia’s microbes, in other words, won’t be enough. We also need the traditional knowledge and everyday practices that have sustained them for centuries. Downstairs, display cases hold the artifacts of other peoples—​from the Massachusett tribe that once lived on the land where Harvard now stands to the Aztec and Inca civilizations that used to rule vast stretches of Central and South America—whose traditions are gone forever, along with the microbial networks they nurtured. “Dairy systems are alive,” Warinner says. “They’ve been alive, and continuously cultivated, for 5,000 years. You have to grow them every single day. How much change can the system tolerate before it begins to break?”

This story appears in the Spring 2020, Origins issue of Popular Science.

[irithnova]

Songs that remind me of aph Mongolia/some aph Mongolia ships? (I'm sorry a few of these are English goth rock bands I can't help that I'm an edgelord)

Cities in dust - Siouxsie and the banshees. God I love this song. Its originally about Pompeii but I can see the lyrics relating to him and his past.

Something Wrong - Clan of Xymox. I can see this song being from from his POV towards another nation, idk if I should disclose what nation though as I don't want to come off insensitive but I do have my reasoning behind it. If you really want to know you can PM me! It's quite a bitter/angry song.

Driven like the snow - Sisters of Mercy. This song is super serious and idk why, I feel like that song would be his vibe during the cold war era?

Same deep water as you - The Cure. The lyrics are quite sad and the whole sound is sad. Again I can see this song being from his POV towards another nation/nation being thing. It's actually more than one nation. I'm not going to elaborate on why but the nations being: Tibet, N Korea, Inner Mongolia? I'm not sure if I personally headcanon inner Mongolia being a nation-being-thing yet. Must educate myself more.. I think I lean more towards yes though.

I have slept with all the girls in Berlin - Sisters of Mercy. Yeah I headcanon during his empire era he was kind of a manwhore so this is self explanatory. Of course he didn't sleep with girls from Berlin but you know there was a lot of people who entertained him (of all genders).

Nevernaya zhena - Fleur. This is a Russian song and for some reason its hard to find these days?? The song is about an unfaithful wife but the lyrics are like. The embodiment of a complicated, painful, toxic and secretive relationship. Unfortunately Monchu is a guilty pleasure of mine (sorry y'all) and yeah any toxic song I can come across like this reminds me of them.

Someone to spend time with - Los retros. Umm this is my tibmongol or Tibet x Mongolia song!! Just a sweet song about missing each other and wanting to spend more time together :)

She sells sanctuary - The cult. I don't know why but for some reason this song reminds me of like the Turkey x Mongolia ship. Maybe because the song just sounds so like happy and carefree and idk kind of like the shared history they had together when they were younger.

There are a lot of Mongolian songs I like but unfortunately I cannot find the English lyrics for all of them. I'm listing some of these off of the vibes they give me. Some modern, some traditional.

Novshroo - Starfish. Sounds like a chill af song makes me think of him just laying down in the steppe somewhere as the sun sets.

A sound - unexpected answer. Again, cannot find the English lyrics :( but its such a nice soft song, def another chill song for him.

LSB - Starfish. Can't find English lyrics :( but yes some nice chill and laidback songs after all of the edgy goth rock I've subjected you all to.

Tsaag agaar - The lemons. Very upbeat song!! This is a summer song for him :3

Altargana - Khusugtun. This song is very beautiful and an altargana is a steppe flower that survives very harsh conditions. Reminds me of his resilience? Also yes I am aware that this is a buryat song. I'm not sure if I characterise aph Mongolia as representing only the Khalkha majority and there are other personifications of different Mongol groups, or if he remains representing the Khalkha majority and a little bit of the different Mongolic ethnic groups? I've read a lot of things from Khalkhas and Buryats/different Mongol ethnic groups online so I'm not too sure... Should educate myself more on this topic..

Govi Nutag - Domog. Based. That's all I have to say.

Khoyor Ntugiin Erkh - Khusugtun. This song is mainly instruments/the morin khuur but wowow its so beautiful. There is part of the song with throat singing though!! It starts from 3:30 minutes and holy shit the sygyt is phenomenal!

[scootoaster]

The answer to lactose intolerance might be in Mongolia

Mongolians subsist on a dairy-heavy diet, even though most are lactose intolerant. (Matthäus Rest/)

Lake Khövsgöl is about as far north of the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar as you can get without leaving the country. If you’re too impatient for the 13-hour bus ride, you can take a prop plane to the town of Murun, then drive for three hours on dirt roads to Khatgal, a tiny village nestled against the lake’s southern shore. The felt yurts that dot the surrounding green plains are a throwback to the days—not so long ago—when most Mongolians lived as subsistence herders.

In July 2017, archaeogeneticist Christina Warinner headed there to learn about the population’s complex relationship with milk. In Khatgal, she found a cooperative called Blessed by Yak, where families within a few hours’ drive pooled the bounty from their cows, goats, sheep, and yaks to supply tourists with heirloom dairy products.

Warinner watched for hours as Blessed by Yak members transformed the liquid into a dizzying array of foods. Milk was everywhere in and around these homes: splashing from swollen udders into wooden buckets, simmering in steel woks atop fires fueled by cow dung, hanging in leather bags from riblike wooden rafters, bubbling in specially made stills, crusting as spatters on the wood-lattice inner walls. The women even washed their hands in whey. “Working with herders is a five-senses experience,” Warinner says. “The taste is really strong; the smell is really strong. It reminds me of when I was nursing my daughter, and everything smelled of milk.”

Each family she visited had a half-dozen dairy products or more in some stage of production around a central hearth. And horse herders who came to sell their goods brought barrels of airag, a slightly alcoholic fizzy beverage that set the yurts abuzz.

Airag, made only from horse milk, is not to be confused with aaruul, a sour cheese, created from curdled milk, that gets so hard after weeks drying in the sun that you’re better off sucking on it or softening it in tea than risking your teeth trying to chew it. Easier to consume is byaslag, rounds of white cheese pressed between wooden boards. Roasted curds called eezgi look a little like burnt popcorn; dry, they last for months stored in cloth bags. Carefully packed in a sheep-stomach wrapper, the buttery clotted cream known as urum—made from fat-rich yak or sheep milk—will warm bellies all through the winter, when temperatures regularly drop well below zero.

Warinner’s personal favorite? The “mash” left behind when turning cow or yak milk into an alcoholic drink called shimin arkhi. “At the bottom of the still, you have an oily yogurt that’s delicious,” she says.

Her long trip to Khatgal wasn’t about culinary curiosity, however. Warinner was there to solve a mystery: Despite the dairy diversity she saw, an estimated 95 percent of Mongolians are, genetically speaking, lactose intolerant. Yet, in the frost-free summer months, she believes they may be getting up to half their calories from milk products.

Scientists once thought dairying and the ability to drink milk went hand in hand. What she found in Mongolia has pushed Warinner to posit a new explanation. On her visit to Khatgal, she says, the answer was all around her, even if she couldn’t see it.

Sitting, transfixed, in homes made from wool, leather, and wood, she was struck by the contrast with the plastic and steel kitchens she was familiar with in the US and Europe. Mongolians are surrounded by microscopic organisms: the bacteria that ferment the milk into their assorted foodstuffs, the microbes in their guts and on the dairy-soaked felt of their yurts. The way these invisible creatures interact with each other, with the environment, and with our bodies creates a dynamic ecosystem.

That’s not unique. Everyone lives with a billions-strong universe of microbes in, on, and around them. Several pounds’ worth thrive in our guts alone. Researchers have dubbed this wee world the microbiome and are just beginning to understand the role it plays in our health.

Some of these colonies, though, are more diverse than others: Warinner is still working on sampling the Khatgal herders’ microbiomes, but another team has already gathered evidence that the Mongolian bacterial makeup differs from those found in more-industrial areas of the world. Charting the ecosystem they are a part of might someday help explain why the population is able to eat so much dairy—​and offer clues to help people everywhere who are lactose intolerant.

Warinner argues that a better understanding of the complex microbial universe inhabiting every Mongolian yurt could also provide insight into a problem that goes far beyond helping folks eat more brie. As communities around the world abandon traditional lifestyles, so-called diseases of civilization, like dementia, diabetes, and food intolerances, are on the rise.

Warinner is convinced that the Mongolian affinity for dairy is made possible by a mastery of bacteria 3,000 years or more in the making. By scraping gunk off the teeth of steppe dwellers who died thousands of years ago, she’s been able to prove that milk has held a prominent place in the Mongolian diet for millennia. Understanding the differences between traditional microbiomes like theirs and those prevalent in the industrialized world could help explain the illnesses that accompany modern lifestyles—and perhaps be the beginning of a different, more beneficial approach to diet and health.

Nowadays, Warinner does her detective work at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History’s ancient DNA lab, situated on the second floor of a high-rise bioscience facility overlooking the historic center of the medieval town of Jena, Germany. To prevent any errant DNA from contaminating its samples, entering the lab involves a half-hour protocol, including disinfection of foreign objects, and putting on head-to-toe Tyvek jumpsuits, surgical face masks, and eye shields. Inside, postdocs and technicians wielding drills and picks harvest fragments of dental plaque from the teeth of people who died long ago. It’s here that many of Warinner’s Mongolian specimens get cataloged, analyzed, and archived.

Her path to the lab began in 2010, when she was a postdoctoral researcher in Switzerland. Warinner was looking for ways to find evidence of infectious disease on centuries-old skeletons. She started with dental caries, or cavities—spots where bacteria had burrowed into the tooth enamel. To get a good look, she spent a lot of time clearing away plaque:​ mineral deposits scientists call “calculus,” and that, in the absence of modern dentistry, accumulate on teeth in an unsightly brown mass.

Around the same time, Amanda Henry, now a researcher at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, put calculus scraped from Neanderthal teeth under the microscope and spotted starch grains trapped in the mineral layers. The results provided evidence that the population ate a diverse diet that included plants as well as meat.

Hearing about the work, Warinner wondered if looking at specimens from a medieval German cemetery might yield similar insights. But when she checked for food remains under the microscope, masses of perfectly preserved bacteria blocked her from doing so. “They were literally in your way, obscuring your view,” she recalls. The samples were teeming with microbial and human genes, preserved and protected by a hard mineral matrix.

Warinner had discovered a way to see the tiny organisms in the archaeological record, and with them, a means to study diet. “I realized this was a really rich source of bacterial DNA no one had thought of before,” Warinner says. “It’s a time capsule that gives us access to information about an individual’s life that is very hard to get from other places.”

The dental calculus research dovetailed with rising interest in the microbiome, rocketing Warinner to a coveted position at Max Planck. (In 2019, Harvard hired her as an anthropology professor, and she now splits her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Jena, overseeing labs on two continents.) Her TED talks have racked up more than 2 million views. “I never expected to have an entire career based on something people spend lots of time and money trying to get rid of,” she quips.

That grimy dental buildup, Warinner has learned, preserves more than just DNA. In 2014, she published a study in which she and her colleagues looked at the teeth of Norse Greenlanders, seeking insight into why Vikings abandoned their settlements there after just a few hundred years. She found milk proteins suspended in the plaque of the area’s earliest settlers—and almost none in that of people buried five centuries later. “We had a marker to trace dairy consumption,” Warinner says.

This discovery led Warinner to turn to one of the biggest puzzles in recent human evolution: Why milk? Most people in the world aren’t genetically equipped to digest dairy as adults. A minority of them—including most northern Europeans—​have one of several mutations that allows their bodies to break down the key sugar in milk, lactose, beyond early childhood. That ability is called lactase persistence, after the protein that processes lactose.

Until recently, geneticists thought that dairying and the ability to drink milk must have evolved together, but that didn’t prove out when investigators went looking for evidence. Ancient DNA samples from all across Europe suggest that even in places where lactase persistence is common today, it didn’t appear until 3000 BCE—long after people domesticated cattle and sheep and started consuming dairy products. For 4,000 years prior to the mutation, Europeans were making cheese and eating dairy despite their lactose intolerance. Warinner guessed that microbes may have been doing the job of dairy digestion for them.

To prove it, she began looking for places where the situation was similar. Mongolia made sense: There’s evidence that herding and domestication there dates back 5,000 years or more. But, Warinner says, direct evidence of long-ago dairy consumption was absent—until ancient calculus let her harvest it straight from the mouths of the dead.

Ancient plaque shows Mongolians have eaten dairy for millennia. (Courtesy Christina Warinner/)

Starting in 2016, in her Jena lab, Warinner and her team scraped the teeth of skeletons buried on the steppes thousands of years ago and excavated by archaeologists in the 1990s. Samples about the size of a lentil were enough to reveal proteins from cow, goat, and sheep milk. By tapping the same remains for ancient DNA, Warinner could go one step further and show that they belonged to people who lacked the gene to digest lactose—​just like modern Mongolians do.

Samples of the microbiome from in and around today’s herders, Warinner realized, might offer a way to understand how this was possible. Though it’s estimated that just 1 in 20 Mongolians has the mutation allowing them to digest milk, few places in the world put as much emphasis on dairy. They include it in festivities and offer it to spirits before any big trip to ensure safety and success. Even their metaphors are dairy-based: “The smell from a wooden vessel filled with milk never goes away” is the rough equivalent of “old habits die hard.”

Down the hall from the ancient DNA lab, thousands of microbiome samples the team has collected over the past two summers pack tall industrial freezers. Chilled to minus 40 degrees F—colder, even, than the Mongolian winter—the collection includes everything from eezgi and byaslag to goat turds and yak-udder swabs. Hundreds of the playing-card-size plastic baggies new mothers use to freeze breast milk contain raw, freshly squeezed camel, cow, goat, reindeer, sheep, and yak milk.

Warinner’s initial hypothesis was that the Mongolian herders—​past and present—​were using lactose-​eating microbes to break down their many varieties of dairy, making it digestible. Commonly known as fermentation, it’s the same bacteria-assisted process that turns malt into beer, grapes into wine, and flour into bubbly sourdough.

Fermentation is integral to just about every dairy product in the Mongolian repertoire. While Western cheeses also utilize the process, makers of Parmesan, brie and Camembert all rely on fungi and rennet—​an enzyme from the stomachs of calves—to get the right texture and taste. Mongolians, on the other hand, maintain microbial cultures called starters, saving a little from each batch to inoculate the next.

Ethnographic evidence suggests that these preparations have been around a very, very long time. In Mongolian, they’re called khöröngö, a word that’s derived from the term for wealth or inheritance. They are living heirlooms, typically passed from mother to daughter. And they require regular care and feeding. “Starter cultures get constant attention over weeks, months, years, generations,” says Björn Reichhardt, a Mongolian-​speaking ethnographer at Max Planck and member of Warinner’s team responsible for collecting most of the samples in the Jena freezers. “Mongolians tend to dairy products the way they would an infant.” As with a child, the environment in which they’re nurtured is deeply influential. The microbial makeup of each family’s starters seems to be subtly different.

After returning from Khatgal in 2017, Warinner launched the Heirloom Microbe project to identify and catalog the bacteria the herders were using to make their dairy products. The name reflected her hope that the yurts harbored strains or species ignored by industrial labs and corporate starter-​culture manufacturers. Perhaps, Warinner imagined, there would be a novel strain or some combination of microbes Mongolians were using to process milk in a way that Western science had missed.

So far, she’s found Enterococcus, a bacterium common in the human gut that excels at digesting lactose but was eliminated from US and European dairy commodities decades ago. And they’ve spotted some new strains of familiar bacteria like Lactobacillus. But they haven’t identified any radically different species or starters—no magic microbes ready to package in pill form. “It doesn’t seem like there is a range of superbugs in there,” says Max Planck anthropologist Matthäus Rest, who works with Warinner on dairy research.

The reality might be more daunting. Rather than a previously undiscovered strain of microbes, it might be a complex web of organisms and practices—the lovingly maintained starters, the milk-soaked felt of the yurts, the gut flora of individual herders, the way they stir their barrels of airag—that makes the Mongolian love affair with so many dairy products possible.

Warinner’s project now has a new name, Dairy Cultures, reflecting her growing realization that Mongolia’s microbial toolkit might not come down to a few specific bacteria. “Science is often very reductive,” she says. “People tend to look at just one aspect of things. But if we want to understand dairying, we can’t just look at the animals, or the microbiome, or the products. We have to look at the entire system.”

The results could help explain another phenomenon, one that affects people far from the Mongolian steppes. The billions of bacteria that make up our microbiomes aren’t passive passengers. They play an active—if little understood—role in our health, helping regulate our immune systems and digest our food.

Over the past two centuries, industrialization, sterilization, and antibiotics have dramatically changed these invisible ecosystems. Underneath a superficial diversity of flavors—​mall staples like sushi, pad thai, and pizza—​food is becoming more and more the same. Large-scale dairies even ferment items like yogurt and cheese using lab-grown starter cultures, a $1.2 billion industry dominated by a handful of industrial producers. People eating commoditized cuisine lack an estimated 30 percent of the gut microbe species that are found in remote groups still eating “traditional” diets. In 2015, Warinner was part of a team that found bacteria in the digestive tracts of hunter-gatherers living in the Amazon jungle that have all but vanished in people consuming a selection of typical Western fare.

“People have the feeling that they eat a much more diverse and global diet than their parents, and that might be true,” Rest says, “but when you look at these foods on a microbial level, they’re increasingly empty.”

A review paper in Science in October 2019 gathered data from labs around the world beginning to probe if this dwindling variety might be making us sick. Dementia, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers are sometimes termed diseases of civilization. They’re all associated with the spread of urban lifestyles and diets, processed meals, and antibiotics. Meanwhile, food intolerances and intestinal illnesses like Crohn’s disease and irritable bowel disease are on the rise.

Comparing the microbiome of Mongolian herders to samples from people consuming a more industrialized diet elsewhere in the world could translate into valuable insights into what we’ve lost—and how to get it back. Identifying the missing species could refine human microbiome therapies and add a needed dose of science to probiotics.

There might not be much time left for this quest. Over the past 50 years, hundreds of thousands of Mongolian herders have abandoned the steppes, their herds, and their traditional lifestyle, flocking to Ulaanbaatar. Around 50 percent of the country’s population, an estimated 1.5 million people, now crowds into the capital.

In summer 2020, Warinner’s team will return to Khatgal and other rural regions to collect mouth swabs and fecal specimens from herders, the last phase in cataloging the traditional Mongolian micro-biome. She recently decided she’ll sample residents of Ulaanbaatar too, to see how urban dwelling is altering their bacterial balances as they adopt new foods, new ways of life, and, in all likelihood, newly simplified communities of microbes.

Something important, if invisible, is being lost, Warinner believes. On a recent fall morning, she was sitting in her sunlit office in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography on Harvard’s campus. Mostly unpacked from her latest trans-Atlantic move, she was contemplating a creeping, yurt-by-yurt extinction event.

It’s a conundrum vastly different in size, but not in scale, from those facing wildlife conservationists the world over. “How do you restore an entire ecology?” she wondered. “I’m not sure you can. We’re doing our best to record, catalog, and document as much as we can, and try to figure it out at the same time.”

Preserving Mongolia’s microbes, in other words, won’t be enough. We also need the traditional knowledge and everyday practices that have sustained them for centuries. Downstairs, display cases hold the artifacts of other peoples—​from the Massachusett tribe that once lived on the land where Harvard now stands to the Aztec and Inca civilizations that used to rule vast stretches of Central and South America—whose traditions are gone forever, along with the microbial networks they nurtured. “Dairy systems are alive,” Warinner says. “They’ve been alive, and continuously cultivated, for 5,000 years. You have to grow them every single day. How much change can the system tolerate before it begins to break?”

This story appears in the Spring 2020, Origins issue of Popular Science.

[cqfox-blog]

Recently, Baji Group八吉集团, a Chinese developer of songhua stone松花石 and financial heavyweight, generously invited 50 of us individuals from around China to visit their headquarters in the city of Changchun, Jilin Province, a trip that coincided with the annual winter fish harvest on the feet thick ice sheet covering Chagan Lake.

Changchun is the capital city of Jilin Province in the far northeast, and along with Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia, is known widely as one of the coldest winter destinations in China, one that certainly lived up to reputation over the course of our visit this week!

A frigid blast of minus 20 degree air swept our faces on our first step outside Longjia Airport. Snow rested upon a layer of solid ice covering the roads and pavements, and streetlight halos fought their way through the dense evening fog.

Well over a thousand miles east of Chongqing, yet on standard time like the entire country, the skies dim from around three in the afternoon, and the sun shines palidly, low in the sky, throughout the day.

We hurried to load our suitcases onto the coach and huddle away inside for the hour plus journey through the evening rush hour, sleepy toll booths, then grid upon grid of traffic lights, before we finally pulled up outside the Warren Hotel opposite Baji headquarters.

In the midst of our frigid surroundings, very few locals ventured into the streets. Occasionally, anonymous and foolhardy jaywalkers scurried across the dark roads, all wrapped up tightly in countless layers of thick clothing.

Even during the day, pedestrians were few and far between. I saw parents hauling children along the streets in sledges, as the pocked, slippery ice rendered futile any hope of navigating anywhere with a pushchair. 

Bellowing smokestacks embellished the neighbourhood skylines, and ticker-tape signs boasted extremely unhealthy levels of PM2.5 particulate contamination.

We passed old tram cars reminiscent of the Soviet era as they ferried passengers their rails, and also numerous accidents were vehicles had skidded into innocent fellow road users.

However, despict my rather dystopian portrayal of downtown Changchun in winter, there were two unique highlights of our three day trip that made our venture into the frozen hinterlands worthwhile.

In my first installment, I wish to focus on the touristic element, the annual fish harvest on the frozen surfaces of Chagan Lake, an fascinating experience I dare say you’ll struggle to witness anywhere else.

Next time round, I will focus on the songhua stone of Jilin Province, and how Baji Group has based a financial empire upon this precious natural resource.

 Chagan Lake查干湖

 Prior to the onset of winter, fishermen cast acres worth of linked nets in advance of the big annual freeze, and once the ice sheet thickens enough to support armies of vehicles, people and horses, the hardy locals begin drawing the catch through a small hole they dig in the ice.

The basic method is to dig two small holes in the ice, that freezes solid to over a foot in thickness. One hole needs to be large enough to draw out the huge nets, while a smaller hole is used to quickly heat lake water by means of a fuel generator, and pump over the emerging catch to prevent re-icing.

Above the main ice hole, a man sprays a constant stream of warm water over the nets, as he sits rather precariously on top a mound of ice, a mere block of polystyrene keeping frostbite away from the nether regions.

Directly in front is a straight, hundred metre iceway where fisherman untangle the gigantic fish, then leave them to freeze completely solid out in the open.

Tourists vie to pose for shots with a considerably burdensome live catch in each hand.

Apart from the gasoline generator, the rest is achieved through a culmination of traditional human ingenuity coupled with the physical might of horses. These handsome beasts, seemingly oblivious to the cold, work alternately in teams as they turn a wheel that drags out the nets, then wind them up into bundles for re-use the following year.

Witnessing this incredible event isn’t so easy. We had the fortune and exclusive use of a coach throughout our stay, but even so, it took the best part of four hours to reach the Mongolian style lakeside village of Guoerluosi in Songyuan County up north, close to the yet colder lands of Heilongjiang Province.

After feasting on tasty dishes based on the local catch, we squeezed into local cars for a 20 yuan each return journey to the fishing site.

Our driver speeded gleefully along the roads of black ice, before making a turn onto the lake, and shot along the ice at a frightening pace. 

We joined a countless number of cars parked up near the catch site, and the driver politely waited as we braved the frigid temperatures to witness a true wonder of human ingenuity and battle for survival against the harsh elements.

Other than multiple layers of warm clothing, another must are exra thick woolen soles you push inside your shoes, as well as warmth pads 暖包(Nuan-bao) you stick directly onto the base of your feet, which then emit desperately welcome heat for many hours.

Before our long return to the cosy Warren Hotel, where I delightfully thawed out that night in the basement spahouse, a few locals accompanying us as guides bought some giant blocks of whole frozen fish, that villagers lay out in piles by the roadside.

At a bargain 16 yuan per kilogram, I was certainly tempted to purchase one myself, but there wouldn’t be any way of transporting them to Chongqing through warm hotels, coaches and airports!

As for the rest, I’ll leave my photos and videos of this once in lifetime experience, and let you marvel for yourself!

 https://chongqinglife.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/sd1577159967_2.mp4

https://chongqinglife.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/235.mp4

https://chongqinglife.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/243.mp4

 Chagan Lake Fish Harvest Recently, Baji Group八吉集团, a Chinese developer of songhua stone松花石 and financial heavyweight, generously invited 50 of us individuals from around China to visit their headquarters in the city of Changchun, Jilin Province, a trip that coincided with the annual winter fish harvest on the feet thick ice sheet covering Chagan Lake.

[mrcoreymonroe]

Flying the Gobi Desert Airshow

Patty Wagstaff poses on the horizontal tail of the Extra 300 she flew in the Gobi Desert. Photo by Mark Jeffries

When I was growing up in Japan, China was known as Red China, a forbidden land. My family and I occasionally sailed out of Yokohama on an American President Line cruise ship to Hong Kong. We sailed through the Straits of Formosa, followed by dolphins numbering in the thousands, and I was fascinated to see, like a mirage, the mysterious China mainland and small Chinese fishing boats precariously crossing our path. I asked the crew if the boats ever got run over by the ships in the passage, and the answer was “sometimes.” Why was China forbidden? Were there really so many people? Why were the communists so xenophobic? Those were the questions I asked.

So recently, when the invitation came to fly an airshow in China’s Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia near Alxa (pronounced Alashan) in the Gobi Desert, how could I resist? My host, the owner of Aviad, Wayne Mansfield, a businessman who also sky writes and has towed banners all across China, worked out the details with our Chinese organizers, while top UK display pilot Mark Jefferies offered his Extra 300L for me to fly. I had a few weeks to get my visa and prepare for the trip. I did some research, but other than what is found in novels about desert explorers, there seems to be a dearth of information available on the region. My favorite words of advice found in an online Chinese guidebook were: “Visitors should also pay attention that not to shelter from the wind behind the lee slope of a dune. The correct action is to stand in front of the dune behind camels.”

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My favorite journeys usually involve work and having a purpose. They can involve long flights and big time changes in places like Kenya, Russia, Central America and Iceland. I like working hard for the privilege of experiencing somewhere from the unique perspective of a small airplane and sharing a toast at the end of a day with the locals. A little chill time is also welcome, especially when there is warm water involved, but since this was the Gobi Desert, where temperatures in October could be warm and pleasant during the day and below freezing at night, or sleeting and snowing all day, I didn’t really know what to expect.

The journey to Inner Mongolia was one of the longest I’ve ever experienced; two days, two nights, two commercial flights, several long drives and a 12-hour time change. Dig for gold and keep digging, and you might find China. After I landed in smog-clogged Beijing, Wayne met me and over dinner shared WeChat pictures of the crew already onsite assembling airplanes in temporary hangars with desert sand as their floor. By the time we arrived at the site, an artificial grass-type carpet had been laid out in sheets.

The site of the Alxa Dream Festival, where Western airshow pilots and crews put on a show. Photo by Mark Jeffries

From Beijing, we flew to Yinchuan, then drove two hours to Alxa, over the Yellow River and rounding a bend to the other side of the Helan Mountains. From this remote part of China, if you were to keep going west, depending on which road you chose, you’d either get to the Tibetan Kush or Kazakhstan, and either way you will be on the Silk Road, the ancient network of trade routes that connected East and West, Rome and China. The Silk Road was long and dangerous, with sandstorms, the risk of starvation and thirst, and the threat of raiding parties after silk, gold and precious stones from China. After the discovery of a sea route from Europe to Asia in the 15th century, which made trade cheaper and safer, the Silk Road trade routes began to wane. No one then or now in this remote part of the world speaks English and, like a lot of things in China, the streets, the buildings, the people were ancient and mysterious, and it was hard to tell where history ended and the new China began.

The second night was spent at our quite nice and modern hotel in Alxa. In the morning, we boarded a bus and drove south to our airshow site, the “Alxa Dream Festival.” Passing religious pyramids, an enormous concrete blimp hangar sitting alone and empty (would they let me fly through it, I wondered?), and herds of camels, the brush turned into Gobi dunes. After several stops where police boarded our bus wearing 360-degree cameras (there are cameras everywhere in China), we arrived at the 7000-foot paved airstrip on the north end of the Dream Festival site.

Mike Wood, our airboss from the UK, briefed us on the layout. Mark Jefferies and Tom Cassells would be flying Extras and their day and night pyro two-ship act; I would be flying the solo routine. Mark, who flies an aggressive and dynamic display, has basically pioneered airshows in China, and his team, the Global Stars, fly one of the best night pyro shows in the world. In between international airshows, his Extras live in big shipping containers, and at the time I am writing this, Mark is flying an airshow in Bahrain, then crating and shipping his airplanes to a show in India.

The Pioneer Team from Italy, led by Corrado Rusalen, flies Rusalen’s own design, the beautiful and nimble Pioneer 330. The Pioneer Team flies four to five airshows in China each year. Its night pyro show is a beautiful example of formation flying and one of the nicest I’ve seen. Another team from the UK, the “AeroSuperBatics,” the world’s only formation wing walking aerobatics team, flown by David Barrell and Martyn Carrington, also flew both day and night pyro shows. Mansfield’s Husky was towing banners and skywriting. Keith Wilson from the UK was on hand to take fantastic air-to-air photographs, plus our group was graced with other assorted crew members from France, Lithuania and the U.K.

Patty Wagstaff flies an airshow over the alien landscape of Inner Mongolia in an Extra 300L. Photo by Keith Wilson

At most airshows, as happens on movie sets, the performers and crew quickly form a little family, and familiar patterns began to emerge. Because the dust was so intense and pervasive, when we were outside the hangars, almost everyone wore a kaffiyeh or face scarf to cover their nose and mouth, especially if they wanted to be able to avoid sinus problems. Lawrence of Arabia wasn’t just accentuating his baby blues…he wore his hijab for a reason. I quickly bought a couple especially designed for desert functionality and suddenly had fashion decisions to make: “What is my look today? Do I go with something feminine like flowers, or go more “badass” and wear camo?” Of course, it didn’t really matter because the very act of covering your face gives the wearer a bit of anonymity. When greeting someone you didn’t know, how could you know who it was you were saying hello to? Was it the tilt of the head that gave their identity away? Their hands? Their fancy kaffiyeh with a zipper that gave them away as locals? If someone said, “Is it Patty?” I would answer, “No, it’s Sandy Dunes! Remember me?”

Airshow pilots, as a rule, don’t generally care where the crowd comes from as long as there is a crowd (and as long as we get paid), but since we were in the middle of nowhere, we asked ourselves, “Who will come?” Perhaps it was a classic cargo cult scenario: If we build it, they will come? I don’t know where they came from, but over the next few days, hundreds of dune buggies arrived on trailers towed by expensive 4 WD trucks and Winnebago motorhomes, and the site became something of a cross between an Oshkosh and a Burning Man for motorheads. When we weren’t waiting to fly, we explored. The site was astonishing and included miles of newly paved roads, hundreds of yurts for camping, motocross tracks and even an enormous Godzilla spewing gaudy American muscle cars out of its mouth. That juxtaposition is obviously hard to describe…you had to be there.

Show center was over the desert, of course. From the air, the dunes were beautiful, distracting. They constantly changed color as the light played upon them. We had a nice shallow alkaline lakebed and a long boardwalk as our show-center reference. The altitude was a sporting 4500’ MSL, but density altitude didn’t affect us as much as we thought it would because the air was so dry. Add some heat and humidity to the mix and the airplanes would not have performed as well. Diving into the show box between the mountains of sand, I saw hundreds of cars with little flags attached to their antennas, driving around like little bugs. A ranch with Mongolian horses was situated next to the Park and I saw expert horsemen galloping across the desert.

Cleared into the box, I dove in, turned on my smoke and pulled to the vertical rolling all the way up and I thought – it doesn’t matter where I am when I’m flying an airshow. I could be anywhere. I’m only focusing on the flying - my altitude, which way the wind is blowing, how the maneuvers will look for the spectators and keeping my flight within the show box and energy management for my next maneuver. I flew between the dunes hoping that people were watching and wondering what they thought, then I called last pass and as I turned a close in base for landing to the west, I reentered the world of the Gobi and the dunes turned orange with the afternoon sun.

Patty Wagstaff is a three-time U.S. National Aerobatic champion, inductee of the National Aviation Hall of Fame and one of the world’s top airshow pilots. Visit pattywagstaff.com/school.html or reach Patty via email through pattyaerobatics@gmail.com.

Want to read more from Patty Wagstaff? Check out our Let It Roll archive.

  The post Flying the Gobi Desert Airshow appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

from Plane & Pilot Magazine http://bit.ly/2D8koIQ

[raphaelinchina-blog]

My Chinese Golden week: an incredible experience!

Last week was the Golden week in China. Almost everybody is traveling in the country. That's why I wanted to travel and I took part of an organized tour to the "Silk road" at the West of the country.

I'll explain you the details of what I did, and all of what I learnt! Day 1: we started the trip on Saturday, at 7 pm. This day we only took the bus and made a stop in a highway area.

Day 2: a long day of bus and we finished at 7 pm in an hostel of Inner Mongolia. We were just in the South of Mongolia. The hostel was really basic: the bed was really hard and the shower was at the same place as the skat toilets. We just went to eat and sleep.

Day 3: we discovered the surroundings of the city: a free trade area, an artificial lake and a forest. It was a bit strange because everything was in the middle of nowhere as an artificial city in the Middle East. But fortunately enough, I was with my friends and we spent some quality time together. Also the day ended with a beautiful sunset in the forest.

Day 4: Early wake up to see the sunrise in the Inner Mongolian desert. It was hard with the sleepiness and the cold. But it was amazing to see the sunrise like this. Even more in the desert. After, we had 7 hours of bus and arrives at a part of the Great wall. It was totally different from the parts I already known, as it was a wall but more a fortress. I didn't really liked it and we took the bus for 4h more until arriving to a superb hotel. We went dinner in the hotel and we met a really kind Chinese man. He was so happy to meet us and to speak English. He offered us cigarets and a local alcohol named baiju. We all finished by dancing with him and he had a hard night after drinking so much eheh.

Day 5: The best and worst in one day. It started really well with the best scenic spot we have been: the colorful mountains of Zhangye. It was amazing, there is no other word for that. I was afraid of being disappointed after having seen the pictures and also because I went to the one in Peru last July. But it was huge and beautiful!! After that we had 10h of bus, and because of my breakfast, sleepiness and the baiju, I felt really bad with my stomach. I threw up 3 times in the bus, but a lot. So I had a hard route to the next point. After that we arrived to an hotel, where I barely ate a cookie and I slept to better myself. So the best and worst in one day.

Day 6: We went to a desert with oasis spot. It was impressive with the bug sand dunes. I walked to the top of one and had a rest there as I lacked of energy after what happened the day before. It was the perfect moment for me to appreciate the landscape and observe the Chinese people. I noticed their way to take pictures everywhere. Apparently, they just go to touristic places to take pictures and show off. And some of them wear princess clothes just to take the beat pictures!After that, we went to a beautiful place: the Delingha mysterious caves. Some old caves with paintings, a giant buddah and so on. It was amazing. But worrying also because we had to make a 2h queue to be able to enter to the caves and we could only stay 30 seconds in the caves. That's the bad part of the Golden week with so many people. 

Day 7: We went to a salted lake. An amazing place and a new experience for me. Basically it's like the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia but with water. A lake full of salt. I came into the water to live the experience. The first time for me I was walking on salt. I also took some really nice pictures there.After that, we had to go to another lake to see the sunset but... we had a bus issue: the motor died. We were stopper in the middle of nowhere, in an highway. As you know, there is always a good part in a bad experience. That's why we decided to order some beers and make a party there. It was awesome!After 4h there, we took another bus to our hostel where we had dinner and we were part of a karaoke. A great first experience for me.

Day 8: We were to a buddhist temple. It was a really big one. Really different from the Lama Temple I knew in Beijing. It was impressive but at the same time, it wasn't really a touristic place, more a place for prayers. So I didn't feel totally in my place there. And after that, we took the bus back to Beijing.

Day 9 and 10: we had an issue with the rain, and weren't able to take the highway. After some negotiations with the local government, we managed to take the highway with a policeman help. And we reached Beijing after a 48h trip!

Finally, I've been really far away from Beijing. I can say that I discover the Western China. The landscapes and scenic spot were amazing. Also, I've been to 3 different regions: Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai. It was hard with all these hours of bus but the place did worth it. 

[jichanglulu]

Thinking outside the Urn: China and the reincarnation of Mongolia’s highest lama

A shorter version of this piece appeared on China Policy Institute: Analysis.

The Chinese government’s prerogative to manage the rebirths of incarnate lamas is being tested in Mongolia. One of the highest lineages covered by the Qing’s ‘Golden Urn’ system at the basis of PRC reincarnation law is passing to its next holder, with the Dalai Lama’s involvement. Despite clear signs that China cares, no public position has emerged so far. To determine what China’s approach to the reincarnation issue might be, we have to go through some Mongolian history and a bit of leaf-reading. The very relevance of state management of rebirths to China’s foreign relations indicates to what extent Qing imperial thought permeates PRC policy. Reincarnation diplomacy is real and has an impact on Chinese policies towards its closest neighbours.

On the last day of his ninth visit to Mongolia last November, the Dalai Lama announced that the tenth reincarnation of the Jebtsundamba རྗེ་བཙུན་དམ་པ་ Khutugtu, the highest Mongolian lama, had been found as to be a Mongolian boy. However, this boy would not be publicly enthroned because of his young age. , who however wouldn’t be publicly enthroned yet due to his young age. China certainly objected to the Mongolia visit, and responded to it with sanctions. As I have discussed in a recent piece, China only showed a will to normalise relations after the Mongolian government produced a ‘non-apology’ that regretted the “misunderstanding” and stated an assumption that the Dalai Lama would not visit again under during the current parliament. Although China’s protests didn’t mention the reincarnation issue, China’s interest in it is revealed by its mention in the various Chinese and Mongolian versions of the Mongolian position. To quote from the most explicit ones: the public announcement of the new Jebtsundamba (and, in one version, his education) will be the responsibility of Mongolian monks, without “outside participation.” The implication being that, as the process is a strictly religious matter, it falls beyond the government’s purview. So far, that seems consistent with the plans of Mongolian clergy, who said in January the tenth reincarnation would be enthroned by Mongolian lamas, and that the process had not started yet.

The rebirth lottery

Before the current controveries over the tenth, previous Jebtsundamba reincarnations played a role in Mongolian, Tibetan and Chinese politics: the ninth, the eighth, the second, the first and indeed the zeroth.

The first Jebtsundamba was the polymath Zanabazar (from Sanskrit Jñānavajra, in Tibetan ཡེ་ཤེས་རྡོ་རྗེ, both meaning ‘wisdom diamond-thunderbolt’; 1635-1723), the second son of the Tüsheet ᠲᠦᠰᠢᠶᠡᠲᠦ Khan Gombodorj, who ruled over one of the Mongol polities of the time. As a child, he was recognised as the reincarnation of Tāranātha, a great exponent of the Jonang school of Tibetan Buddhism. The Jonang’s association with political opponents of the Gelug school, which was then consolidating its secular power over Tibet, led the fifth Dalai Lama, head of the Gelug, to suppress it. The Jonang school only survived in Amdo (today’s Qinghai province), while Jonang monasteries in Central Tibet, including Tāranātha’s main seat, were forcibly converted to the Gelug. Although all Jebtsundambas, from the first on, had Gelug tutors and were recognised by successive Dalai Lamas, there has been some scholarly controversy0 over whether Zanabazar’s recognition as Tāranātha reincarnation was originally a Jonang challenge to the Gelug or, as the earliest available Tibetan documentary evidence would appear to suggest, a Gelug manoeuvre to claim Tāranātha’s legacy. Regardless of its significance in Tibetan factional politics, the recognition of Gombodorj’s son as a major incarnate lama helped buttress the Tüsheet Khans’ claim to primacy among the Khalkha (eastern) Mongols, matching the status of the other centres of Mongol power: the Dzungars in the west and the southern Mongols, already allied to the Manchus’ emerging Qing dynasty. Zanabazar’s later role the Khalkhas’ submission to Kangxi, key to the Qing’s eventual defeat of the Dzungars and conquest of much of Central Asia, made Mongolian nationalist historiography blame him for the subsequent centuries of Chinese rule. Chinese scholars praise him, for much the same reasons.

After an anti-Qing rebellion among the Khalkhas in which the second Jebtsundamba had an ambiguous role (his brother was executed for cooperating with its leader), emperor Qianlong ordered subsequent reincarnations to be born in Tibet, in what would later become part of the Golden Urn (金瓶) selection system, a Qing-managed ‘reincarnation lottery’ that gave imperial authorities control over the highest religious figures in Tibet and Mongolia. Qing-approved high lamas, who would recognise the emperor as a Buddhist ruler (cakravartin, ‘turner of the wheel’), rather than locally-born leaders who could help catalyse challenges to imperial power, were key to Beijing’s Central Asian policy.

For the next five reincarnations, the Urn lottery worked as expected, providing empire-friendly, purely religious figures who spent their short lives (only one lived into his thirties) as Tibetan-born foreigners in Mongolia.

Then the Empire lost at its own rigged raffle. Although also from Tibet, the Eighth Jebtsundamba adapted well to life among the Khalkha. He learnt the language, and his popularity and political savvy made him the centre of Outer Mongolian politics, culminating in his proclamation as theocratic ruler of independent Mongolia when the Qing fell in 1911. By the time he died in 1924, the Communists were in power, and decreed the end of the lineage. According to the historian J.Boldbaatar Ж.Болдбаатар, Mongolian lamas defied the prohibition and tried to install a Mongolian boy named Tüdeviin Luvsandorj Түдэвийн Лувсандорж as ninth reincarnation. These attempts failed to get Tibetan approval and were thwarted by the Mongolian government, fearful of the emergence of another popular figure with aspirations to theocratic rule. In what could well be the first Communist attempt to legislate reincarnations, the 1926 Party Congress asserted in a resolution that the Jebtsundamba wouldn’t be reborn again in Tibet or Mongolia after the eighth incarnation, since he was due to become general Hanuman1 in the mythical realm of Shambhala. The government later launched a brutal suppression of Buddhism that precluded any further efforts to revive the lineage (remarkably, the Mongolian boy that had been selected to continue it managed to survive the crackdown and lived as a layman until 1948).

Meanwhile in Tibet, a boy born in 1933 was secretly identified as the 9th Jebtsundamba reincarnation. He left Tibet in 1959 and lived, mostly in poverty, in Nepal and India, until being announced as 9th Jebtsundamba by the Dalai Lama after the end of Communism in Mongolia in the early 1990s. He first visited Mongolia in 1999, among Chinese protests, and had to wait until 2010 to be allowed in again and made a Mongolian citizen. He died in Ulaanbaatar in 2012. The Mongolian public would likely only accept the next reincarnation to be born in Mongolia, and indeed that’s where the Dalai Lama says he told the old 9th Jebtsundamba to go in his next life. That’s why there was expectation that the reincarnation would be announced during last November’s visit.

Remarkably, Qianlong’s Urn lottery is still running. The continuity of Qing-inherited control over reincarnations is central to the justification of the PRC’s prerogative to appoint the most senior Tibetan Buddhist clergy. Current PRC reincarnation law explicitly refers to the Golden Urn system, as did its ROC precedent in 1936. Incarnate lamas continue to play a key role in Tibetan society, and government control over this hierarchy is meant to help legitimise Beijing’s right to rule Tibetan Buddhists, precisely as devised by 18th-century emperors. The Urn system, embedded in Chinese law, sits at the top of this structure. The current Dalai Lama’s assertions that it will be up to him to decide where to reincarnate next, if at all, were strongly attacked by Chinese officials, indeed on grounds of historical continuity centred on the Urn system. The PRC has used it exactly once, selecting its 11th Panchen Lama in 1995 after detaining the candidate approved by the Dalai Lama. Given how invested PRC discourse is in the legitimacy of the Urn system, an outside-the-Urn Jebtsundamba can be perceived as a challenge to imperial continuity, and a ‘rehearsal’ of a more serious one, the Dalai Lama’s own succession outside China.

What does China think?

Despite the challenge to PRC religious policy implied by an outside-the-Urn reincarnation, China hasn’t published any statements on the 10th Jebtsundamba, and the only public evidence of its concerns is its reflection in the Mongolian response.

To try and guess what Chinese officials think about the Jebtsundamba reincarnation, we can look for views on the previous lineage holder, recognised without Chinese consent. A 2009 article by Selengge ᠰᠡᠯᠡᠩᠭᠡ 斯林格, head2 of the Russia and Mongolia Research Institute at the Inner Mongolia Academy of Social Sciences, is sceptical about his legitimacy. The paper examines the “complex and sensitive problem” of the 9th Jebtsundamba reincarnation, highlighting the involvement of pro-Japanese Mongolians (Demchugdongrub Дэмчигдонров (De Wang 德王) and Li Shouxin 李守信) in his recognition process, and the role of the “Dalai clique” (达赖集团, Party-speak for the Dharamsala-based Tibetan government in exile) in his 1999 Mongolia trip. Selengge’s views, coming from a senior researcher who has been involved in exchanges with Russia and Mongolia, are significant, and consistent with the idea that Chinese authorities consider the Jebtsundamba lineage to have finished with the 8th reincarnation.

Another data point for assessing the official Chinese attitude towards the 9th Jebtsundamba is provided by the little-known fact that the PRC actually allowed him to lecture and perform rituals at his ancestral monastery, the Püntsokling ཕུན་ཚོགས་གླིང་ 彭措林 in Lhatse, Tibet, both before and after his enthronement by the Dalai Lama. The Püntsokling is strongly associated with Tāranātha, who greatly expanded it into the main monastery of Central Tibet and seat of the Jonang order, as part of whose suppression it was made a Gelug monastery under the Fifth Dalai Lama. As tenth reincarnation of Tāranātha, the ninth Jebtsundamba inherited this connection to the Püntsokling. He lived in or near the monastery, without revealing his status as Tāranātha reincarnation, until 1959, first as a simple monk and then as a layman, after he abandoned his vows and married his first wife. His first visit to Tibet after ‘liberation’ came in 19843, when he worked with the local government to rebuild the Püntsokling, by then converted into a granary. His status as Jebtsundamba reincarnation was still only known to a few, and is unlikely to have been revealed during his months-long stay in Tibet. The local authorities‘ willingness to work with him to restore the monastery can’t be read as any sort of recognition. Quite the contrary: despite his key role in reestablishing the Püntsokling, I’ve seen no mention of the ninth Jebtsundamba in Chinese materials on the monastery, suggesting his presence there has become a ‘delicate’ issue.

More remarkable is the ninth Jebtsundamba’s last visit to Tibet. He had now been publicly established as such by the Dalai Lama, and the climate in China had turned more adverse towards exchanges with the exile Tibetan community. This last visit has been described by Fabian Sanders based on conversations with the ninth Jebtsundamba. The following account is based on his 2001 article, to my knowledge the only published account of the final visit, and a personal communication. One of the main goals of the visit was to establish contacts with representatives of the Jonang school, which, as mentioned above, had been suppressed after Tāranātha but still survived in Amdo (Qinghai). The Jebtsundamba wasn’t allowed to travel to Qinghai, but he did go to Lhasa and from there to the Püntsokling, where he performed rituals and helped acquire statues for the monastery. He left Tibet when rumours began to circulate about “investigations” against him initiated by the Chinese authorities.

The final visit illustrates the ambiguities in Chinese attitudes towards the ninth Jebtsundamba: although he was allowed to perform rituals in an open capacity as Tāranātha reincarnation at Tāranātha’s own monastery, which could be read as a degree of tolerance, if not recognition, of his status, the fact that the visit was cut short, and information about it apparently expunged from accounts of the Püntsokling’s recent history show that the PRC authorities have been uncomfortable with the ninth reincarnation for decades. These contradictions are now transmitted to the the tenth reincarnation, whose legitimacy depends on that of his predecessor. If the ninth reincarnation was unacceptable to China, so should be the tenth; but if the ninth could officiate on PRC soil as embodiment of the zeroth, the Urn system’s monopoly has been undermined.

A more explicit discussion of the Jebtsundamba issue, complete with policy recommendations, appeared in a 2011 article published by the China Energy Fund Committee (中华能源基金会, CEFC), a think tank whose initialism mirrors that of the company that established it, CEFC (华信). Andrew Chubb and John Garnaut have written about CEFC (company and think thank) and its links to the PLA and specifically military intelligence[]. The article, in all likelihood signed with a pseudonym4, calls the restoration of the Jebtsundamba lineage in Mongolia “a great victory and a breakthrough for the Dalai clique” that can sow discord in Tibetan Buddhism by challenging the reincarnation system “unified” by Qianlong’s Golden Urn procedure. “The Indian government and the CIA” were involved. The Chinese government should foster religious exchanges with Russia and Mongolia, dispatching “virtuous and respected high monks” and using “social and economic methods” to compete with the Dalai clique. Using the example of the Gang gyan Development Company (བོད་གངས་རྒྱན་དར་སྤེལ་ཀུང་སི་ 西藏刚坚发展总公司), associated to the Tashi Lhunpo monastery and established by the 10th Panchen Lama in 1987, the article proposes China should “use the form of a company” to sell religious artifacts, drawing on “China’s advantageous position in trade with Russia and Mongolia” to “monopolise” the “religious market.” Finally, China should take the lead to coordinate the establishment of a “unified system for the search, recognition and final announcement” of incarnate lamas in the three countries, in order to restrict Dharamsala’s influence. Though unofficial, such advice is consistent with China’s current approach to Mongolian Buddhism, that involves cultivating ties to Dalai-unfriendly Mongolian monasteries and seemingly exploiting, as elsewhere, the Dorje Shugden controversy.

After such efforts didn’t prevent the Dalai Lama’s participation in, at least, the announcement of the new reincarnation, they might now be focused on trying to isolate him from Dharamsala, especially during his training years. Mongolia’s response to Chinese protests does suggest China privately requested that no exile Tibetan lamas anoint or tutor the future Jebtsundamba. Precedent for ‘tolerated’ reincarnations, although none as senior as the Jebtsundamba, exists. Indeed, China didn’t object to, for example, the Dalai Lama’s 2004 recognition of the Jalkhanz རྒྱལ་ཁང་རྩེ Khutugtu, the latest representative of what is likely the oldest lineage of Khalkha Mongolian incarnate lamas. As Johan Elverskog, known for his work on the Mongols and the Qing, puts it, the PRC “recognise they don’t need to control all the reincarnations, especially those outside the 1949 borders, and don’t care about Nyingma or Sakya incarnations – or [Treasure Revealer (གཏེར་སྟོན་)] Steven Seagal.”

At any rate, a Mongolian, but China-friendly, Jebtsundamba without Dharamsala ties is probably the most ambitious goal China can attain: trying to enforce the Golden Urn procedure would amount to imposing, or vetting, a religious leader on Mongolia, and the backlash could seriously hurt Chinese interests there. A subtler, longer-term approach, such as that which appears to be underway, can find allies within Mongolia’s political and religious establishment, and still succeed at a degree of extraterritorial enforcement of the PRC’s Qing-inherited religious policies. Such a senior outside-the-Urn reincarnation might be hard to accept for the would-be cakravartins at the Relevant Departments, but it seems they’ll have to live with it.

Thanks to Agata Bareja-Starzyńska, Robert Barnett, Andrew Chubb, Johan Elverskog, Victor Mair, Fabian Sanders and others I prefer not to name for comments and invaluable help in gathering information for this piece.

Notes

0The son of the Tüsheet Khan was ordained as a small child. He was recognised as incarnate lama by the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, who bestowed initiations on him while he studied in Tibet since 1650. That much seems uncontroversial. The issue is whether he was first educated in Mongolia by Jonangpas, or was a Gelugpa all along, and who and when first recognised him as the reincarnation of Tāranātha.

Tibetan and Mongolian sources on Zanabazar, beginning with the earliest extant biography, completed in 1702, with Zanabazar still alive, by his disciple the Khalkha Zaya Paṇḍita Lozang Trinle བློ་བཟང་འཕྲིན་ལས་, are connected to the Gelug school. Any early Jonang influence on Zanabazar could have been ‘harmonised’ away from these Gelug accounts. Juko Miyawaki 宮脇淳子 has called narratives of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas’ recognition of Zanabazar as reincarnation of a major figure of the rival Jonang sect “ahistorical”. She notes that, while a 19th-century Mongolian biography (reproduced and translated by Bawden) says that he received the title Jebtsundamba during his stay in Tibet, thus in or after 1650, the Qing veritable records (Qing shilu 清实录) record the “Jebtsundamba Khutugtu under the Tüsheet Khan” (土谢图汗下泽卜尊丹巴胡土克图), along with other Khalkha lamas, offered tribute in 1648, showing the title was already in use before its recognition by the Dalai Lama. Qing historical sources thus contradict a later Mongolian text, but are still consistent with the Khalkha Zaya Paṇḍita’s biography (reproduced and translated by Bareja-Starzyńska), where the boy is enthroned at age five by a Gelug incarnate lama, the Wensa Tulku དབེན་ས་སྤྲུལ་ཀུ་, a fact then “reported to the Victorious Father and Son” (i.e. the Dalai Lama and either his regent or the Panchen Lama), who “identified [Zanabazar] as the reincarnation of the Jebtsundamba” (རྒྱལ་བ་ཡབ་སྲས་ཀྱི་སྐུ་གཞོགས་སུ་ཞུས་པར་རྗེ་བཙུན་དམ་པའི་སྤྲུལ་སྐུར་ངོས་འཛིན་གནང་།; this and the next translation based on Bareja-Starzyńska’s). Although this still doesn’t disambiguate who this ‘Jebtsundamba’ was found to have reincarnated in Zanabazar, the Zaya Paṇḍita’s biography does say that later, in or after 1651, the Panchen Lama “confirmed that he was a reincarnation of the Lord Tāranātha” (པན་ཆེན་ཐམས་ཅད་མཁྱེན་པས་རྗེ་ཏཱ་ར་ནཱ་ཐའི་སྐུ་སྐྱེ་ཡིན་གསུང་). However, that still doesn’t settle the question of whether Gelugpa lamas had already identified Zanabazar as Tāranātha reincarnation before his 1650 trip to Tibet.

The name the fifth Dalai Lama uses to refer to Zanabazar in his autobiography would seem to provide key evidence. While Miyawaki interprets the name, Jamyang Chöje འཇམ་དབྱངས་ཆོས་རྗེ་, as the boddhisattva Mañjuśrī, other scholars, including Agata Bareja-Starzyńska in a 2010 article, have argued that it refers to the founder of Drepung monastery. That would be consistent with later lists of pre-Tāranātha existences, one of which claims to have been composed by Zanabazar himself. These lists usually contain another fourteen existences before Tāranātha, with Jamyang Chöje (a historical figure) as the eleventh.

1The Party Congress resolution is given in English translation by Bawden, who quotes the Shambhala general’s name as “Hanamand”. The idea that the Jebtsundamba will eventually be reborn as this figure is a Mongolian tradition and surely wasn’t made up by the Communists, but that Shambhala battle it alludes to was scheduled for centuries later.

This general fights along the 25th king of Shambhala, Raudracakrin, in the Kālacakra-tantra. The relevant line (third pāda of v. 162 in Banerjee’s edition) reads

अश्वत्थामं महाचन्द्रतनयहनूमांस्तीक्ष्णशस्त्रैर्हनिष्यत्

aśvatthāmaṃ mahācandratanayahanūmāṃstīkṣṇaśastrairhaniṣyat

Hanūmān, son of Mahācandra, will strike Aśvatthāma with sharp weapons. (Tr. Newman, my emphasis.)

I find the long ū in the name striking. A short u, as in the deity of the Hindu epics, would indeed scan better (the sragdharā metre requires a short syllable). The annotated Tibetan translation by Butön བུ་སྟོན་(as quoted by Orofino) has a short vowel (ha nu manthas, which is consistent with the name for the Hanuman of the epics in other Tibetan texts).

2He was vice-director when the article was published.

3The 1984 visit to the Püntsokling is discussed by Sanders and in Selenge’s article, whose source for that information is an article by Udo Barkmann. Unfortunately, Selenge only cites Barkmann’s article by a Chinese translation of the title without mentioning when or where it was published and I haven’t been able to identify the original paper.

4The CEFC attracted a good deal of attention in 2011 through a rather bellicose opinion piece (English version) published in the Global Times and signed by Long Tao 龙韬, which Chubb and Garnaut found to be a pseudonym used by Dai Xu 戴旭, an Air Force senior colonel (大校).The pseudonym (’the dragon’s strategy’), as has been noted, alludes to the Liu tao 六韬 or Six strategies, a classic military treatise. The article about the Jebtsundamba is signed by Na Lan or (more likely) Nalan 纳兰, likely also a pseudonym that could refer to the Manchu Nara clan in general or to its most famous representative, the early Qing poet Nalan Xingde 纳兰性德.