clipped from: www.ft.com But perhaps the strangest transformation ever undergone by the Mongolian military genius has come in modern times: his reinvention as a Chinese hero.
“Genghis Khan was certainly Chinese,” says Guo Wurong, general manager of the Genghis Khan Mausoleum Tourist District in China's Inner Mongolia region.
“We currently define him as a hero of the Mongolian nationality, a great man of the Chinese people and a giant in world history,” says Mr Guo, who has led a multimillion-dollar redevelopment of the site of the great Khan's “mausoleum” in Inner Mongolia's Ordos prefecture.
The Chinese part of that description would no doubt surprise Genghis himself, who seems to have seen the Han Chinese people who lived south of his Mongolian heartlands as merely another ethnic group to be subjugated.
Mr Guo's definition closely matches that pushed by official histories and government scholars, however. The late chairman Mao Zedong may once have dismissed Genghis as someone who “only knew how to draw his bow at the eagles”, but Beijing's cultural commissars have good reason to embrace the great khan as a model Chinese.
Celebrating Genghis aligns Beijing policy with the reverence ethnic Mongolians feel for the founder of their nation.
Turning Genghis Chinese, meanwhile, pushes the party line that Inner Mongolia is an integral part of China, despite the quiet yearning for independence of many of the region's increasingly outnumbered original inhabitants.
State-approved histories paint an idealised picture of an eternal “Chinese” state grouping the majority Han with ethnic brothers such as the Mongolians.
A Chinese tide is also washing over the Ordos “mausoleum” – which is actually the site of a sacred enclosure where relics of the great khan were preserved. Now a complex of statues, plazas and museum halls has been built around the site in a style reminiscent of China's imperial tombs.