The wall of Genghis Khan

[Chudo]

Genghis Khan's Wall
Michael Wines New York Times Service
Tuesday, September 25, 2001

ZABAIKALSK, Russia "When I came here three months ago, I had the same question," Aleksandr Petrovich Bronnikov, the property manager of this tiny railroad town, said when asked where one might find the Wall of Genghis Khan. "Theoretically, it exists. Practically, I haven't seen it."

The Atlas of the World, published by the Federal Service of Geology and Cartology of Russia, shows it clearly: "Val Chengis Khana," 480 kilometers (300 miles) of crenelated black line starting in eastern Mongolia, curving gently through China, slicing into Russia like a grapefruit knife directly at Zabaikalsk and then playing out in the treeless Russian hills to the east.

As old chronicles describe it, the wall consisted of a huge earthen berm topped by wooden parapets. But today, few around here have heard of the Wall of Genghis Khan, the great Mongol conqueror (c. 1165-1227) who united China and forever altered the course of Russian history.

"I was interested in it, too, but I've never seen it," said Dmitri Batirshin, who works in a Russian travel agency a few steps from the Chinese border. "They say Genghis Khan is buried around here. They're still looking for his grave." Temujin, as he was called until his enthronement in 1206, is almost surely not buried here. But Zabaikalsk is at the heart of the empire he built, one that eventually stretched from the Yellow Sea to the Volga, from central China to Lake Baikal.

It fell to Aleksandr Vasilevich Nazarov, chairman of the Zabaikalsk Ecological Committee, to lay the mystery of the Genghis Khan Wall to rest. Nazarov, a good-natured man with time on his hands ("There are no ecological problems," he said) had not only seen the wall once, but even knew where to find it.

He was surprised that anyone would care. "No one has ever asked before," he said. Five minutes by minivan from town, in a grassy field just yards from the barbed-wire fence that marks the no man's land between Russia and China, it became clear why.

"Here it is," Nazarov said. There, in front of him, was a smallish lump of earth, perhaps 30 yards long, 18 inches high and about as wide as a one-car driveway. Genghis Khan's historic fortification had been cut down to size not just by centuries of erosion, but by a dirt road running toward a candy-and-soft-drink kiosk. It did not reappear on the other side of the kiosk.

"The Great Wall of China was built of stone," he explains. "This was made of dirt." The story might end there, but for a stop later at the history museum in the capital of Chita Province, also named Chita, where Aleksei Myasnikov, delighted that anyone would ask, delivered the coup de grace: The Wall of Genghis Khan was not built by Genghis Khan at all.

"It's part of a fortification for local tribes that lived here 300 years before Genghis Khan," a people called the Liao, he said. "It was built to protect from invasion from the south. Relations were quite tense at the time."

Genghis Khan got credit for the wall, he said, because Genghis Khan gets credit for almost everything ancient - a Siberian version of the Washington-slept-here syndrome of the eastern United States.