Mongolia: Rise and fall of an empire | DW Documentary

foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign foreign [Music] [Music] in Mongolia there's always the wind the people move constantly and the air moves constantly [Music] when you're Crossing this step it can go for hours or sometimes days without seeing a human habitation but you always look for the animals because once you see the animals you know they're going to be people somewhere close by there will be herders in Mongolia you don't have to ask permission you just come as you approach the gear you stop your horse or your vehicle a little bit far from the house from the gear just so that they have a little more time to prepare for you and you walk up slowly you go and sit on the west side of the gear the gear is filled with everything the family owns and it has a strong smell of wool and mutton meat and fermented horse milk foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] you know I take it Mongolia as a one giant National Park is one of the only countries left in the world where you can leave the city and within half an hour you are in the countryside and you can hike anywhere you want you can camp anywhere you want you can live anywhere you want because the land belongs to the government this is one of the last pristine untouched step ecosystems lived on earth it's one of the few places in the world where the nomadic lifestyle still rains and you know nearly 30 percent of Mongolians live pastoral livelihoods [Music] the foundation of the Mongolian economy is the historial nomadic lifestyle and that's what Mongolians are as an identity you know we are nomadic people the rich traditional culture is still something that you know people come from all over the world to witness we had a consultant actually he was from Canada that came in was doing some work and I think he had read up about Asian countries and saving face and not being confrontational and you know the cliches if you will about what it means to engage with an Asian country and my senior Mongolian on the usaid staff she told me she said Jonathan you have to tell this guy we are not Asian that we're something different [Music] Mongolia today seems to me a very modern society on the surface but just below the surface there is a feeling of great antiquity and a tremendous respect for the history and the traditional culture our history we are trade as Warriors we are portrayed as people who conquered vast lands we were the exception to the norms the name of Mongols came in the 13th century with chingsan but after that time it has been 800 years and we have been up and down and we were part of Manchester Dynasty and then we have been 70 years of in communism and generally in communism they negate the achievement in the 13th century and you know saying the name of chingasan was taboo you know personally in my life chingus Khan didn't matter till 1990. because it was prohibited to talk about him so it was prohibited to teach about him in at school but on literature class my teacher dawanim just talked the Virgin son like he was a fairy tale hero turned out he was a law Giver he was a religious tolerance Giver and he was the the guy who unified Mongolia lastly when we think of Genghis Khan or chingas harness the Mongolians say we think of a conqueror a man on a horse but the circumstances of his life were very unusual he was born in a time of great turmoil and Chaos on this step when he was eight years old his father took him to live with another family it was very common in Mongolia to marry off a son by taking him to live with the girl's family for several years until he grew up then on the way back jiggers Han's father stopped in a camp and he was poisoned so in the spring when the ancestral ceremonies came they did not invite his mother mother earloon to the ceremony her husband had died and they no longer considered her a member of the tribe and the old women announced before they left leave these women and these children here was a death sentence somehow they survived but they were outcasts in an isolated family with very few friends he had to teach himself how to hunt he had to teach himself how to live on the mountain he had to teach himself how to grow into a man [Music] when he was 16 years old the girl that he had met when he was eight bursta she came to live with him you can imagine what it's like at 16 to fall in love you can imagine especially after a harsh life of being an exile of having nothing it was happiness the first happiness he had probably known in his life [Music] and then I heard hoofs hitting the Earth and they knew horses were coming and if their horses coming there are men coming mother erlun had been kidnapped herself she did not know who the men were who were coming but she knew why they were coming they had heard there was a girl in this camp mother erlu knew if she left that girl she could save her own children was still a boy he obeyed his mother and he rode off with her to the mountains but they would leave burst them behind Ching asham decided his life was not worth living if he had to live without Berta somehow he would get her back he gathered some friends and they rode out in search of bursting they found her they found the market Camp they came in at night was a full moon and Ching as hung was calling out her name burst the burst of birth and she heard him and she was on a cart being driven away she heard the voice she jumped off the cart and she ran to him and she reached up to grab the horse it was the middle of a battle and he thought she was a soldier he almost struck her and then he was hot it was birthday he jumped off the horse the raid was over she was the only thing he wanted and there in the Moonlight he held her [Music] [Music] foreign foreign [Music] rescued Berta he was in a set of social relations that he had never had before suddenly he was a part of the step life he had obligations to some other people he had also enemies who would come for him again at some point he began to fight war after war after War small battles big battles but he realized there was no end to these wars every year he would fight again go in raid next year they would come and raid you slowly but surely Ching as Han came to understand how step Warfare worked what he was determined to change it he realized in order to stop the fighting from order to prevent it from reoccurring the next year he had to kill the leaders every time and as he killed them then he gathered their followers into his own and finally in the year 1206 he was ready to proclaim a nation his own Nation and he called it the Mongols [Music] but then after that a little unclear what's going to happen you've United the people your nomadic people you move around how are you going to keep the people happy the Mongols already had a long step tradition of raiding until they began to raid the people around them after a series of raids in 1209 chickashan decided to make the first Invasion not just to be a raid but to make a longer Invasion and he invaded the Tangled people one of the nations of northern China so now for the first time Jenison was beginning to get some foreign followers but this was by compulsion by force but also at the same moment the first people came voluntarily to him those were the weaker people and the weaker people were Muslims at this time as they are today and the Muslim people been sent a delegation to Ching as Han to ask him to come and free them [Music] Chinese Khan had never had an invitation like this but we decided to do it now he had new subjects he had subjects who lived in Oasis who lived in small towns they weren't tribal people and he needed a new law to protect them and that was the law of religious freedom he had this law read in every village in every city and every community that every person had the right to choose the religion of his or her choice [Music] we remember the conquest and the conquest was harsh and it was brutal and it was bloody but no Empire survives on war war is only one phase Empire survives when the people prosper in some way from it changes Han's empire was an Empire of Commerce all of a sudden people in every part of the world were beginning to get Foods medicines textiles from other parts of the World Books paper started moving around knowledge about gunpowder moved around Almanac spread from China to Europe Christian doctrine spread back to China it was also the first to give us an international law first with the law of religious freedom but also the law against the kidnapping of women his mother had been kidnapped his wife had been kidnapped he recognized that next to religion kidnapping of women was often the most important reason that men fought one another [Music] he also passed a law to protect all envoys all ambassadors this time usually the way you declared war on another when nation was to kill the Ambassador that was the beginning of it chiggers Han said no every Ambassador must be protected with your life so he and created this vision of diplomatic immunity so he United the world in trade he created the first international law and to me these are the two greatest achievements of China's Han um Edison is two years before James Han founded his Mongol Nation he ordered his people to learn to read and write from his daughters we do know that they could read and write and one of them became something of a scholar in their Chinese Envoy described her as reading all the time there from the very beginning of Mongolian history we see that the women were better educated than the men and that has lasted for more than 800 years even today women are more likely to go to the university they're more likely to have advanced degrees than the men Mongolian women are more educated than Mongolian men because of that after revolution a lot of family leads the girl to the university not a boy because in the countryside for example our nomadic population is considering that boys they should stay at home and look after livestock well poor girls they should be at least educated so they're sending them to universities so there's some kind of education Gap and that creates problems for many well-educated Mongolians but they cannot find Partners who are equal to them or adequate in their view for marriage it's a social problem today status of women in Mongolian history is higher than anywhere in the world during the Great Mongol Empire the in the politics or in the everyday life women's involvement was very important and very powerful woman we had in our history and that continued especially in nomadic Society women's role is immensely important in nomadic life Khan was a man of the step he came out of a nomadic tribe they were accustomed to hurting animals and the hunting animals and he applied the Mongolian system of hunting to conquering Nations so the Mongols moved in a huge formation which he called the left wing and the right wing that helped to drive everything before him it drove any animals who were out there any people who were out there that would push them forward and so word would come about the Mongols coming and because they were spread out so far it was very hard to know how many and it just seemed immense the people would begin to flee to the city that's exactly what he wanted it brought Panic it brought disease they began to eat up the food drink up the water so the city was already weakened and confused by the time Ching as Han's Army actually attacked seeing his hand had to adapt many new tactics and new strategies because he was facing things that that step people never faced one was cities and walls Ching's hand had never seen a wall except those made out of wool but it was so resourceful he recognized his soldiers couldn't bring down a wall but it was a small River that fed the town he diverted the river in order to Break Down the Walls over and over the Mongols would divert Rivers all the way up to the conquest of Baghdad they would use the rivers as their greatest Ally to bring down the walls so in this way the Mongols were able to win city after city after City finally and 12 15 he defeated the Jinn Dynasty he took over the city of what is now Beijing singer's Han continued to conquer for the rest of his life he became then the greatest conqueror in the history of the world there's no one no one who comes close if we look at Alexander the Great maybe he conquered one-third conquered and the day Alexander the Great died his entire Empire died with him as his generals carved it up chingas Han conquered and his Empire lived for 150 years his Empire eventually stretched from Korea all the way to the edge of Poland it stretched from the Arctic in the North to the Indus River in India in the south after the death of James Han 1227 the Mongolian Empire continued to grow for two more Generations he had put in motion something that could not be stopped and it continued to grow right on through the time of his grandson Kubla Khan Kubla Khan came the first emperor of China under the Yuan Dynasty the Mongol Dynasty by 1368 the whole Dynasty collapsed the Mongols returned to Mongolia to them it was almost like well they had made camp in China for 150 years they just packed up and went home back to their nomadic lifestyle we were able to keep our language and culture because of the fact that we just were independent Sovereign gear to gear countries for hundreds of years right after the fall of the Mongol Empire nobody could bother them and we will completely independent and completely efficient on our own the Mongolians are some of the most hospitable people in the world but always the first thing you hear is The Barking Dog Mongolian dogs are Shaggy they look more like lions than like dogs and so the first thing you always yell in Mongolia it's not hello I'm coming may I come in it's the hoi hello hold the dogs hold the dogs is one of the first domesticated dog which is way before qingasan because it's 15 000 years ago these days the very few Bankers are saved the dog's main purpose is to protect livestock from natural Predators the examples gravo for snowjapper red fox or some species of eagles too they're an identity of who Mongolians are they're a spirit of who Mongolians should be and who they used to be the Mongols have been Nomads for as long as we've known about them in history and of course there's people moving around all the time they're not building cities they're not building walls and they're not doing the kind of craft work that people in sedentary civilizations do so they have a whole different approach to the Arts if you go to nomadic lifestyle you will see that Mongolians like to sing that's the only entertainment they have they have to entertain each other a couple of people living together nothing around no theaters around no movie theaters around they have to entertain each other so they sing to each other they appreciate each other singing foreign [Music] [Music] it is really important for Mongolians because they have a religious aspect to it and they have a lot of traditional elements to it and the lyrics are all really poetry but because they elongate the vowels they call it long song [Music] for Mongolians music is not music in our Western concept but in Mongolia it's it's really the sound so they go out and process this sound but the place where they process the sound is with the animals and the perception of the space to how it's echoing so these are not really singers but they're herders from 1696 onward Mongolia then belong to the Manchu Empire as a part of China the early 20th century the Manchu Empire began to fall apart Mongolia took that opportunity to revolt and to leave China different people were rising up there were foreigners occupying many parts of the country around 1921 a group of mercenaries invaded Mongolia led by a European Aristocrat named Baron von Unger a guy from Europe who some people think was was a lunatic but basically was in Mongolia for a while sort of announcing the return of of Genghis Khan almost he was a weird Mystic but extraordinarily brutal Mongolia was teetering and looking for friends they contacted the Americans they contacted the British who wants to help us the Mongolians were on their own and Mongolia decided to go to Russia the newly formed Bolshevik government for help [Music] Stalin said oh yeah sure fine well part of the Soviet Union no no no no we have to be an independent autonomous area [Music] so then they sent in a military and got rid of Baron von on guern at that time they had very little infrastructure and they began to form a military and they named the leader that military a guy named supatar sukbatar was a patron of the Russians when he came in the political system gradually changed into a full communist system he died early so did many of the leaders die early and some of them under suspicious circumstances the person who was left standing was a marshall chorbelson charbelson did what the Russians told him to do he suppressed the Buddhist Faith he initiated a purge in which monasteries were burned Buddhist llamas Buddhist priests were killed thousands and thousands of them just for being a Buddhist llama just for being a chingasan's descendants just for being a herder sometimes [Music] when World War II came the demands on the herders became extreme animals were confiscated left and right for the war effort Mongolia donated every bit of our animals every bit of resources and blood and P people and monasteries and gold and silver and animals horses everything to World War II when World War II ended things did not improve Troublesome then turned to consolidating the herders into rural communes they're more or less completely governed by Russia through this time [Music] but eventually the Soviets just one day they just pulled out they could no longer financially maintain the infrastructure and maintain in the governance in Mongolia they were at the tail end of the Soviet Empire and when that Empire collapsed they faced economic clavity as well all of the support all of the economic support that they had received from Russia was immediately cut there was no police no fire no infrastructure at all it was a very very poor difficult time and this was the time of the democratic Revolution in December of 1989 a group of young people gathered and they began to demand democracy no one quite knew what to do nothing like this had ever happened and they went then to sukbacher square in the main square and the revolution just grew more and more people came it was totally peaceful and they decided to make Mongolia a democracy with the parliament basically sort of like England and that created the modern day political structure one of the first things the people did was they sang a song and prayed to chingas Han for ignoring him prayed to him for forgiveness for everything that they had done wrong in the 20th century in today's Mongolia you can see the name of chingashan everywhere but during communist time nobody was allowed to say ching-san's name so that's some kind of influence this so it's done the damaged morally as and they just alienated our history that's the influence of Soviets and that's also the problem that we forgot our tests after communism fell suddenly we need ideas ideologies and Inspirations and role models and those new time role models were not ready yet but then people start having Inspirations from the all-time Role Models so the first role model comes chingasan [Music] he gives inspiration to every range of people [Music] during that energy sometimes we sing ortendo long song and this song is I think the first step to be as a opera singers in the 20th century the Russians of course brought in socialism but they brought in many of the western arts and because the Mongolians could already sing so well and they had these kind of talents that became an emphasis then on the Soviets of creating what they call Modern socialist culture but it was very much rooted in Western culture so opera singing dramatic arts dance ballet [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] we are Mongolians so we people Wild Country Wild Horse and the people were born here and we're born to sing we're born to dance my time was we graduated in Russia we studied in Russia in Moscow cave in San peterborg this time New Generation we have owned ballet dancers we have our own opera singers [Music] the major export of Mongolia really is their culture the literature the music and the art it's all world class what Mongolia today is in 21st century a lot of things because of the legacies of the Mongolian Russian involvement depending on which generation you ask I think in Mongolia you might hear different perspectives my father used to tell me a young girl why don't you listen to the government and just obey and don't oppose it so I would always say I don't want unfree Society for my children I'm doing it for my children so there's a real gap between the generation that's still in control of Mongolia and the up and coming generation wishes very different world view the urbanization here in Mongolia is happening too fast I left Mongolia in 2009 to study abroad when I came back after six years I couldn't recognize the southern part or the area of lambatar it was so different and I felt like I was in a foreign land but there's the familiar look was still there in the gear District that divide between the rich and the poor has widened they just only goes to show that it is happening too fast there's one major city in Mongolia in Lombardo the capital [Music] a lot of the countries development and half the citizens live and you be here population of Mongolia is 3 million and half of the population is living in the city the last 30 years there have been about 600 000 herders moved to the ulambatar and the lumbaters population expanded very fastly in 1990s there were like so many harsh thought Winters are happening and then thousands of families lost their like only source of income before you went to bed you had like more than one House's livestock but in the morning when you wake up you lost all of them they have only one choice to come back to the olambatar to find the job to find the new incomes but downtown is reasonably small where people live in tall buildings and they have all the electricity they need and they have a running water and hot water and heat and elevators and internet and everything [Music] but surrounding them almost one million people living in Gears heating with coal or whatever they can find to burn or with no running water they have to haul it no paved streets the gear is very efficient shelter in terms of Mobility but in terms of Energy Efficiency it's not very efficient especially during the winter the biggest issue among others have now it's not Chinese it's not the Russian Legacy it's not like North Korea it's not poverty it's the Mongolians now learning to live as a community in the following you know same rules in in big cities like UB and really respecting and being nice to one another I think the transition from being harder to live in an urban area is very hard nomadic people come to Orlando and behave like Nomads so people from the countryside they tend to not know how to function in society they also have a hard time engaging with people all of a sudden this great nation of Mongolians who are known for being really great Hospital people an artist grumpy angry you know people in the city I grew up in Countryside in every directions riding every directions freely without thinking about traffic or without thinking about other people because of this nomadic mindset I didn't know traffic rules traffic is like yeah it's too much so it's a very strange Paradox you know being very polite country person at the same time being treated as a root person in all and butter because I didn't know well about the rules [Applause] you hear him at a gay district families uh gear we just met a single mom who also has a daughter with three children who's also a single mom and none of them are employed the only source of income they have is um the child money which is around eight dollars a month which is given from the government is located in is um not their own that they're taking care of this um land uh for the owner who who's recently moved into an apartment so um they don't get paid to take care of the yard but um in the winter they're given um coal to keep themselves warm foreign [Music] source of energy for most Mongolians is coal whether it's burning in the power plants or whether it's powering people's coal stoves here in the gear areas Soviet era stoves in many cases and they burn very cheap low quality coal and that's a problem there's an inversion effect in this Valley where ulambatar sits and that traps all of this coal smoke that accumulates [Music] in the winter here it's like being in the middle of a forest fire it's worse than that because it's coal it's these very fine small particles in the summertime it really clears up significantly and a lot of people forget about it there's a study that found children living in the city center here have roughly half the lung function of children growing up in the countryside so there's a massive public health impact here foreign visits in the wintertime skyrockets [Music] the citizens of ulambat are recognized the danger of the pollution just two years ago I think one of the big television broadcasted the documentary about their pollution and that winter is the first demonstration against the pollution it is the slogan which is written let's destroy the pollution [Applause] I have friends who work in the development sector who talk about air pollution which is connected to gear District but they've never been to the garage [Music] I want to change this up this apartment people's people were toward the gear District people I want these people to understand each other and embrace their struggle foreign democracy in Mongolia is just 28 years old [Music] when the democracy is that young people are just trying to discover and really explore or just play with it and that's what's happening here in Mongolia the youth when we talk about what's gonna happen in next 50 to 100 years I think it's brighter people in my age and Mongolia we are quite idealistic in terms of how we see the future of Mongolia or how we could contribute to the development of Mongolia especially the youth is filled with ambitions and aspirations and you know dreams to change the world change the country like if you see the young kids around here none of them would know any words in Russian they don't dress like Russian kids and most of them dress like South Koreans or like Americans mostly [Music] in a period of Rapid change it brings up interesting cultural kinds of things and it brings up upheavals of all kinds and I think in Mongolia it's played out through music because it draws on different strands you have the three you know classical music mediated through the Soviet Union a modern contemporary pop music if you will rock music and then this Mongolian tradition and it's sort of this interplay that is taking place right now that at that particular level I think you know makes Mongolia really interesting thank you this is a very uh awkward time for for youth of Mongolia and the modern times are colliding in in one person when you look at the IV drip packet and you see the face behind the drip pack and it's all distorted what distorts that is our modern way of living is like Facebook Twitter and alcohol I see vodka bottles so the people who became homeless and if we're picking up garbage or people who came from the countryside who came to the city and then they lost their ways and became the peninal alcohol and became homeless vagrants for a nomadic lifestyle we tend to take our time take our pace and we're changing that with something that that is really quick and fast and that's really hard on Mongolians we are moving away from our traditional life and going into a more western style of Lifestyle that's what I wanted to betray in return that lifestyle does not help Mongolians at all [Music] okay now [Music] horse is essentially animal for Nomads but if you go to the countryside in Mongolia now you will not see that man riding horse but instead of the man riding some motorcycle imported from China the horse is losing its practical values and when it loses practical values we've lose its byproducts and that things would be lost and forgotten and nude foreign [Music] we will not live like the nomads in the 13th century or 14th century but we would like to take some elements from them the minimalism anti-consumerism our ancestors respected the nature and that idea is being forgotten um [Music] foreign we have lots of lessons to tell to the world and also lots of lessons to learn from the world we will probably will need lots of wisdoms from past especially from Ching's hand that's why he's very connected to us now because we are doing this transformation [Music] if you live a nomadic life you see the life differently you will respect the limitations we have we have to leave something to Next Generation we are not the last generation in the Earth [Music] that's some kind of nomadic way of thinking that had been in our country for more than 2 000 years [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: DW Documentary

Views: 901,643

Keywords: Documentary, DW documentary, full documentary, DW, documentary 2023, dw documentary, documentaries, Documentaries, documentary, Genghis Khan, horsemen, nomads, Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar

Id: NRipDEuuiyg

Length: 51min 56sec (3116 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2023