How a Mongol tent is built
Editorial contextHuc visited Mongol families and describes their tent exactly: a cylinder about three feet high topped by a cone, a folding lattice of crossed bars below, a ring of poles meeting at the top like umbrella ribs, a thick covering, and a low folding door with a beam across the bottom. The next page describes the smoke-hole flap of felt and the men's and women's sides inside.
The Mongol tent, for about three feet from the ground, is cylindrical in form. It then becomes conical, like a pointed hat. The woodwork of the tent is composed below of a trellis-work of crossed bars, which fold up and expand at pleasure. Above these, a circle of poles, fixed in the trellis-work, meets at the top, like the sticks of an umbrella.
About Mongols
'No towns, no edifices' in the land of grass
Editorial contextCrossing the prairies of the Chakhar, Huc sums up what makes Tartary unlike anywhere else: no towns, no buildings, no crafts, no farming and no forests, only endless grassland, lakes, rivers and mountains. In the next paragraph he describes encampments of tents appearing and vanishing as herders moved to fresh pasture.
There are no towns, no edifices, no arts, no industry, no cultivation, no forests; everywhere it is prairie, sometimes interrupted by immense lakes, by majestic rivers, by rugged and imposing mountains; sometimes spreading out into vast limitless plains.
About Mongols
Keep in mind
A literary generalisation; elsewhere Huc describes lamaseries, trading towns and ruins in the same region.
A Mongol: 'We Mongols are formed for living in tents'
Editorial contextIn Gechekten, where Chinese settlers had turned grassland into poor sandy fields, the priests asked a Mongol rider why his people did not farm. He answered that Mongols were made for tents and herds; since they had started farming and building houses they had grown poor, and the Chinese (Kitat) had taken their land, herds and houses. It is a Mongol's own verdict on houses versus tents.
"We Mongols are formed for living in tents, and pasturing cattle. So long as we kept to that in the kingdom of Gechekten, we were rich and happy. Now, ever since the Mongols have set themselves to cultivating the land, and building houses, they have become poor. The Kitats (Chinese) have taken possession of the country; flocks, herds, lands, houses, all have passed into their hands.
About Mongols of Gechekten (Hexigten)
A city built for a Mongol prince by imperial slaves
Editorial contextThe Qianlong emperor married a daughter to a Khalkha prince, who hated court life and longed for his tents. As a compromise the emperor carved out land in the Chakhar, 'built for him' a small handsome city, and gave him a hundred families of slaves skilled in Chinese arts and crafts. The princess got her court; the prince could go back to the tent. Huc credits the city to the emperor and Chinese craftsmen, not to the Mongols.
He dismembered a portion of the Tchakar, and assigned it to the Mongol prince; he built for him, amid these solitudes, a small but handsome city, and presented to him a hundred families of slaves skilled in the arts and manufactures of China.
About Khalkha Mongols; Manchu imperial family; Chinese artisans
Cave houses dug by Chinese settlers
Editorial contextCaught in a freezing storm in the Ordos, the priests found a ravine lined with man-made caves, neatly plastered, with windows, stoves and heated beds (kang). Huc explains that Chinese settlers in Tartary dig such homes into hard hillsides. A Mongol sheltering in the next cave told them he had known the Chinese families who dug them, and that the local Mongols had driven them out two years before for encroaching and stealing.
not simple caves formed by nature, but fine, spacious apartments excavated by the hand of man. … When the Chinese establish themselves anywhere in Tartary, if they find mountains, the earth of which is hard and solid, they excavate caverns in their sides. These habitations are cheaper than houses, and less exposed to the irregularity of the seasons.
About Chinese settlers (Kitat) and Ordos Mongols
A minstrel's song: 'Return, O Timour!'
Editorial contextAt a feast for the Moon festival a Mongol bard (toolholos) played a three-stringed fiddle and, at the priests' request, sang the 'Invocation to Timour', a lament for lost greatness that begs a hero to return and make the Mongols warriors again. Huc reproduces it in translation. It shows nineteenth-century Mongols remembering their imperial past in song.
"When the divine Timour dwelt within our tents, the Mongol nation was redoubtable and warlike; its least movements made the earth bend; its mere look froze with fear the ten thousand peoples upon whom the sun shines.
About Mongols
Keep in mind
Huc gives a free French rendering of an oral song; the 'Timour' of the song may not be the historical Tamerlane.
Women do all the work, men ride
Editorial contextHuc is blunt about the division of labour: Mongol women milk the cows, make butter and cheese, fetch water, gather and dry dung fuel, make clothes, tan skins and full cloth. The men's work is herding on horseback, which Huc calls more amusement than labour. The page opens with the Chinese nickname Tsao-Ta-Dze, 'Stinking Tartars'.
Among the Tartars, household and family cares rest entirely upon the woman; it is she who milks the cows, and prepares the butter, cheese, &c.; who goes, no matter how far, to draw water; who collects the argol fuel, dries it, and piles it around the tent. The making of clothes, the tanning of skins, the fulling of cloth, all appertains to her
About Mongols
Marriage as a contract of sale
Editorial contextHuc says Mongol marriages were arranged by parents through go-betweens, and that the bride's family was paid in horses, oxen, sheep, cloth, butter, brandy and flour. The Mongols themselves spoke of 'buying' and 'selling' a daughter. He goes on to describe a mock fight at the bride's door, a gallop to the new tent, polygamy and easy divorce.
The thing is indeed very clearly expressed in their language; they say, "I have bought for my son the daughter of so and so." "We have sold our daughter to such and such a family." The marriage contract is thus simply a contract of sale.
About Mongols
Brick tea, 'the grand luxury of the Tartars'
Editorial contextHuc explains 'Tartar tea': coarse tea leaves pressed into bricks, broken off, boiled until red, salted and mixed with milk. He says the Tartars (with the Russians) were its only consumers. Elsewhere he notes that at Urga bricks of tea served as money.
the coarser leaves, with which are mixed up the smaller tendrils, are pressed together in a mould, in the form and of the size of the ordinary house brick. Thus prepared, it becomes an article of considerable commerce, under the designation of Tartar-tea, the Tartars being its exclusive consumers, with the exception of the Russians
About Mongols
Burning the dead in an earthen pyramid
Editorial contextHuc describes several Mongol funerals: nomads left the dead on hilltops or in ravines for eagles and wolves, while rich families built a pyramid-shaped earth furnace around the standing body, burned it, and had the Grand Lama knead the powdered bones with meal into cakes that were stacked and placed in a small tower.
The richer Tartars sometimes burn their dead with great solemnity. A large furnace of earth is constructed in a pyramidical form. Just before it is completed, the body is placed inside, standing, surrounded with combustibles.
About Mongols
Eastern Tartars and Western Tartars
Editorial contextHuc sets out how he uses the word: following the Tartars and Chinese themselves, he divides 'the Tartar people' into Eastern Tartars (Toung-Ta-Dze), the Manchus, and Western Tartars (Si-Ta-Dze), the Mongols. He dismisses European map labels such as 'Kalmoukia' and 'Great and Little Bukharia' as 'purely imaginary'.
we will divide the Tartar people into Eastern Tartars (Toung-Ta-Dze), or Mantchous, and Western Tartars (Si-Ta-Dze), or Mongols. … Great and Little Boukaria, Kalmoukia, Great and Little Thibet … all these denominations seem to us purely imaginary.
About Manchus and Mongols
Manchu soldiers who no longer speak Manchu
Editorial contextAt the garrison town of Koukou-Khoton (Hohhot), Huc found that the 10,000 'Mantchou Tartars' stationed there hardly spoke their own language. Two centuries after conquering China, he says, the Manchus had become Chinese in manners, language and even homeland.
The soldiers of the New Town of Koukou Khoton are Mantchou Tartars; but if you did not previously know the fact, you would scarcely suspect it from hearing them speak. Amongst them there is perhaps not a single man who understands the language of his own country.
About Manchu bannermen
Royal tombs with poisoned children and arrow traps
Editorial contextHuc passes on a lurid report about Tartar kings' burials: a brick building with statues, a central cavern full of treasure, children killed with mercury to keep their faces fresh and set up around the corpse holding the king's pipe and snuff, and a spring-loaded battery of bows to shoot any grave robber. He says bow-makers sold such traps and that Chinese sometimes bought them to guard their houses.
These monstrous interments sometimes cost the lives of a great number of slaves. They take children of both sexes, remarkable for their beauty, and make them swallow mercury till they are suffocated; in this way they preserve, they say, the freshness and ruddiness of their countenance, so as to make them appear still alive.
About Mongol princes (reported)
Keep in mind
Huc did not see this; 'they say' marks it as hearsay, and it echoes older Chinese tomb legends.
The mooncake massacre of 1368
Editorial contextHuc tells the Chinese tradition behind the Moon festival: in about 1368 the Chinese rose against the Mongol dynasty, passing the signal in letters hidden in the festival cakes, and killed the Mongol soldiers billeted in their homes. When the priests told this to a Mongol family, the old man wept and said a day of vengeance would come. The massacre story is a legend, not established history.
The signal was given by a letter concealed in the cakes which, as we have stated, are on that day, mutually interchanged throughout the country. The massacre was effected, and the Tartar army dispersed in the houses of the Chinese, utterly annihilated. This catastrophe put an end to the Mongol domination
About Mongols (Yuan dynasty) and Chinese
Keep in mind
A Chinese folk tradition that Huc repeats as history.