The Bogd Khan

The eighth Jebtsundamba Khutughtu was born in Tibet in 1869 and identified as a child as the reincarnation of the Mongolian Buddhist lineage founded by Zanabazar in the seventeenth century. Brought to Urga, he became the spiritual head of Mongolian Buddhism and, in a country with no native monarchy since the Manchu conquest, the only institution capable of representing Mongolia as a whole. He was worldly, politically shrewd, fond of Western imports and mechanical novelties, and by the 1910s losing his sight to what contemporaries recorded as syphilis.

When the Qing dynasty fell in 1911, Mongolian nobles and monastic leaders declared independence and enthroned him as Bogd Khan — Holy Emperor — of an autonomous Mongolia. The arrangement was never secure: the 1915 Kyakhta Agreement between Russia, China and Mongolia reduced independence to autonomy under nominal Chinese suzerainty, and the Russian collapse of 1917 removed the counterweight that had made even that possible.

In 1919 the Beiyang general Xu Shuzheng marched troops into Urga, forced the abrogation of autonomy, and stripped the Bogd Khan of the state seals, in ceremonies designed to humiliate the Mongolian court. The Bogd Khan was placed under effective house arrest at the Green Palace on the Tuul. It was in this period that monastic networks began looking north for deliverance, and that oracles in Urga were reported to have identified the approaching Baron Ungern as an emanation of the wrathful war deity Jamsaran.

In February 1921 a raiding party of Tibetan and Buryat riders from Ungern's division extracted him from the palace and carried him to the monastery of Manzushir on the sacred mountain. Days later Urga fell, and on 22 February the Bogd Khan was re-enthroned with full ceremony — the act that gave Ungern's regime its legitimacy. That legitimacy was brief. When Soviet and Mongolian People's Party forces took Urga in July 1921, the Bogd Khan was retained as a constitutional figurehead with almost no power. He died on 20 May 1924; the Mongolian People's Republic was proclaimed months later, and the search for his next reincarnation was banned.