The man I wrestled that day in Inner Mongolia was about a foot shorter than me, at least a hundred pounds lighter, and seemed only slightly weaker than the horse I'd just seen him ride around the vast expanse of the Mongolian Steppe. The interesting thing about him was that just as the match began he looked up into my face which was so high above him that I was blocking out the noon sun, and smiled. There seemed to be something that I wasn't getting, some little piece of knowledge that had escaped me. We were surrounded on all sides, by Han Chinese tourists, Han Chinese wrestlers, Han tour guides, Han cooks, Han dancers, and Han musicians all pretending that they were Mongolian. In fact, the little man I grabbed onto that day was the only person of Mongolian descent I would ever meet in Inner Mongolia over the next two weeks. The people shouted for the man to stand up for his country, meaning China, which seemed to amuse him.
The thing I had not grasped about Inner Mongolian Wrestlers is that they wrestle for wrestling sake and live their lives for much the same reason. Winning and losing do not come into the equation once the match starts, and only the wild-haired strength that comes from being raised on horse milk and sheep meat is present. As I tugged at his armor and he tugged at mine (mine was about ten sizes too small) I started to get the point of the Mongolian heart, which is to battle for battle's sake, to win through strength or lose through strength, but always the strength remains. As I went flying onto my back and the crowd cheered for my Mongolian friend, I realized once and for all that you just can't beat a Mongolian horseman at wrestling if you think about where you are what you're doing any more than a horse thinks about all that vastness in the grass.
Inner Mongolia, like tourist attractions the world over, is a mixture of the real and the imagined. At the provincial museum in Baotou I happened to catch an exhibit of photographs of the old Mongolian tribes that once roamed the steppe, along with pictures of the very last wolf hunter that Inner Mongolia ever knew. What exists now is a mixture of the choking nature of tourism and the very real elements of a culture which is in its last decades.
The grass is real. You can stand on the prairie and look out at a horizon ending in a sea of green. If the year's rain fall has been low (and it increasingly is), large drifts of amber the size of aircraft carriers can be seen from any nearby ovoo. In fact, the grasslands will teach you the meaning of things vast and big. After losing yourself in the grasslands you can visit the Xiangshawan, or “Singing Sands” of the Gobi desert. If you should ever find yourself lucky enough to be there, walk out onto the nearest large dune, sit down, be still, and place the palms of your hands flat on the sand. Should the wind be just right you will actually hear the dune make a kind of low moan. At least I did. The horsemen are real, even though for the most part Han Chinese have taken over the role of their Mongolian neighbors when it comes to the horse treks, Mongolian traditional music, and yurt hotels that you meet throughout the region.
Many often refer to China's treatment of Inner Mongolia and Tibet as a kind of Chinese colonialism. Yet while the description might fit in geopolitical circles, it doesn't wash when it comes to the vast expanse of history between the two regions. It's hard for me to believe that the Inner Mongolians consider their present government to be a foreign occupier when it was they who produced the greatest and most vicious leader the world had ever known, a man so consumed with power that he subjected most of the known world to the philosophies of the Mongols.
For centuries the Mongols had tried to gain control of China but never quite succeeded because of that damned pesky wall. The Mongols were considered barbarians by the Song and Jin Dynasties which in their later years had lost their military spirit, turning attentions to art, an action which produced an awful lot of pottery and poetry but not many fortifications or military advances.
Then in 1162 a boy was born somewhere in modern day Mongolia who would eventually grow up to unite the tribes of Mongolia, slaughter anyone who got in his way, and bring the finery of the Song to its knees. Ghengis Kahn not only brought the separate tribes of Mongolia together, thereby making it one nation rather than a scattering of nomadic people, but he also created a cult of personality around the Mongol people which exists to this day.
In 1208 Ghengis Kahn attacked from the north, swept most of China into his empire, and proceeded along the path of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar towards the farthest reaches of the earth trying to own it all. In the process, he taught Chinese culture the value of strength. Ghengis Kahn is still worshipped today in Inner Mongolia as the region's one and only leader who managed to make a name for himself. And what a name it is.
