Completion of the Secret History of the Mongols

The book opens with the legendary origin of the Mongols from a blue-grey wolf and a fallow doe and tells the story of Temüjin: his hard youth after his father’s murder, the wars and plots through which he rose, his proclamation as Genghis Khan in 1206 and his conquests. The last part covers the reign of his son Ögedei and ends with Ögedei’s own reflections on what he had done well and what he had done wrong. Written in Middle Mongolian for the ruling house, the work weaves verse, epic and folklore into the chronicle; its author is unknown.

According to the colophon, the writing was finished when the Great Assembly had gathered, in the seventh month of a Year of the Rat, while the khan’s palaces stood at Köde’e Aral on the Kherlen. Which Year of the Rat is meant is disputed. Probably most specialists, Igor de Rachewiltz among them, date the original text to 1228 and regard the account of the following years as later additions. Others prefer 1240, since the narrative covers almost the whole reign of Ögedei (died 1241), or 1252 (René Grousset, Christopher Atwood), and 1264 has also been proposed — hence the interval 1228–1264. Köde’e Aral is identified with the plain of Khödöö Aral — the same name in modern Mongolian — on the Kherlen in today’s Khentii Province; the marker is approximate.

The Mongolian original is lost. The text survives in a transcription into Chinese characters with an interlinear translation, made at the Hanlin Academy at the end of the 14th century, under the early Ming, as a textbook for interpreters; about two-thirds of it was also copied into the 17th-century chronicle Altan Tobchi. The Russian sinologist Palladius (Kafarov) was the first to translate it into a foreign language, in 1866 — from its abridged Chinese version.