Completed in 1662, Sagang Sechen’s Precious Summary (Erdeni-yin Tobci) tells the story of the Mongol empire’s origins from the most prestigious lineage of the Buddhist primordial cosmogony narrative. It traces the life of Chinggis (Genghis) Khan (r. 1206–1227) and his descendants through to the mid seventeenth century, when the rising Manchu Qing polity absorbed a majority of Mongolian princedoms. Sagang Sechen (b. 1604), an Ordos Mongol and descendant of Chinggis Khan, as well as a nephew of Altan Khan (1507–1586) who famously laid siege to Beijing in 1550, wrote this history of his illustrious dynasty late in his life. Not only is this text crucial for studying the history of Mongolia and the Sino-Mongolian frontiers, it is also an iconic piece of Buddhist historiography. Johan Elverskog’s new English translation of the work is long overdue: the Precious Summary has been a major literary monument in the Western study of Mongolian history since I. J. Schmidt produced a translation into German in 1829; and its role as a historical source in East Asian historical research is even more venerable, as its Chinese translation (via Manchu) was incorporated into the Qianlong emperor’s massive anthology, the Siku quanshu, in 1767.
Elverskog felicitously divides the text into 14 chapters, and his brief preface to each clearly demonstrates thematic and chronological coherence. Chapters one and two give a concise version of the received historiography of Tibet as a holy land, beginning with the creation of the universe in Buddhist mythology and the conversion of the Tibetan people and land. It is, therefore, an excellent example of a national founding myth. Any graduate or upper-division undergraduate seminar instructor seeking to assign a Buddhist origin myth as a primary source would be well served by this piece. Chapter three is a marvellously creative work of bricolage, masterfully stitching together the Buddhist creation storyline from India and Tibet to the narratives about Chinggis Khan found in the Secret History of the Mongols (circa 1250) and apocryphal stories about him (circa fifteenth to sixteenth century).Footnote 1 The stories of the successive Mongol emperors of the Yuan (1260–1368; chapter four) and the early decades of the Northern Yuan (1368–1415; chapter five) are told in a fascinating selection of stories, culminating in the harrowing tales of the Mongol–Oyirat wars (1415–1454; chapter six) and the watershed event of Dayan Khan’s rise to power (1449–1543; chapter seven), and how his polity of the Six Tümens functioned through the rise of Altan Khan and his undermining of that system (1482–1573; chapter eight). In these chapters, the relevance of the Dharma is less prominent; however, the thread of a Buddhist logic of rulership is maintained throughout. The last chapters focus on the Ordos–Tümed region, now south-western Inner Mongolia, and the importance of the Buddhist conversion as well as the achievements of Sagang Sechen’s recent ancestors take centre stage.
As Elverskog explains (pp. xvii–xix), the text is an important work of political theory. It illustrates how the Mongolian native concepts of ulus ‘state’ and törö ‘government’ could exist independently of each other and were adapted and reconceived in new circumstances and political crises/transitions over the three centuries after the fall of the Mongol empire. He argues convincingly that the Precious Summary seeks to justify the incorporation of Mongol principalities into the rising Manchu polity by demonstrating the compatibility of the ulus and törö system with the conception of a good Buddhist government, provided by the Manchu khans. Moreover, the political crises and their resolutions told in the Precious Summary bear witness to centuries of change and innovations in the Mongol states, a heritage that the Manchus later inherited. This belies the oft-repeated stereotype that upon the end of the Mongol empire, somehow the erstwhile rulers of empires slunk back into some kind of “backwardness” of no relevance, unaware of History, until the Manchus came and bestowed the trappings of a state society upon them. In the chapter prefaces, Elverskog further explicates the layers of arguments implicit in Saghang Sechen’s writing that sought to read the recent history a particular way for a political purpose. Indeed, L. Munkh-Erdene also argues in his detailed study of the Mongolian transition to the Qing polity (2021) that Sagang Sechen was likely involved in the coup that ended the rule of the last Great Khan—the title passed down from Chinggis Khan himself.Footnote 2
Excellent endnotes help the reader make sense of the historiographical whitewashing these texts engage in, especially at the end of chapter five, on the early post-imperial khans. The fact that the Qubilaids were not in power for decades in the early fifteenth century is glossed over in the Precious Summary. Another example is the historiographical tradition in which Ögedei’s second son, Köten, reigns as Great Khan (p. 82), a tradition more typical of Tibetan historiography that contrasts sharply with other imperial-era sources. Those who wish to understand Mongolian historiography and the body of textual monuments from this period would do well to read the notes carefully.
The shortcomings of this book are essentially limited to a handful of proper name transliterations—problems that peer reviewers and the copy editor might have caught. The Greek letter gamma (γ), to which a majority of Mongolists stubbornly cling when transcribing Mongolian into the Latin script (for its alleged irreplaceability as a sign for the non-aspirated back velar gh), masquerades as a -y- in Jayud (p. 126) but should have been rendered as either Jagud or Ja’ud. Likewise, one also finds Üljeng Subukhai (p. 132) and Vajra Üiyeng (p. 135), both of whom held the title üijeng. Other typographical errors in proper names include: Bagujin=Bargujin (p. 41); Sadaan=Qadaan (p. 47); Qarachang=Qarajang (p. 87); Altangaljin (p. 107) and Atlaaljin (p. 115), which should both be Altagaljin. There are also some puzzling decisions in translating or transcribing personal names, but that is a matter of authorial choice.
Despite these minor issues, this new translation is a boon to all Mongolists since we can now freely quote from this authoritative translation (and its useful index) without undertaking ad hoc exercises in rendering the original in mutually inconsistent ways. However, its truest benefit is for pedagogical use. The present volume joins Elverskog’s translations of Pearl Rosary (2007) and Jewel Translucent Sutra (2003), both literary and historiographical monuments of central importance in the Mongolian corpus. Over the years, Elverskog has been building up a critical mass of translated Mongolian sources in English, which makes it possible for anglophone scholars to make better-informed readings of post-imperial Mongolian history in their writings. It is high time for historians of the Qing empire and of Ming China to stop implying that the centuries between the Yuan and Qing in Mongolia were characterized by nothing but ‘internecine tribal warfare’ (which society’s aristocracy can truly avoid that description for its history?), as if no political processes of consequence occurred and that the Qing empire’s Inner Asian statecraft came into existence ex nihilo.
