July 02, 2003
disappearing mummies
Today's edition of our newspaper has an article about the ongoing search for the body of the last Mongol monarch, the 8th Bogd Khan. The piece starts like this - "The last Bogd Khan (1870-1924), before he died, asked his astrologer-lamas when he would be reincarnated on earth and the lamas said that in the black horse year of 17th sixty-year cycle of lunar calendar (ie. 2002) the Bogd Khan would be with his disciplines again. But last year the Bogd Khaan did not reappear."
You gotta love it. So they can't find the Khan's mummified body, which was removed from a temple by the Russians in the 1930s and buried in a grave elsewhere. But that grave is empty, as is the grave of the Russian consul's wife Galya, where the body was also rumoured to be buried (don't ask). So now they think some of the Khan's disciples (maybe reincarnated ones) dug him up and buried him on a site somewhere in the third microdistrict of Ulaanbaatar, probably where the Orgoo cinema is.
I can just see some construction worker fixing the pipes somewhere out in the third microdistrict and coming across the mummy (the Russian soldiers cut open the bandages when they took the body out of the temple and the flesh looked like 'dried meat' apparently) and smuggling it to China in the back of a Russian jeep, exchanging it for three hundred bottles of vodka and a few cases of apples.
This reminds me, albeit in a roundabout way, of a moral dilemma I've been grappling with lately. Wandering around markets and museums and antique shops, I keep coming across things that really shouldn't be for sale. Beautiful and exquisite and bizarre things that should be in museums - Bronze Age arrowheads, fossils, 18th century handcuffs, and Buddhist relics like bowls made from human craniums and horns made from the femur bones of eighteen year old girls. You're not supposed to take anything pre-1930 out of the country without a customs certificate but the bribes are cheap. I don't think these things should be for sale, but if they're selling them for three dollars at the market, wouldn't it be better for someone to take them home and treasure them? Would they sell them if people didn't buy them? Chicken or the egg?
I suspect buying a mummified Bogd Khan would be a bit different from buying an 18th century silver knife though. Wonder what Australian customs would make of a cranium bowl.
But you don't even consider the idea that the Khan did reincarnate and simply decided to ditch the disciples. That's my vote. I say he's on the beach in Florida, sipping daiquaris.
Posted by: Greg at July 3, 2003 06:43 AMIf he reincarnated in 2002, wouldn't he still be too young for daiquiris?
Posted by: Mig at July 3, 2003 09:10 AMThere's a few possibilities, I'm thinking. A) he got reincarnated last year and by some freak accident landed in his own mummified body, dug himself out and went to Florida. B) his disciples were reincarnated as starving herders, dug him up, ate half of him and sold the other half at the market, in strips. C) he was reincarnated last year as a baby but died of TB before he could tell anybody who he was, or D) he was reincarnated as an adult, wandered out into modern Ulaanbaatar and was promptly run over by a taxi.
Posted by: chris at July 4, 2003 01:57 AMHe was the taxi. Besides, Florida can't vote.
Posted by: Taylor at July 4, 2003 04:39 PM