A Tour in Mongolia

A Tour in Mongolia

A Tour in Mongolia recounts the author's travels through Inner and Outer Mongolia in 1913, undertaken during the turbulent aftermath of Mongolia's declaration of independence from Chinese rule. Departing Peking after visiting the Ming tombs and the Great Wall, the narrator travels to the frontier town of Kalgan, where she persuades reluctant Norwegian missionaries to help her arrange passage into Mongolia despite widespread warnings about roving Mongol soldiery and unrest along the border. She joins a Finnish missionary's caravan, traveling by Peking cart and pony over the Han-o-pa Pass into the Chakhar region of Inner Mongolia, staying at the yourt of her Mongol guide Dobdun and observing Mongol domestic life, Buddhist lamaseries, wolf hunts, and the customs of nomadic pastoral society, including tea-making, snuff-bottle etiquette, and marriage practices among the Chakhars. After a brief return to Peking, she partners with Edward Manico Gull—whom she would later marry—to attempt a crossing of the Gobi Desert to Urga, Mongolia's capital. Political instability forces them to abandon the direct desert route; instead they travel via the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern railways through Manchuria and Siberia, encountering bureaucratic obstacles, petty theft, and the depressed towns of Verkne-Oudinsk and Kiachta before hiring a tarantass and driver to cross into Mongolia proper and reach Urga by road, fording swollen rivers and camping among nomadic settlements en route. In Urga, lodging with a Norwegian trader, the author describes the city's tripartite structure—the lamaist holy city, the Russian consular quarter, and the Chinese trading quarter of Mai-mai-ch'eng—along with its horse and camel markets, the immense gilded Buddha temple, and the political tensions between Russian commercial encroachment and Mongol aspirations for autonomy. She provides extended ethnographic observation of Khalkha Mongol dress, customs, courtship, drinking habits, and attitudes toward the elderly, alongside anecdotes of hunting, bartering at a lama auction, and encounters with Russian officials and the Bogdo Hut'ukt'u, Mongolia's reincarnate spiritual and temporal ruler. The narrative builds toward the great Ts'am Haren festival, a elaborate ceremonial pageant of tribute, archery, sacred dance, and wrestling, which the author witnesses as the culminating spectacle of her Mongolian sojourn—a vivid, near-final glimpse of a "medievalism untouched" she had sought before it vanished under Russian and Chinese pressure.

By Beatrix Manico Gull · First published 1920 · Genre: Travel Literature, Adventure Narrative, Memoir · 18 chapters

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