Alan Goa

The smoke-hole of a felt tent is a round window on the sky, and it is where the light comes in. In the story the Mongols told about their own beginning, something else came in with it. Night after night a widow lay in her tent while a resplendent yellow man slipped in by that opening, or by the gap above the door, and rubbed her belly until his radiance sank into her womb. When he left, he went the way light goes, creeping out along a moonbeam or a ray of the sun, looking as he went like a yellow dog.

The widow was Alan Goa, and three sons came of those visits. The youngest of them, a boy his own brothers took for a simpleton, was the ancestor of Temüjin, the man the world knows as Chinggis Khan. She stands at the exact point in the oldest Mongol history where the genealogy stops being a wolf and a doe and starts being people with tempers, herds and grudges.

That history is the Secret History of the Mongols, composed in Mongolian at the court of Chinggis Khan’s heirs in the thirteenth century. It opens with a blue-grey wolf and a fallow doe, then walks down the generations to two brothers on the mountain Burqan Qaldun. The elder, Du’a Soqor, had a single eye in the middle of his forehead that could see three stages of a journey away. From the height he watched a band of people moving down a valley and picked out, in the front seat of a black covered cart, a fine girl. If she has not been given to another man, he told his brother, we shall ask for her for you. His brother was Dobun Mergen. She had not been given, and she was.

Her own people were the Qori Tumat. She was born at Ariq Usun, in Qori Tumat country, to a chief named Qorilartai Mergen and his wife Barghujin Qo’a. Her father had quarrelled with his kin over hunting grounds rich in sable and squirrel and had led his household off to Burqan Qaldun, which is how a Qori Tumat girl came to be riding past a Mongol mountain at the moment a one-eyed man looked down. Nobody describes her face.

She bore Dobun Mergen two sons, Bügünütei and Belgünütei. Then Dobun died, and after his death Alan Goa bore three more: Buqu Qatagi, Buqatu Salji and Bodonchar Mungqaq. The two elder boys did the arithmetic out loud, though not in front of her. Their mother had no husband, no brothers-in-law and no male kin in the household, and yet here were three sons. There was a man of the Ma’aliq Baya’ut living with the family. Surely the boys were his.

She heard about it. The Secret History answers the gossip with a lesson. Alan Goa sat her five sons in a row and handed each of them a single arrow shaft to break, and five dry snaps went round the tent. Then she told the elder two exactly where their half-brothers had come from: the light at the smoke-hole, the radiance in her belly, the yellow dog slipping out on a sunbeam. The signs made it plain, she said, that these were sons of Heaven, not to be compared with the black-headed common people, and when they became rulers of all, the common people would understand. Then she bound five shafts together and passed the bundle down the line, and none of them could break it. Born of one womb, she told them, they would be snapped one at a time like single arrows if they split apart, and nobody could deal with them easily if they held together. It was a speech that settled a paternity question and a succession question in one sitting, and neither elder son is recorded as arguing.

The lesson did not outlive her. When Alan Goa died, the four brothers divided the herds among themselves and gave Bodonchar nothing, because they thought him foolish and weak and did not count him as family. He rode off downriver alone on a white horse with a black sore on its back and a mangy tail, snared a young hawk with a loop of horsehair, and lived by what the bird caught. Each of her sons became the founder of a clan: the Belgünüt, the Bügünüt, the Qatagin, the Salji’ut, and from Bodonchar the Borjigin, the clan of Chinggis Khan.

A second telling survives in the History of Yuan, the official Chinese history of the Mongol dynasty compiled at the new Ming court in 1369 and 1370. It is shorter and it moves the pieces around. Here the widowed Alan dreams that a white light comes in through the skylight of her tent and turns into a golden, godlike man who approaches her bed; she wakes pregnant and bears one son only, Bodonchar. The two older boys carry names that match the Secret History’s Buqu Qatagi and Buqatu Salji, so in this version the husband’s sons and the light’s sons are not sorted the same way at all. The Yuan history adds that Bodonchar looked strange and said little, that the family called him an idiot, and that Alan alone told people the boy was no fool and that his descendants would be greatly honoured.

The story kept travelling west. Timur, who conquered from Anatolia to Delhi, was not descended from Chinggis Khan, and his house claimed Bodonchar instead. The historian John E. Woods showed in 1990 that the inscription on Timur’s nephrite cenotaph in the Gur-i Amir at Samarkand, cut no earlier than 1425 when his grandson Ulugh Beg brought the stone to the city, retells Alan Goa’s conception in a Muslim key: it quietly sets her beside the Virgin Mary, likens her visitor to the spirit the Qur’an says was sent to Mary, and openly declares that visitor a descendant of the Caliph Ali. A Timurid genealogy of the Mongol rulers, the Mu’izz al-ansab, drew her in a roundel on the family tree, as the historian Joo-Yup Lee has described. In Mongolia today she has a statue and a small museum housed in a ger-shaped log cabin.

Alan Goa works no magic of her own. Everything supernatural in her story happens to her, and the only thing she does with it is talk. That turns out to be her power: the authority of a mother who can name her sons’ father, give three boys a place above ordinary people, and make five squabbling heirs feel the weight of a bound bundle of shafts. The Timurids understood that authority well enough to carve it into jade two centuries later.

Its limit is the grave. Her word held while she lived and failed the day the herds were divided, and the son she had marked out as Heaven’s rode away with a sore-backed horse and no inheritance. Her evidence was never more than her own account of a light nobody else saw, which is exactly what the elder sons had pointed out.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Alan Goa?

Alan Goa is the legendary ancestress of the Mongols in the thirteenth-century Secret History of the Mongols. She was the wife of Dobun Mergen, and after his death she bore three sons whom she said were fathered by a being of light. Her youngest son, Bodonchar, was the ancestor of Chinggis Khan.

What is the story of Alan Goa and the five arrows?

Alan Goa gave each of her five sons one arrow shaft, and each broke it easily. She then bound five shafts together, and none of them could break the bundle. She told them that if they split apart they would be broken one by one, but if they stayed of one mind no one could easily defeat them.

How did Alan Goa conceive her three youngest sons?

According to the Secret History of the Mongols, a resplendent yellow man entered her tent every night through the smoke-hole or the top of the door, rubbed her belly, and his radiance entered her womb. He left on a moonbeam or a ray of the sun in the shape of a yellow dog. Alan Goa declared that the three sons born this way were sons of Heaven.

How is Alan Goa related to Genghis Khan?

Alan Goa is Genghis (Chinggis) Khan’s ancestress through her youngest son Bodonchar Mungqaq, founder of the Borjigin clan. Bodonchar was one of the three sons she bore after her husband’s death, and the Secret History traces the royal line from him down to Temüjin.

Why did Timur claim descent from Alan Goa?

Timur was not descended from Chinggis Khan, so his dynasty claimed descent from Alan Goa’s son Bodonchar instead. The inscription on Timur’s cenotaph in the Gur-i Amir at Samarkand, added under his grandson Ulugh Beg, retells her miraculous conception and likens her to the Virgin Mary.

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