1644 CHINGGIS KHAN
Daoist San Guan (three officials) as the ancient sage-kings
Yao, Shun, and Yu. The most famous case is the transforma-
tion of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (Chin., Guanshiyin)
into the most popular deity of all, the compassionate moth-
er-figure, Guanyin, whose birthday is celebrated on the nine-
teenth day of the second month.
A few of the deities that originated in popular cults be-
came so important that they were adopted by the state and
became objects of official sacrifices as well. The most out-
standing example on Taiwan is Mazu (granny), who was
given the highest imperial rank of Tianhou (consort of Heav-
en). Her most important function is to protect all who must
venture upon the waters. (Her birthday is celebrated on the
twenty-third day of the third month.) Guan Sheng Da Di
(holy great emperor Guan), originally a famous general of the
Three Kingdoms period (third century CE), became the
greatest of the military gods and protector of the empire; his
birthday is celebrated on the thirteenth day of the fifth
month. While many popular deities are pan-Chinese, their
birthdays celebrated everywhere, there are also many others
whose cults are only local, or of importance chiefly to certain
groups or occupations.
RELIGIOUS YEAR OF THE STATE. Since ancient times the
state has considered the ritual offering of sacrifices to be one
of its most basic duties and prerogatives. The calendar issued
by the imperial Bureau of Astronomy gave the annual sched-
ule of official sacrifices, which formed a separate system from
the universal festivals and from the birthdays of deities cele-
brated in the popular cults.
In China, as elsewhere, some observances have become
more or less drained of religious content and their original
significance forgotten by all but scholars or obscured by later
rationalizations. In the religious year as a whole a few themes
are conspicuous: concern for unity of the family, including
filiality to the ancestors and protection of the children; desire
for longevity; hopes for blessings in general; and fear of re-
sentful ghosts and attempts to propitiate them. Aside from
these hopes and fears, the colorful practices marking the
course of the year may be understood as one of the clearest
expressions of traditional popular culture.
SEE ALSO Chinese Religion, article on Popular Religion;
Confucianism, article on The Imperial Cult; Yuhuang.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A complete calendar of the religious year can be found in Henri
Doré’s Recherches sur les superstitions en Chine, 18 vols.
(Shanghai, 1911–1938). Doré’s opus has been translated by
M. Kennelly as Researches into Chinese Superstitions, 13 vols.
(1914–1938; reprint, Taipei, 1966); see volume 5, pages
563–656. An abbreviated calendar can be found in Doré’s
Manuel des superstitions chinoises, 2d ed. (Shanghai, 1936),
pp. 132–137. The festival year observed in different localities
is described in Justus Doolittle’s The Social Life of the Chi-
nese, vol. 2, edited by Paxton Hood (New York, 1868),
chaps. 1–3; J. J. M. de Groot’s Les fêtes annuellement célébrées
à Émoui (Amoy), 2 vols. (1886; reprint, Taipei, 1977); Annu-
al Customs and Festivals in Peking, (1936; reprint, Hong
Kong, 1965), an annotated translation by Derk Bodde of a
work by the Manchu author Tun Li-ch’en; Lewis Hodous’s
Folkways in China (London, 1929); C. S. Wong’s A Cycle of
Chinese Festivities (Singapore, 1967); and Henry Yi-min Wei
and Suzanne Coutanceau’s Wine for the Gods; An Account of
the Religious Traditions and Beliefs of Taiwan (Taipei, 1976).
Wolfram Eberhard’s Chinese Festivals (1952; reprint, Taipei,
1972) discusses the origins and significance of some of the
major observances. More specialized treatments include
Marcel Granet’s Fêtes et chansons anciennes de la Chine (Paris,
1919), translated into English by E. D. Edwards as Festivals
and Songs of Ancient China (New York, 1932), in which see
especially part 2; Derk Bodde’s Festivals in Classical China:
New Year and Other Annual Observances during the Han
Dynasty, 206 B.C.–A.D. 220 (Princeton, 1975); Göran Aij-
mer’s The Dragon Boat Festival on the Hupeh-Hunan Plains,
Central China (Stockholm, 1964); and Carole Morgan’s Le
Tableau du Boeuf du Printemps: Étude d’une page de
l’almanach chinois (Paris, 1980).
New Sources
Chang, P. F. Chinese Festivals Customs and Practices in Sarawak.
Sarawak, Malaysia, 1993.
Grayson, James H. “Is There an East Asian Millennium? East
Asian Conceptions of Time.” In Calling Time, edited by
Martyn Percy, pp. 61–73. Sheffield, 2000.
Holzman, D. Immortals, Festivals, and Poetry in Medieval China:
Studies in Social and Intellectual History. Brookfield, Vt.,
1998.
Jian, T. Strukturen, Funktionen und Symbole des chinesischen Festes
Frühlingsanfang im historischen Wandel. New York, 1999.
Kurihara, Keisuke. “The Hsia Hsiao-cheng, the Earliest Chinese
Agricultural Calendar” tr. by Barry Steben. In Contacts be-
tween Cultures, edited by Bernard Hung-Kay Luk,
pp. 276–278. Lewiston, N.Y., 1992.
Maheu, Betty Ann. “Welcome to the Year of the Dragon.” Tripod
20, no. 115 (2000): 45–50.
Stepanchuk, C. Red Eggs and Dragon Boats: Celebrating Chinese
Festivals. Berkeley, 1994.
Wong, C. S., and R. Pinsler. An Illustrated Cycle of Chinese Festivi-
ties in Malaysia and Singapore. Singapore, 1987.
LAURENCE G. THOMPSON (1987)
Revised Bibliography
CHINGGIS KHAN (1162–1227), great Mongol lead-
er and founder of a vast empire in Asia. One of the extraordi-
nary personages of world history, Chinggis Khan is a striking
example of an emperor who became a god.
Born in Mongolia, northeast of present-day Ulan Bator,
and called Temüjin in his youth, he was the eldest son of a
chieftain of the Mongol Borjigit clan. Having succeeded in
uniting the Mongol and Turkic tribes of the area, he adopted
the title of Chinggis Khan and set out to conquer the world.
He subdued the Chin empire in North China, the Hsi-hsia
kingdom northeast of Tibet, the Turkic states in Turkistan,
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION

and the empire of Khorezm, comprising Transoxiana as well
as Afghanistan and Eastern Iran. Mongol units even ad-
vanced as far as India and the Crimea. When Chinggis Khan
died in 1227 near Ning-hsia, capital of Hsi-hsia, he left the
broad foundations of an empire that would extend, under his
sons and grandsons, from Korea to the Near East and south-
ern Europe and from southern Siberia to Indochina.
The story of Chinggis Khan’s life reads like that of an
epic hero. Indeed, the thirteenth-century Secret History of the
Mongols, the first work of Mongolian literature, patterns Ch-
inggis Khan’s biography after the model of the hero-king,
and thus reflects the indispensable qualities of a ruler and the
hopes set upon him. Chinggis Khan possesses the mandate
of Heaven and Heaven’s support to restore law, order, and
peace on earth. He is of noble totemistic descent: his forefa-
ther, the ancestor of the Mongol royal family, is a blue-gray
wolf whose son is born on the holy mountain Burkhan
Qaldun. It is this “good place,” the center of the world,
where Chinggis Khan’s career begins as well. From here he
goes forth to conquer nations and peoples in all directions,
and to this same place his dead body returns. He has a good
wife, a good horse, and good companions, and he finds him-
self in a situation favorable for his activities.
After Chinggis Khan’s death, his character develops in
three ways: Chinggis Khan becomes a means of political
identification, a figure of political theology, and a deity. Ch-
inggis Khan is used as a means of political identification by
the Mongols as well as by the Chinese. To the Mongols, as
the founder of their unified state, he is a symbol of Mongol
national independence, or at least autonomy. To the Chi-
nese, he is the glorious first emperor of a Chinese dynasty
of Mongol nationality, a symbol of the multinational charac-
ter of Chinese history.
Chinggis Khan’s association with political theology is
twofold. It was probably during the time of Kublai, grandson
of Chinggis, that the concept of a dual Buddhist world gov-
ernment was introduced: the ruler of the state is the king,
as represented by Chinggis Khan and his successors, the
Mongolian great khans; the head of the religion is the reli-
gious teacher, the lama, as represented by Buddha
Śākyamuni and his successors, the Tibetan hierarchs. The
two orders of state and religion, based on mutual harmony
and distribution of functions, guarantee secular and spiritual
well-being. This concept, however, has never been fully real-
ized. Kublai became not the ruler of a Tibeto-Mongol Bud-
dhist state, but rather the first Mongol emperor of China.
Another notion of Chinggis Khan that links political
and religious images proved to be more successful. In this
view, Chinggis Khan, protected by Heaven, becomes the son
of Heaven (Tengri) or the son of Khormusta, the lord of the
gods (tengri), the Indian Indra, whose attribute is the thun-
derbolt. In Mahāyāna Buddhism, Indra developed into the
bodhisattva Vajrapān: i, the “bearer of the thunderbolt,” a fig-
ure symbolic of power. It is power that is the principal quali-
ty of Chinggis Khan and his people, the Mongols. At the
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
CHINGGIS KHAN 1645
same time, however, in ideological or even genealogical
terms, Chinggis Khan becomes a successor to the first king
of humankind, the Indian Mahasammata.
There are three aspects to the deification of Chinggis
Khan. First, he became the ancestral deity of the ruling Bor-
jigit clan, the state, and the whole Mongol people, guarding
them against all evil. Sacrifices to Chinggis Khan, his family,
and his war genies (sülde) seem to be offered even today in
his main sanctuary, the Eight White Yurts, in the Ordos dis-
trict of Inner Mongolia. He is also still officially venerated
by Mongolian refugees in Taiwan. Second, Chinggis was in-
corporated into the Lamaist-Buddhist pantheon as a local
guardian deity of comparatively low rank. In the practice of
folk religion he became fused with the ancestral deity. Third,
traits of an initiatory god were imputed to Chinggis Khan;
as this deity, he introduced marriage customs, seasonal festi-
vals connected with the nomadic economy, and certain ritual
practices of daily life.
SEE ALSO Inner Asian Religions; Mongol Religions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Basic observations on the religious role of Chinggis Khan have
been made by Walther Heissig in his Die Religionen der Mon-
golei (Stuttgart, 1970), translated by Geoffrey Samuel as The
Religions of Mongolia (Berkeley, 1980). The ideological de-
velopment of Chinggis Khan’s character is dealt with by Her-
bert Franke in his excellent study From Tribal Chieftain to
Universal Emperor and God: The Legitimation of the Yüan
Dynasty (Munich, 1978). Indispensable for everyone inter-
ested in Chinggis Khan’s biography and thirteenth-century
Mongol political and religious thought are the anonymous
Secret History of the Mongols and two Persian chronicles writ-
ten by al-Juwayni and Rashı̄d al-Dı̄n. The following English
translations are available: The Secret History of the Mongols,
for the First Time Done into English out of the Original Tongue
and Provided with an Exegetical Commentary, 2 vols.,
by Francis Woodman Cleaves (Cambridge, Mass., 1982–);
The History of the World-Conqueror, by EAla-ad-Din
EAta-Malik Juvaini, translated by John Andrew Boyle in two
volumes (Cambridge, Mass., 1958); and The Successors of
Gengis Khan, translated from the Persian of Rashı̄d al-Dı̄n
T: abı̄b by John Andrew Boyle (New York, 1971). An excel-
lent biography of Chinggis Khan written by a Western histo-
rian is René Grousset’s Le conquérant du monde (Paris,
1944), translated into English by Denis Sinor and Marian
MacKellar as Conqueror of the World (Edinburgh, 1967).
The most recent study on Chinggis Khan’s life and activities
is Paul Ratchnevsky’s Činggis-Khan: Sein Leben und Wirken
(Wiesbaden, 1983).
New Sources
Onon, Urgunge. The Secret History of the Mongols: The Life and
Times of Chinggis Khan. Richmond, 2001.
Ratchnevsky, Paul. Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy. Translated
and edited by Thomas Nivison Haining. Oxford, 1992.
Turnbull, Stephen. Genghis Khan & the Mongol Conquests, 1190–
1400. New York, 2003.
KLAUS SAGASTER (1987)
Revised Bibliography