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Hello and welcome to the history of China.

Mongol Ten, the last campaign.

As he was about to ride out, Queen Yesui petitioned the Great Khan.

She said, Kyan, you are thinking of crossing high ridges and forwarding wide rivers, of executing

distant campaigns and pacifying your many nations.

But no creature is born eternal.

When your body, like an old and withered tree, comes crashing down, to whom will you bequeath

your people like tangled hemp? When your body, like the stone base of a pillar, comes tumbling down, to whom will you bequeath your people like tangled hemp?

When your body, like the stone base of a pillar, comes tumbling down,

to whom will you bequeath your people like a flock of redpoles?

Which of your four steeds, the sons born to you will you nominate?

From the secret history of the Mongols, translated by Ergong-unun.

Temajin well understood that his time on earth was growing short.

His latest attempt to achieve eternal life by recruiting a supposed Chinese Taoist immortal had had proved a bust on that account.

Though it was unlikely that a man as shrewd as the great Khan of Mongolia had ever replaced too much stock in the stories about the old man,

who it turned out, after all, to be little more than a huckster, it surely still must have been something of a letdown.

Nevertheless, that had been his Hail Mary play, not his only plan to deal with his approaching mortality.

Even before he had set out on his half-decade-long Quarasmian odyssey of destruction and conquest,

Jenghis had made arrangements for his eventual departure and the succession that would guarantee

a future for his empire, his life's work, his dream.

This was, in fact, something of an oddity in Mongolian culture, since there were strong taboos against even the mention or

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