The Math of Khan
There’s a good article in this week’s Economist about Mongolia’s dispute with China over which of the two peoples are the true heirs of Genghis Khan:
In a country of only 2.7m people scattered over an area four times the size of Germany, national heroes are few and far between. This makes it all the more galling that Genghis is claimed by China too. Unlike the Russians, the Chinese have got round their subjugation by the Mongols by insisting he was one of their own. Genghis’s grandson, Kublai Khan, founded China’s Yuan dynasty in the 13th century. That, in China’s view, makes Genghis himself an honorary Chinese emperor.
The dispute was apparently sparked by a new Genghis Khan theme park. Is it possible that Khan is viewed differently over there than he is over here?
Anyway, what drew me to this article was that it reminded me of a study published a few years ago, also concerned with the legacy of Genghis Khan:
An international group of geneticists studying Y-chromosome data have found that nearly 8 percent of the men living in the region of the former Mongol empire carry y-chromosomes that are nearly identical. That translates to 0.5 percent of the male population in the world, or roughly 16 million descendants living today.
16 million descendants. And that’s only men descended from Khan directly through the male line, father to son, for the past 800 years. The total number of Khan’s descendants living today is truly incalculable.
So, China and Mongolia should probably stop arguing over which of their people are the true heirs of Genghis Khan. My guess is, almost all of them are.