The Beatles never went to Mongolia.

Mongolia was a socialist regime in those days, and pop music from the western world was considered a danger to society. You could be thrown in jail for being a fan, and for owning or selling Beatles recordings and paraphernalia.

In Ulaan Baatar last June, a Mongolian friend surprised me when, arranging a place and time to meet, he said, “Let’s meet by the Beatles statue.”  Beatles statue?

Yes, just in front of the State Department Store, the fanciest store in town, there’s a street extending south with a wide pedestrian mall in the middle.  Just past the oversized inflatable pool with kids riding paddle boats in it, there’s a guitar-shaped wall with the Beatles in bronze, life size. 

(Pictured right: Namuul, our cook, sang for us in a reindeer villager’s teepee.)

The Beatles are an icon of freedom to the Mongols. Our guide, Tulga, said he remembered memorizing Beatles songs as a teenager, and secretly singing them with his guitar in a stairwell where he would not be heard. Talking about the socialist era, he said “We were like North Korea is now.” Wow, I had no idea it was that bad.

(Graduation day, Ulaan Baatar)

(In this photo, the young shaman prepares to start his ritual.)

I counted three wolf skins on the floor and a couple of fox. The young shaman wore a robe of black leather with dangling leather cords and bells all over, and a headdress of black eagle feathers with more leather cords covering his face. He drummed and chanted with the drum held close to his head, and seemed to listen a long while for something in the drum’s voice. He howled like a wolf and snorted, and then spoke to us in a spirit voice. He quizzed me about the question I had brought to him, and gave me a few words of counsel. Then he concluded the ceremony quickly.

It turned out that on the spur of the moent his master shaman had invited us all to attend a ceremony he was performing that night. We jumped into a couple of cars and set out through the rainy night into a rough part of the city. We splashed through potholes on the dirt streets, past low buildings and gers (yurts), and stopped at a wooden house to climb some steep stairs and squeeze into a small room with an altar at the front. We were lucky to find a spot where we could sit on a rolled up carpet with our backs against the wall. By the time things got started, the room was packed. The majority were young women.

The master shaman, who appeared to be in his late thirties, pulled on a robe of dark red with black strips and small bells all over it. HIs headdress had black eagle feathers standing upright, like the other shaman headdresses we’ve seen. He began by drumming and chanting to call the spirits, while all of us listeners sat with our hands open, palms up, signaling a receptive state. When the spirits came, we all stood while he greeted them. For the rest of the ceremony we sat on the floor and he sat before us on a low stool with the altar behind him. Before long, my knees ached and my back was sore, but I kept still because I didn’t want to miss a minute of what was unfolding in front of me.

Our young shaman knelt at the master shaman’s side as interpreter, because when the spirits came to him, the master shaman spoke in an obscure old dialect that was unintelligible to most the people in the room. So we depended on two interpreters to understand what the shaman said: the young shaman to translate into modern Mongolian, and our guide Tulga to put it into English. But Tulga sat with the men along the left wall, separate from the women, so we watched and listened through the night and Tulga told us later what we had seen. 

When the master invited us to the ceremony, he said he only expected two or three others to be there. But at least twenty people showed up, asking for help. News travels fast in the city, thanks to the cell phones everyone carries. It gave us a glimpse of the active network of followers that can grow around a powerful master shaman. 

One by one, each person in the room came forward to kneel before the shaman, to ask for counsel or healing. Almost all of the people there were shamans in their own right, his disciples and proteges. One woman was planning to do a big ceremony at her home in the country, and asked for counsel on the best location and timing for the event. Others asked for help with personal and health issues.

A woman who was not a shaman had come because of a liver complaint condition. The shaman told her husband, who had come with her, that he should go to his ancestral home and consult the spirits of his ancestors. He made the woman lie on her back, and he passed his hands over her abdomen, probing and pressing, talking to her all the while. This was something I’d never seen a shaman do. It turned out he is an energy healer, and before the night was out he treated several people that way. Meanwhile, we sat squeezed in on the carpet with our knees drawn up to make room for the people coming for help from the shaman, not imagining that we would each kneel at the shaman’s feet before the night was out.

(Morley poses with with young women wearing traditional Mongolian clothing.)

After 12 days in Hovsgol Province, we flew back to Ulaan Baatar, left our bags at the hotel, and went walking through the city. We came to Sukhbaatar Square, the city’s central plaza, just as the national university graduation ceremonies ended, right there in the square. We couldn’t have come at a better time. The place was crowded with graduates dressed in their best, with their families from all over Mongolia. We plunged right into the crowd.
 
Many of the young women wore modern adaptations of traditional Mongolian clothing in bright silks, with super high heels. The colors were dazzling, and in many cases the effect was sexy and slinky. Some of the guys wore traditional clothing, but without the modern twist. It was fun to see the men’s hats, which stand up in a point on top, and I think Mongolian men look very manly in their traditional “deel” coats sashed low across the hips.

Groups were posing and everyone was taking pictures, so all we had to do was crowd in with the folks pointing cameras, and we got some great group shots. Morley had learned a word for “pretty,” “horhoon,” and so, combining that with English and sign language, she got several people to have their picture taken with her. People are so friendly and welcoming here, and if you take a photo and then show it to them on your camera screen, they respond with smiles and laughter.

Just about everyone who comes to Ulaan Baatar visits Sukhbaatar Square, and for good reason. It seems like there were big events happening there every day. At one end of the square is the parliament building with a huge statue of Chingghis Khan seated on a throne. It’s lit up with blue lights at night, and it always has people taking pictures of each other at the Khan’s feet, day or night. 

The square is named for General Sukhbaatar who led the 1921 revolution which freed Mongolia from Chinese control — although China held onto the southern region, which is now the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. Sukhbaatar’s statue stands at the center of the square, supposedly on the spot where his horse urinated during a ceremony on July 8, 1921. This was considered a good omen, and someone took the care to mark the spot, although the statue wasn’t made until many years later. (I learned this from Wikipedia, and haven’t confirmed it yet with any of my Mongolian friends…) I love the statue: a heroic warrior on a heroic horse.

As a visitor to Mongolia, it’s important to understand about Chinggis Khan. We know him as Genghis Khan, the cruel and terrible warrior who destroyed whole cities in eastern Europe and the Middle East. But in Mongolia he’s like George Washington, the father of their nation who united the Mongol tribes and was an enlightened ruler. I guess people’s point of view depends on which history book they learn from. Just think of Alexander the Great, who we’re taught was a great hero and brilliant general who extended his empire all the way into India. But if you could see history through the eyes of the people he conquered, he might look more the way Chinggis Khan does to us.

Now young Mongolians are studying tourism and mining, engineering, and international relations. They start learning English in grade school, and many of them know several languages. Mongolia has its share of difficult problems—how to develop their resources without polluting or destroying the land, how to balance the surrounding international powers, how to modernize without losing their traditions—but I think it’s an exciting time to be a young Mongolian.