The canonical modern-Mongolian rendering, and the source the Mongolian summaries are written against: all 282 sections, numbering identical to de Rachewiltz. IN COPYRIGHT: Damdinsüren died 1986 and Mongolia protects for life + 50, so the text is protected until 31 December 2036. Read and cited here; NOT reproduced. It also supplies the Mongolian naming and register the summaries use.
derachewiltz-2004
Igor de Rachewiltz (tr., comm.), The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols (Brill, 2004; 3rd impression with addenda 2006).
The standard scholarly edition, and the reason it is here: volume II is a commentary that argues the geography section by section. IN COPYRIGHT: cited, never reproduced. The open 2015 shorter version (ed. John C. Street) is CC BY-NC-ND and is the one linked from /shm.
rubruck-itinerarium
William of Rubruck, Itinerarium (1253–55). Cite by chapter. Consulted in W. W. Rockhill trans., The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World (Hakluyt Society, 1900): public domain; Peter Jackson, The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck (Hakluyt Society, 1990) is the scholarly standard.
A Franciscan who was at Batu’s camp and Möngke’s court in 1253–55, inside this chapter’s window, and who wrote down where things stood inside a ger. Everything the entry sequence shows in the interior is his: the door to the south and the master’s couch on the north, the women’s side east and the men’s west, the felt images over the heads of the house, the bench with a skin of milk in the entry, and the coffer of woven twigs under a turtle-back and black felt with a little doorway in its front end. The CHEST is no longer his: a painted wooden авдар stands there now, which is a later form, so the caption on screen carries the object’s date rather than his name. The couch he places on the north side and the three felt images above it are described here and are not shown. The two images he places beside the entry are described and NOT shown, because their distinguishing detail cannot be rendered at that size without inventing the rest of them.
secret-history
Монголын нууц товчоо / The Secret History of the Mongols, 282 sections. Cite by § number, never by page: pagination differs across every edition.
The primary source for 1162–1227 and the single most important text behind this chapter. See translations below: no English or Mongolian edition may be redistributed, so the site ships original summaries keyed to § numbers.
Mongolian, primary. The solar-electrification programme itself: 2000–2010, households paying half up front and half on lease, with «радио, телевиз» named among the loads it was meant to carry. This is why a herding household has a television at all.
A dated photograph of an ordinary herder household, and the reference the bed is built from: a low timber platform on short square legs, a painted авдар at the head doing the work of a headboard, a хивс hung on the хана with a crocheted valance, and the бүтээлэг spread flat with no pillow or quilt in sight.
Эрдэм шинжилгээ / Academic
Peer-reviewed or scholarly-monograph. The preferred anchor for any factual claim.
atwood-2004
Atwood, C. P., Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire (Facts on File, 2004).
The chronological spine of the whole corpus, cited about twenty times WITHOUT page numbers. the project research flags this as outstanding verification debt, and it remains outstanding.
Establishes that the covenant happened; does not establish where. Cited on the Baljuna entry, which carries no coordinate for that reason.
derachewiltz-1997
Igor de Rachewiltz, "Searching for Činggis Qan: Notes and Comments on Historic Sites in Xentiǐ Aǐmag, Northern Mongolia", Rivista degli Studi Orientali 71 (1997).
The specialist study of exactly the ground this chapter opens on: the Khentii sites: Burkhan Khaldun, Deluun Boldog, the Onon and Kherlen camps. Consulted for which identifications carry scholarly weight and which are local tradition.
dicosmo-2009
Di Cosmo, N., "The Qing and Inner Asia: 1636–1800", in Di Cosmo, Frank & Golden (eds.), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (CUP, 2009).
dicosmo-2011
Di Cosmo, N., "Ethnogenesis, Coevolution and Political Morphology of the Earliest Steppe Empire: the Xiongnu Question Revisited", in Brosseder & Miller (eds.), Xiongnu Archaeology (Bonn, 2011), pp. 35–48.
fenner-2020
Fenner, J. N., Delgermaa, L., Piper, P. J., Wood, R. and Stuart-Williams, H., "The Aurag Palace of Genghis Khan: a radiocarbon chronology", Archaeological Research in Asia (2020).
Radiocarbon work at the Avarga/Aurag site in Delgerkhaan, Khentii. Reads the site as Chinggis’s winter base camp rather than a capital, which is why the entry no longer calls it one.
franke-1990
Franke, H., "The forest peoples of Manchuria: Kitans and Jurchens", in Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (CUP, 1990), pp. 400–423.
Давыдова А. В., «Иволгинский комплекс (городище и могильник) — памятник хунну в Забайкалье» (Ленинград: ЛГУ, 1985). English: Davydova, "The Ivolga Gorodishche", Acta Orientalia Hungarica 20 (1968), 209–45.
Cited by the relay roads (ortoo.json), not by an era file. Archival and field study of the Khüree to Khiagt road: eleven named stations, 301.34 km measured in 2025, a mean spacing of 26.38 km. The accessible abstract gives the names and the lengths and no coordinates; the positions are in the paper's own tables, which this project has not seen. One of a series by the same author in the same journal on the Darkhan uul trade road (XXIV, 2023), the Darkhan to Argal road (XXIII, 2022), the Günj road (XXV, 2024) and the official posts south of Khüree (XXII, 2021).
shim-2022
Shim, H., "The Jam System", in The Mongol World, ed. T. May and M. Hope (Routledge, 2022), ch. 30.
Cited by the relay roads (ortoo.json) for the three roads between Daidu and Karakorum under the Yuan and for the shape of the jam as an institution. Names no station inside Mongolia and locates none, which is why the road is drawn as a line between its two ends.
Mongolian. The hearth’s change in a scholar’s own words: the open fire on a тулга was universal inside the felt ger, «эцсийн үед … хөдөө, хотгүй, цөм төмөр зуух, яндан (хулан)-тай болсон». Also dates the low floor table «30 см хэртэй өндөр, 80 см талтай дөрвөлжин» with matching backless исэр stools as a late addition. Содном died in 1979, so his "recent times" is the mid-20th century at the latest. A blog republication of a mid-century scholar; the print original has not been read.
Лавлах / Reference
Edited reference work or lexical authority. Fine for dates; cite alongside academic work.
Used for one thing: what the сүлд at the entry is made of and how many there were. It calls the surviving examples “horse-hair battle standards” and records that NINE of them are held at the Khural, which is what corrected this project's own gloss. The entry described “the nine-tailed white standard” and modelled nine tails on one pole; «есөн хөлт» is nine legs, nine standards. Popular accounts also say yak tail rather than horse; that disagreement is left standing rather than resolved, and nothing in the model turns on it.
A Mongolian-language lexical authority: one of only two Mongolian sources in the whole corpus. the project research records that the source base is otherwise Anglophone.
The Mongolian reference entry for Kebineng, which dates his assassination to 235 and the Xianbei state 151–235; the anchor for the period's end year, where the English Wikipedia convention says 234.
Mongolian, lexical. The line the dictionary itself draws: тулга is the trivet for «задгай гал», an open fire, glossed «ил зуух»; зуух is the thing you burn a fire INSIDE. Also мухар сандал (backless), түшлэгтэй сандал (with a back), исэр (the ger’s backless stool), явган ширээ (the low table). It also records that «бойлуур» and «түдэн» are not words.
Mongolian. The quadrant inventory, verbatim: the host’s bed on the west with the chest of his fine things «орны толгойн талд», at the head; the hostess’s on the east with «эзэгтэйн орны хөлийн авдар» at the foot and the sewing chest at the head. The order of the east list, running from the door to the хоймор, is what puts the head north.
Заавар (эх сурвалж биш) / Leads, not citations
An index INTO the literature, never a factual anchor. Wikipedia and Britannica sit here.
Travel notes along the northern stations of the tea road, tying several of them to present-day places (Kharaa gol to Züün Kharaa, Örmögtei to railway post 42 on the Sharyn gol, Khüiten gol to the old Darkhan sum centre). A lead: it identifies localities, not coordinates, and it is journalism citing an unpublished survey.
Mongolian. The one consulted page that separates the older arrangement, «хоймор болон баганын хоёр талаар эсгий ширдэг дэвсдэг байв», from the later furnished one with a bed on each side.
Mongolian. The symbolism of the frame: тооно as the head, унь as the sun’s rays, хана as the ribs, багана as the world’s axis («баганыг түших цээрэгддэг»), and the two sides’ contents.
Mongolian. «Гэрийн хойморт нар их үдэд 12 цаг тусдаг»; the master sits at the хоймор and seats the honoured guest there; the sides’ contents in the source’s own list.
Mongolian, the national heritage centre. «Ширмэл ширдэг дэвсэх, тохирсон тавилга тавих» ёс; the хоймор as the master’s seat, west for the men, east for the women; the ger craft inscribed by UNESCO in 2013.
Mongolian. «XVI зуунаас одоогийн Монгол гэрийн хэлбэрт шилжсэн»: the present form of the ger from the sixteenth century, which is the horizon the register’s 1600 bracket rests on.
Mongolian. The frame with its numbers: the унь of a five-хана ger 2 to 2.5 m, the багана one and a half times the door’s height, the туурга 9 m at the hem and 7.5 at the throat, the чагтага of camel wool, and the types of тооно, хаалга and хана by name.
Mongolian. The three crowns of the 19th to 20th century Khalkha ger, «хэлхээ буюу сархинаг, сараалжин буюу цамхраа, хорол буюу хүрдтэй тооно», and the name: the part fixed with a wooden ring round the centre is the хүрд or хорол, «голыг тойруулан модон цагирагаар бэхэлсэн тэр хэсгийг хүрд буюу хорол гэж нэрлэснээс тийнхүү хүрдтэй тооно гэгдэх болжээ».
Mongolian. The dictionary’s definition, «монгол гэрийн унийг тогтоож байдаг, цамхаг бүхий дугуй цагариг», and the crown’s named parts: тоононы хүрээ, тоононы хорол, тоононы даага; among its types the хүрдтэй тооно.
Mongolian. The engineer who ran the programme: herders had candles and lamps before 1999, the subsidised kits were 50 W, «телевиз үзэх боломжтой болсон», and today a colour set with a fridge needs 500–600 W. Also that old car batteries are commonly wired into the household system.
Хориглосон / Not used as factual anchors
Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World: Popular history. The project rules bar it as a factual anchor (HISTORY.md §1).
John Man's books: Popular. His "first recorded attempted genocide" framing of the Tangut destruction needs academic corroboration before any use.
Өгөгдлийн сан / Datasets
cliopatria
Historical territory polygons: every era boundary in this project
Seshat Global History Databank, Cliopatria (Nature Scientific Data, 2025).
CC-BY-4.0DOI 10.5281/zenodo.14714684
Expert-reviewed, year-sliced. Nomadic-area borders are drawn conservatively and every pre-modern polygon stays flagged approximate.
natural-earth
Present-day coastline, countries, lakes and rivers
composite of public-domain and open-licensed national DEMs; no NC or ND source involved
The full required attribution string is reproduced verbatim in the terrain notes. Within this extent the contributing sources are SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1 and EU-DEM.
resolve-ecoregions
Biome classification: the land-cover mask
Dinerstein et al., "An Ecoregion-Based Approach to Protecting Half the Terrestrial Realm", BioScience 67 (2017); RESOLVE Ecoregions 2017, served by UNEP-WCMC.
CC-BY-4.0
Licence read from the data's own `license` field, not inferred.
koppen-geiger
Climate classification: gap-filler for the biome mask (4.5% of the grid)
Beck, H. E. et al., "High-resolution (1 km) Köppen-Geiger maps for 1901–2099 based on constrained CMIP6 projections", Scientific Data 10, 724 (2023).
CC BY 4.0DOI 10.6084/m9.figshare.21789074.v2
The 1901–1930 period is used: the earliest available, and the closest to a pre-industrial baseline.
pederson-2014
The 1211–1225 pluvial variant of the biome mask
Pederson, N., Hessl, A. E., Baatarbileg, N., Anchukaitis, K. J., Di Cosmo, N., "Pluvials, droughts, the Mongol Empire, and modern Mongolia", PNAS 111:4375 (2014).
undefined
Fifteen consecutive above-average moisture years in central Mongolia, "unprecedented over the last 1,112 y". The authors present the grassland-productivity link as a HYPOTHESIS and as one factor among many. The raster variant is speculative and labelled so.
Орчуулгын эрх / Translation licensing
No translation of the Secret History is redistributed by this project. Every English or Mongolian edition that exists is in copyright, and there is no public-domain English rendering. The site ships ORIGINAL summaries keyed to § numbers and links out for the text.
Маргаантай / Contested
Where specialists disagree, the disagreement is shown rather than resolved in the site's favour.
birth-year
Chinggis Khan's birth year
1162, official Mongolian commemoration; used by this site
1155, the Rashīd al-Dīn tradition
1167, some scholars, including Pelliot
The data uses "c. 1162" and carries the note. Never state it bare.
death-tolls
Deaths caused by the Mongol conquests
40–60 million, the popular figure; traces to McEvedy & Jones 1978, a single criticized source
Chinese registered population ~120M → ~60M, attributed by Mote largely to administrative collapse and by Durand to incomplete censuses
800,000 at Baghdad (Mustawfi); 700,000 at Merv (Ibn al-Athir), medieval chroniclers; considered exaggerated even by scholars who argue for demographic catastrophe
Ranges only, with the "estimates contested" flag. Never a single death-toll number, anywhere.
ikh-zasag
Whether the Ikh Zasag (jasaq) was a fixed written legal code
no unified written code ever existed, Morgan 1986
an evolving body of decrees, precedents and taboos, Atwood 2004, summarizing the debate
Present it as a legal TRADITION; flag "written code" claims as contested.
empire-area
The extent of the empire: shapes and areas disagree
Cliopatria 1260–71 outline measures ~25.8 M km², Seshat, expert-reviewed
~20 M km² at 1260, Taagepera 1997
"24 M km² in 1279", popular claim; Taagepera actually gives 22 M (1280), 23.5 M (1294), max 24 M at 1309, and by then it is four already-split realms
Both are cited; neither is silently preferred. They measure different things. The territory anchors each carry an areaNote stating the gap.
shm-composition-date
When the Secret History was completed
1228, de Rachewiltz
1240, Damdinsüren, who renders §282 as «хулгана жилийн (1240)»
later, a minority
§282 names a Rat year and a month but no cycle. The two principal editions this project reads date it differently, and both are shown.
baljuna
Where the Baljuna Covenant was sworn
near the Khalkhyn Gol
a tributary of the Ingoda
Lake Balzino, Buryatia
Unresolved. The coordinate is an approximation and must carry confidence: speculative.
mount-naqu
Where Chakirmaut / Mount Naqu is
the Altai foothills
the Khangai slopes
Not securely located. The map position is an approximation.
birthplace
Where Delüün Boldog is
Dadal sum, Khentii, Mongolian tradition
Binder, some scholarship
Marked contested in the data; the coordinate is approximate.
burial
Where Chinggis Khan is buried
unknown
The site is unknown and this chapter points at nothing. The Secret History records the death in a single clause (§268) and gives no place, no cause and no rite.
Зураг / Images
Each image carries credit, licence and sourceUrl in the era file that references it, and all are shown in the interface rather than buried. Licences: 12 public domain, 5 CC0, 4 CC BY-SA 4.0, 4 CC BY-SA 3.0, and one each of CC BY 4.0, CC BY 2.0, CC BY-SA 2.5, CC BY-SA 2.0. All 29 sourceUrls are Wikimedia Commons file pages. Only PD / CC0 / CC-BY / CC-BY-SA is permitted.
Seven credits were corrected on 2026-08-03 against the Commons file pages. One was a licence-condition failure rather than a typo: a CC BY-SA 3.0 photograph by Fan111 was credited to "Wikimedia Commons": the host, not the author.
