Death of Genghis Khan (1227) and the Mystery of His Tomb

Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire, died in August 1227 while his armies were completing the destruction of the Tangut kingdom of Western Xia in north-western China. His death at roughly 65 came at the height of his power, but its cause is uncertain and the location of his grave remains one of the best-known unsolved puzzles of medieval history. The succession he had arranged held firm, and his empire continued to grow under his sons and grandsons.

Background: the war against Western Xia

Western Xia was a kingdom of the Tangut people, centred on the upper Yellow River in what is now Ningxia, Gansu and Inner Mongolia. Its capital, Zhongxing, stood near modern Yinchuan. The Mongols had raided it several times from 1205 onwards, and in 1210 its ruler submitted as a vassal, promising tribute and troops. (For the kingdom’s earlier history, see Western Xia.)

That arrangement broke down when Genghis Khan prepared his great campaign against Khwarazm in Central Asia. According to the Secret History of the Mongols, the Tangut court refused to send soldiers, and a minister named Asha Gambu answered the khan’s envoys with an insult: if Genghis lacked the strength for the war, he should not call himself khan. Genghis postponed his revenge while he fought the Mongol conquest of the Khwarazmian Empire, but he did not forget it.

After returning to Mongolia in 1225, he learned that Western Xia had also been negotiating with the Jin dynasty of northern China, the Mongols’ main remaining enemy in the east. In 1226 he led a large army south against the Tanguts in what would be his last campaign.

The final campaign, 1226-1227

The Mongols advanced through the Gansu corridor, taking the cities of Ganzhou, Suzhou and Liangzhou during 1226. In the winter of 1226-1227 they defeated a major Tangut army near the Yellow River and then laid siege to Zhongxing. While the siege went on, Mongol forces also raided Jin territory to the south and east.

The Secret History records that during that winter Genghis Khan went hunting wild horses at a place called Arbuqa. His horse shied, he fell, and he was taken ill with a high fever. His family and commanders urged him to withdraw and return later, but he refused, saying the Tanguts would think him afraid. The campaign continued into 1227.

In the summer of 1227 Chinese sources place the khan in the cooler region of the Liupan Mountains, on the border of present-day Ningxia and Gansu. His condition worsened, and he died in the seventh lunar month of the year, in August 1227. The date most often quoted is 18 August, though some reckonings of the Chinese record give about a week later. The precise place of death is disputed.

The fall of Western Xia

Before he died, Genghis Khan is said to have ordered that his death be kept secret so that the enemy would not take heart, and that the Tangut ruler and his people be dealt with harshly. The last Western Xia ruler, Li Xian, surrendered Zhongxing shortly afterwards, apparently unaware of the khan’s death. He was executed, and the Mongols killed large numbers of the city’s inhabitants.

The Western Xia state, which had existed for nearly two centuries, came to an end. Much of its written history was lost, and the Tangut language was later almost forgotten. The scale of the killing cannot be measured reliably, but the destruction was severe enough to be remembered in both Chinese and Persian sources.

How did he die? Competing accounts

The sources do not agree on the cause of death, and none of them was written by an eyewitness at his bedside.

• The Secret History of the Mongols, the main Mongol account, links his decline to the fall from his horse and the fever that followed.
• Rashid al-Din, the Persian historian who wrote for the Mongol rulers of Iran around 1300, describes an illness during the campaign without a dramatic cause.
• The Yuan shi, the official history of the Mongol Yuan dynasty compiled in the 14th century, also reports that he fell ill and died.
• Western travellers heard other stories. Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, who visited the Mongols in the 1240s, reported that he was struck by lightning, and Marco Polo later wrote that he died of an arrow wound in the knee.

Modern writers have suggested internal injuries from the fall, an infection such as typhus, or malaria, but these are guesses. Given his age and decades of hard campaigning, a fatal illness needs no special explanation.

Burial and the secret grave

Genghis Khan’s body was carried back to Mongolia. Rashid al-Din states that he was buried in a forbidden area in the Mongol homeland, at a spot he had chosen himself, and later sources connect the grave with the sacred mountain Burkhan Khaldun in the Khentii range of north-eastern Mongolia. This was the region where he had grown up and where, according to the Secret History, he had once hidden from his enemies.

The burial ground became part of a closed zone known as the Great Taboo (Ikh Khorig), guarded for generations and off limits to ordinary people. Several of his descendants, including later Great Khans, were reportedly buried in the same area. The grave was not marked by a monument, and its exact location seems to have been forgotten over the following centuries.

Famous details of the funeral are much less certain. Marco Polo wrote that the escorts of a dead khan’s funeral procession killed everyone they met on the road, but he was describing later funerals, from hearsay, and gave figures that cannot be checked. Stories that horses trampled the grave flat, that a forest was allowed to grow over it, or that a river was diverted across it appear in later tradition and are not confirmed by contemporary sources.

The search for the tomb

Interest in finding the grave grew after Mongolia’s democratic transition in 1990. A joint Japanese-Mongolian project known as Gurvan Gol surveyed the Khentii region in the early 1990s. Later expeditions explored walled sites and burial grounds in the same area, and in the early 2000s Japanese and Mongolian archaeologists excavated the site of Avraga, believed to be an early Mongol palace or camp linked to Genghis Khan, and suggested his grave might lie nearby.

From 2009 the Valley of the Khans project, led from the University of California, San Diego, used satellite images and thousands of online volunteers to look for possible sites without excavation. None of these efforts has produced a confirmed tomb.

Many Mongolians regard the grave as sacred and believe it should not be disturbed, and the Mongolian government has restricted digging. In 2015 Burkhan Khaldun and its surrounding landscape were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for their sacred role in Mongolian tradition, though not as a confirmed burial place.

Succession and legacy

Genghis Khan had settled the succession before the Khwarazm campaign. His eldest son Jochi, whose legitimacy had been questioned, died around the same time as his father, probably in 1225 or 1227. Genghis named his third son, Ögedei, as his heir, judging him the most able to keep the family united. His youngest son, Tolui, acted as regent until a kurultai, or great assembly, formally elected Ögedei as Great Khan in 1229.

Under Ögedei the Mongols completed the conquest of the Jin dynasty, built a capital at Karakorum and launched campaigns into Russia and Central Europe. The empire that Genghis had founded at the kurultai of 1206 eventually stretched from Korea to eastern Europe.

His memory became the centre of a religious cult. The Eight White Tents, portable shrines holding relics associated with him, were tended by a hereditary group called the Darkhad and moved with them for centuries. Since the 1950s they have been kept at the Mausoleum of Genghis Khan in Ejin Horo Banner, near Ordos in Inner Mongolia, a memorial that contains no body.

Timeline

• 1210: Western Xia submits to the Mongols as a vassal.
• 1219: The Tangut court refuses to send troops for the war against Khwarazm.
• 1225: Genghis Khan returns to Mongolia from Central Asia.
• 1226: The Mongols invade Western Xia and take Ganzhou, Suzhou and Liangzhou.
• 1226-1227, winter: Genghis Khan falls from his horse while hunting; the siege of Zhongxing begins.
• 1227, August: Genghis Khan dies, traditionally on 18 August.
• 1227, shortly after: Li Xian surrenders and is executed; Western Xia ends.
• 1229: A kurultai elects Ögedei as Great Khan.
• 2015: Burkhan Khaldun is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

Genghis Khan’s death did not break the Mongol Empire, which shows how firmly he had built its institutions and family succession. It sealed the end of Western Xia and opened the reign of Ögedei, under whom the conquests reached Europe. The unknown grave also keeps him in public imagination and remains a sensitive question of heritage and respect in Mongolia today.