The Bogd Khan’s Ger

This beautiful ger, or yurt as the Russians would say, may be the only evil building I have ever seen. The Bogd Khan was the last king- emperor of a great  Buddhist people, the Mongols.He was blind and fat in his elder years, and was said to have had  an appetite for very young girls AND boys.  His ger, in a room in his palace, stands a little ger  made not  of wool but from 150 to 500 snow leopard skins, more perhaps than exist alive today. Its room is kept completely dark. Then, they were ashamed of it and kept it in the dark, both because it preserved it and because it was evil. I’m the only person I know to see it. The number of the skins  sounds crazy but you should see the furnishings inside. Everything was made from snow leopard bones and hides including the utensils and beds. I wonder if he was influenced by his friend, Baron von Ungern-Sternburg, the insane white baron who came from the Balkans to reign in terror over Ulaan Bataar and Urgaa for a number of years. Among many other atrocities, he burned Jews and Chinese alive so they would reincarnate into higher forms. Some Buddhist! We have reliable testimony from some of his staff. These were common practices.

We were spared his second Mongol invasion from the west when a  wandering Bolshevik patrol  picked Ungren-Sternburg up while traveling west of Urga. His protege, the Bogd Khan, died in bed. AFAIK his only major relic is the ger . I saw it in his magnificent palace in 2001 because I didn’t know any better — that is, I offered to bribe the caretaker. And for years, my pictures are the only ones on the internet. And what did I pay the caretaker? A bottle of the good, “expensive”,  Smirnoff instead of the cheap Russian Stoli.

Now the US is offering $15,000 to repair it. I figure what they should do is expose the leopard skins on some mountain top and release the spirits of the leopards. and spend the money on snow leopard conservation.