The legendary conqueror Genghis Khan (Chinggis Khaan) laid the foundations of the Mongol Empire and remains one of the seminal figures in world history. Born under the name "Temüjin" as the son of a local chieftain on the Asian steppe in the historical land of Mongolia, he would rise to prominence by uniting the feuding Mongolian tribes into a unifying fighting force that conquered the largest contiguous land empire in history. These accomplishments earned Temüjin the title of Genghis Khan - the "universal ruler."

While his name today is rightly synonymous with bloody conquest, Genghis Khan, whose impressive equestrian statue stands today in Ulaanbaatar, is honored by the people of Mongolia for his leadership, innovation, and religious toleration.

However, the location of his final resting place has remained one of history's greatest mysteries. Despite centuries of speculation, the exact burial site of the founder of the Mongol Empire has never been discovered. While many theories have been proposed, the consensus points to a site near the sacred Burkhan Khaldun mountain in northeastern Mongolia.

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The Death Of The Great Khan

The trail of historical clues starts with the medieval chronicles

Genghis Khan statue in Mongolia

Despite his conquests, Genghis Khan was a mortal man. He met his death in August 1227. For centuries, the exact nature of khan's death was uncertain until new historical sources became available to scholars.

Author

Text

Date

Anonymous

The Secret History of the Mongols

1228?

Marco Polo

The Travels of Marco Polo

Circa 1300

Rashid ad-Din

The Successors of Genghis Khan

Early 1300s

The Venetian merchant and traveler Marco Polo recorded one version of the event. Polo, who traveled through the Mongol Empire in the late 13th century and met Genghis' grandson Kublai Khan, related that Genghis Khan died in battle at a place known as Thaigin. Polo wrote, "he was struck by an arrow in the knee, and, dying of the wound, was buried in the mountain of Altai."

Another version of the great Khan's demise comes from the 13th-century Persian historian Rashid ad-Din Hamadani. He recorded that Genghis died "when a disease overtook him in the land of the Tangqut," a region of northern China.

However, the most historically credible source is the Secret History of the Mongols, a historical work written by an unknown Mongolian in the years following Genghis' death. This source was unavailable to Western historians until English and other European languages were translated in the 20th century.

Early 15th-century miniature of Genghis Khan advising his sons on his deathbed, taken from Marco Polo's section of the Livre des merveilles manuscript.

The work's author relates that Genghis Khan fell from his horse during a hunting accident while the Mongols were preparing a military campaign against the people of Tangqut. The khan did not immediately succumb to his injuries and was brought to his tent, where he continued to issue orders to his army as he languished over the following weeks. Finally, death overtook him. As the author of The Secret History recorded, "In the Year of the Pig, he rose to Heaven."

The Legend Takes Root

Separating fact from fiction has taken generations

Rumors and speculation about the exact location of Genghis Khan's burial have persisted for centuries, as early sources like the Secret History are silent. Marco Polo provided possibly the earliest theory on Genghis' burial. He wrote that all the great Khans are buried in the Mongolian Altai Mountains, one of the world's undiscovered ranges:

It has been an invariable custom that all the grand khans and chiefs of the race of Genghis Khan, should be carried for interment to a certain lofty mountain named Altai, and in whatever place they may happen to die, although it should be at the distance of a hundred days' journey, they are nevertheless conveyed thither.

Polo also added some grizzly details to his account, alleging that the Mongols, as they transported the body of a deceased khan for burial, would kill anyone they encountered on the route, "upwards of twenty thousand persons who fell in their way."

Polo's accounts should not be taken at face value. Serious historians have long dismissed many of Polo's stories as fiction. For example, Polo also related that Genghis Khan had waged war against the kingdom of the legendary Prester John.

Nonetheless, Marco Polo's tall tale about the burial of the great Khans would develop into a legend in its own right, reminiscent of tales told about royal burials, such as the curse on the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun or rumors of booby traps in the unopened tomb of China's Qin Shi Huang.

As the legend developed over the centuries, it was said that Genghis Khan had been buried in an elaborate tomb with great riches and that, to keep the location a secret, everyone who had been involved in the tomb's construction was killed. Another legend states that disturbing the tomb of Genghis Khan will herald the end of the world.

The truth, however, is not as dramatic!

Leading experts narrow in on the lost tomb

Theories abound about the location of the khan's burial, but hard evidence is key

Many modern scholars reject Marco Polo's theory that Genghis Khan was buried in the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia and instead point to the Khentii Mountains of eastern Mongolia. The leading theory is that the great khan was buried near the sacred mountain of Burkhan Khaldun in the Khentii range.

Reexamining the historical sources clarifies why modern scholars have reached this conclusion. While the Secret History of the Mongols is silent about where the great Khan is buried, the work frequently mentions the young Temüjin visiting and circling Burkhan Khaldun during his rise to power.

The mountain was considered sacred to his people. The Secret History even quotes Genghis Khan praising the mountain: "Every morning I shall sacrifice to Burkhan Khaldun, and every day I will pray to it."

Close

Countless adventurers, ranging from legitimate archaeologists to would-be grave robbers, have tried in vain to locate the burial place of Genghis Khan over the centuries. The problem is compounded by the uncertainty of which exact peak in the Khentii Mountains might have been the sacred Burkhan Khaldun of Genghis' time. Beginning in the 2010s, scholars have applied modern techniques to try and finally solve the mystery.

In the late 2000s, Albert Yu-Min Lin, Ph.D., an engineer at UC San Diego, developed an innovative method for finding the lost burial site: crowdsourcing. Using satellite imagery available online, Lin relied on, as he wrote in a 2014 paper to PLOS One, "online volunteer participation to generate human identifications of unknown anomalies within massive volumes of geospatial remote sensing data."

Lin's brilliant strategy was to turn to an online volunteer army of citizen scientists who could identify and catalog anomalies and other features in the satellite images taken over remote regions of Mongolia. With the help of National Geographic, Lin's team later traveled to Mongolia to "ground truth" some of the sites identified by citizen scientists.

While Lin's team did not have permits to excavate, they confirmed that many of the identified locations were genuine archaeological sites by examining surface features and using ground-penetrating radar. These sites ranged in antiquity from the Bronze Age to the 13th century (Genghis' time). While Lin was ultimately unsuccessful in locating the tomb, his innovative approach demonstrated that the search for Genghis Khan's final resting place was far from over.