Free The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer Page A

bearing silks, drugs and teas; trappers hawked furs that would eventually be sold for a thousand times their initial price when they reached Moscow or London; fortune-tellers cast oracle bones on the street to determine the fates of young nobles.
    It was a trading city, where Mongols, Chinese and Russians met to exchange goods worth over a million dollars a year. Its Chinese and Russian enclaves were well established, almost entirely separate from the Mongolian one. Urga lay at the centre of the Tea Road, the overland route to Russia, and originally the local currency had been bricks of tea, but now most traders preferred the brass cash of the Chinese, or even Mexican dollars (a common trading currency at the time). The markets were full of livestock, enlivened by the occasional Western wonder such as a gramophone or a camera, normally brought for the amusement of the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, also known as the Bogd Gegen, Holy Shining One, Holy King or Living Buddha: the ever-reincarnating head of the Mongolian Buddhist orders and one of the very few Mongols
who could afford such toys. 3 It was the closest that Mongolia had to a capital, being the nominal centre of the most dominant Mongolian group, the Khalkha, 4 but the real power lay in foreign hands. Mongolia had been under Chinese control for three centuries, and the Chinese administration, including a small garrison, was based in Urga.
    Primarily, it was a city of religion. Out of the roughly twenty-five thousand permanent Mongolian residents, an estimated ten thousand were either monks or had some sort of affiliation with the monasteries. There were a hundred and three reincarnated lamas in Mongolia, returning life after life, and many of them lived there. Urga had been founded in the seventeenth century as the Ikh Khuree, or ‘great monastery’, to serve as the residence of the Bogd Gegen, and that remained its Mongolian name; ‘Urga’ was used only by Russians and other foreigners. Temples were everywhere, dark and smoky, statues of their gods concealed in numerous alcoves. The gods were usually depicted in a warlike stance, brandishing weapons and trampling on corpses, but some were joined together in elaborate and implausibly athletic couplings, no doubt to the ribald amusement of the more elderly and worldly-wise female pilgrims. 5 The statues were dressed by the temple’s monks, some of whom would climb, agile as monkeys, over the larger examples, sometimes twenty metres tall, in order to change a goddess’s scarf or repaint a cracked face. Most of the monks wore the conventional saffron robes of Buddhism, but some wore heavy wooden masks depicting the angry or ecstatic faces of the gods, dancing and singing in their honour. Yellow silk banners fluttered in the breeze outside the temples, emblazoned with the swastika, an ancient symbol of Buddhism and one particularly venerated by the Mongolians.
    Being a monk was a relatively good life, compared with that of herder, scratching out a bare subsistence and ever fearful of a bad zud , a peculiar local combination of hard winter and quick-melting frost that could kill a quarter of the country’s livestock. The vast majority of Mongolians lived as nomads, moving between camps according to the seasons and relying on their animals to survive. Monks were certain of a full bowl and a comfortable place to sleep, if nothing else, and the temples were major money makers, storing most of what wealth there was in Mongolia. The temples were visible for miles, since they were the only large buildings in Urga; most of the population lived in gers (felt tents). Important gers were surrounded by walled compounds,
marking an uneasy compromise between settled and nomadic life. Only in the Russian compound and the Chinese trading town of Maimaichen, a few miles from the main city, were permanent buildings common.
    Throughout the year the population of the city would be bolstered by pious pilgrims, bringing