Journey to Mongolia

As a boy growing up in a small farming town in western Connecticut, I used to ask my grandmother, who lived thirty miles away in the Berkshire Mountains, to tell me about her father—Frans Larson. I'd seen photographs of him in her copy of Larson, Duke of Mongolia that had stirred my curiosity. In the frontispiece he stood by a tent near an oasis in the Gobi Desert wearing the clothes of a safari hunter: a helmet-shaped hat called a topee, a khaki shirt, jodhpurs (riding pants), and puttees wrapped around his shins. In another picture he sported a riding cap and sat between the humps of a long-haired camel. Near the end of the book he grimaced on a snowy plain surrounded by camel boxes, his hands buried in the sleeves of a heavy black coat. He'd pulled his large fur hat almost down to his nose. I didn't know where he was, but the place looked as cold and desolate as the dark side of the moon.

Tai Tai, as we called my grandmother (the name means grand old woman in Chinese), often told me stories about her father's hunting trips on the Mongolian steppe—how he gained the respect and trust of Mongol farmers by shooting wolves that preyed on their goats and sheep. He was a crack shot; he could kill a wolf at 1,500 feet with one bullet. If he wasn't shooting wolves, he was distributing Bibles for the British and Foreign Bible Society; he handed out about 25,000 copies of the good book during the 1890s and early 1900s. But the Mongols valued his hunting skills more than his Bibles. (Still they put the Bibles to good use by sewing the covers into their boot soles and stuffing the crumpled pages into their boots for insulation.) If the Mongols wondered why he was a missionary, I did, too. How, I sometimes asked myself, could an upstanding Christian be such an avid wolf hunter—so avid that he was nicknamed Wolf Larson and Mr. Lang (Chinese for wolf)? And how had he ended up in China and Mongolia in the first place?

Tai Tai told me her father had adopted Mongolia as his second country after growing up poor on a farm in Tillberga, Sweden, a town seventy miles northwest of Stockholm. He felt an immediate bond with the Mongols because they spent as much time with horses as he had in Tillberga. Tai Tai explained that he had built a large ranch on the Inner Mongolian steppe to raise horses and, by the end of his career, he'd sold about 23,000 horses to China's army and its racetracks. On his various travels through Mongolia to distribute Bibles, buy horses, and shoot wolves, he'd become a close friend of the living Buddha, Bogdo Gegen (the third potentate in the Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy beneath the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama).

Tai Tai told me her father had lived in a Buddhist temple, which also puzzled me. Although my elementary school hadn't taught me much about Asian religions, I sensed intuitively that it was odd for a Christian missionary to live in a Buddhist temple. Hadn't my great-grandfather been trying to convert the Buddhists? If he wanted to live in a sacred building, why didn't he live in a church? Had he given up on the gospel and gone native?

I grew more perplexed when Tai Tai said that the living Buddha had admired her father so much that he'd made him a duke, which was just below a prince in the country's aristocracy. She also informed me that the first Chinese president after the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 had hired him to be his advisor on Mongolian affairs. This was around the time that the living Buddha had declared himself emperor of Mongolia and fought a war of independence with China. In other words the two countries had been enemies, yet my great-grandfather had worked for rulers on both sides. When I...