Oldal 328 [328]
OCR
VESNA A. WALLACE edict was issued in Peking that prohibited lay people from living in Ikh Khüree. The effectiveness of this edict gradually diminished, and it ceased with the collapse of the Qing dynasty. Based on Pozdneev’s observation some hundred years after the edict had been issued, the population of Ikh Khiiree still consisted exclusively of monks." But Pozdneev also observed that the prevalence of the male population over the female population in the capital and the expansion of the Chinese trade district into the close vicinity of Ikh Khiiree created opportunities for monks’ sexual adventures. The availability of young, prostituting girls in the Chinese district facilitated the spread of venereal diseases, especially syphilis, which resulted in an epidemic that continued well into the twentieth century and affected nearly the entire Mongolian population, including the nominally celibate monks,'* whom the MPRP later held responsible for contributing to the outbreak and spread of the disease. Some twenty years after Pozdneev’s visit, John Sheepshanks, Bishop of Norwich, calculated in 1903, when the Qing dynasty was weakening, that the number of monks living in Ikh Khiiree ranged between 3,000 and 4,000, but the total number of people residing there was 10,000, in spite of the mentioned imperial prohibition. When the newly appointed Governor (amban) of Urga attempted to remove them from Ikh Khiiree, the Eighth Bogd Jebtsundamba interfered, claiming that driving away some 7,000 people from their homes and shops would be foolish, since their presence is not harming him or Buddhism.'° The Bishop of Norwich also noted that monks residing in Ikh Khiiree were frequently defying monastic rules and that a majority of monks in the country were sexually active. Children born from monks’ illicit relations with women were not recognized by the Qing administration, but were allowed to belong to the administrative units (xosi) of their mothers, and male children from such relations were given monastic ordinations.'’ While some monks in the capital called for reforms in the monasteries, others insisted on the present state of affairs. When one reactionary was quoted as having said that Mongolia did not need more monks, as some claimed, but fewer and better monks, he was killed by a special commando squad sent out to eliminate him." In one of his edifying letters to the Khalkhas, the Eighth Bogd Jebtsundamba lamented the widely spread, bad conduct of monks, due to which, he wrote, “even old people and children laugh at them.”'? His complaints were grounded in the social Pozdneev, Aleksei Matveevich: Mongolia and the Mongols. Vol. 1, pp. 63-64. Bawden, Charles R.: The Modern History of Mongolia. Kegan Paul International, London and New York 1989, p. 146. 16 Sheepshanks, John, Bishop of Norwich: My Life in Mongolia and Siberia; From the Great Wall of China to the Ural Mountains (1903). Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (Digital Collections from Cornell University Library), London 1903, pp. 71-74. 17 Sheepshanks, John, Bishop of Norwich: My Life in Mongolia and Siberia..., p. 95, 98. Lattimore, Owen: Nomads and Commissars: Mongolia Revisited. Oxford University Press, New York 1962, p. 102. Sark6zi, Alice: Political Prophecies in Mongolia in the 17"—20" Centuries. (Asiatische Forschungen Vol. 116.) Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1992, p. 119, 124. 326
