China Expat is a cultural and literary forum for expatriates interested in China and has been published by Asia Briefing Ltd since 2001. The sites resident China culture writers have included such expatriate luminaries as 
Mongolian Women: Today and Yesterday
-by Ernie Diaz
What do Mongolian women have to do with the China expat? You might assume we’d go into the historical relationship between Mongolia and China, how a band of nomads rapidly subdued the world’s richest empire, and whose blood still pulses in millions of Middle Kingdom hearts today.
But today’s Mongolian women are vanquished in China, where they are to prostitution what Philippinos are to musicianship: passionate, talented, and cheaper than the so-called competition. Steppe culture, which gave them their fierce vitality and comely stature, has betrayed them to the global market, where their gifts are now commodities. Heaven forfend we give the impression that all Mongolian women are for sale, much less inclined to the world’s oldest profession. It’s all due to the inhumanity of simple economics, but it’s also a large economy, with a large human toll.
It starts at transit points such as Erenhot, officially in the PRC but minutes from the Mongolian border. Virtually all the discos, KTVs, and saunas are brothel fronts, where in back the girls are crammed ten to a room. They’ve been lured from Mongolia with the usual subterfuge, vague ads promising modeling work, friends of friends connecting them to jobs as “dancers”, smooth-talking strangers who paint a convincing enough picture of a better life. Once over the border, their papers are snatched and they find themselves in bondage, usually for a sum under $1000.
From there the next trafficking post is Beijing, and for many of the women it ends in the bordellos of Macau, although a substantial number find themselves sold off to new owners in Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, even Eastern Europe. The women suffer degradations and risks common to the untold millions of their compatriots the world over, from HIV to drug addiction.
It’s a sordid, sad predicament not likely to change, and not brought up here in any idealistic hopes of spurring change through awareness. Forced prostitution is too old to be news, and too bound up with human nature to be eradicated. Instead, we hope the foregoing serves as a sober counterpoint to the following, a description of the respect Mongolian women enjoyed during their heyday. Free markets can enslave people, and liberalism can send souls hurtling backward.
Long before political ideology shaped a nation’s destiny, the harshest climes made for the heartiest values. In Mongolia, the constitutionally weak didn’t live long enough to procreate, and the land didn’t support enough life to drop human worth as low as it reached in stable agrarian societies. Mongolian women, therefore, played a separate but equal role in their clans, subordinate by strictly feminist standards, but balanced to those who understand the subtle dynamic of public and private life.
In the days of their glory, Mongolian men’s duty consisted of fighting and hunting (specialization breeds success, and Genghis Khan always dictated excellence as the supreme virtue). The women took care of everything else: packing up the yurt for migration, making clothes, rugs, flags, and horse blankets. Processing milk, cheese and meat. Tending the sheep. In short, they carried the whole labor-intensive Mongolian economy on their rugged yet feminine shoulders.
Giovanni Carpinin, who visited the Mongols between 1245 and 147 at the behest of Pope IV, describes it best. “Girls and women ride and gallop as skillfully as men. We even saw them carrying quivers and bows, and the women can ride horses for as long as the men; they have shorter stirrups, handle horses very well, and mind all the property. The Tartar (old term for Mongols) women make everything: skin clothes, shoes, leggings, and everything made of leather. They drive carts and repair them, they load camels, and are quick and vigorous in all their tasks. They all wear trousers, and some of them shoot just like men.”
But most likely doing all the hard work didn’t grant Mongolian women their respected status. It did, however, along with the rigors of living in the Gobi, create a social climate in which fertility was valued over virginity, a slight and sensitive point with enormous ramifications. Widows were free to remarry, and even better, women had a right to divorce. There was no stigma barring a divorced woman from remarriage. Millions of lives were spared the long-term abuse that women down south endured on pain of banishment. In material terms, women could inherit their dead husband’s property, rather than having it appropriated by the closest male relative. Customarily, the mother became head of the family when widowed.
However, the key factor in the relatively elevated status of Mongolian women in the “good old days” must have been their fighting prowess. Clans could lose a great number of males in a single deadly encounter, thus women were routinely given extensive military training. Those who proved proficient fought alongside men in battle. On campaigns, Genghis Khan employed women to perform all the associated military duties of men, while the latter were off fighting. The Secret History of the Mongols also reveals that Genghis relied on his wife Borte for advice on key decisions, and acknowledged how much of his career was facilitated by the wisdom and skills of his mother, Hoelun.
One warrior princess is said to embody the fighting spirit of Mongolian women. Khublai Khan’s niece, Princess Khutulun, was as beautiful as she was strong, and not at all given to marriage. Nonetheless, she had no end of noble suitors. Cutting the coquetry short, she promised her hand to any man who could defeat her in wrestling, as long as he staked one hundred horses on the outcome. It is said she had a herd of ten thousand before she was finally left alone, and remained a happy royal spinster. No wonder that Naadam and other Mongolian festivals have rounds for women in the archery and horse race competitions, and until recently, in wrestling.
Today, there is little for women to gain from physical prowess and martial courage. Nor is there an abundance of economic opportunities for Mongolians, despite its burgeoning growth. We can only hope that the spirit of Genghis Khan and his insistence on excellence will guide Mongolia to a near future where a myriad of choices besides prostitution await its women.
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chinese were the lowest class slaves in both mongol and manchu empires
How many classes were there, if you really consider yourself qualified to talk about class?
Should be Filipinos, not “Philippinos” in paragraph 2. Sad story, human trafficking in this modern 21st century world. So much degradation of women folk.