Wrestling is one of their favourite amusements, and the trained wrestlers are proud of their skill in the art. A square-built lama challenged me to wrestle with him at Tsagan-tuguruk. There was a great concourse of people present, and to have declined the contest would have been as bad as a defeat. I therefore determined to risk the trial. I soon found that being totally ignorant of the art, I had to act solely on the defensive. After some ineffectual attempts the lama threw me. I had a firm hold of him, however, and we both came down together, the lama under. Having come out of the ordeal better than I expected, I had no wish to try another round, and the lama also had enough. It was my turn to challenge then, and considering that the honour of my country required it, I offered to box my antagonist, which honour he respectfully declined. This incident exhibited to me the muscular weakness of one of the best-made men I met among the Mongols.
But their weakest point is their legs, which are rarely exercised. The Mongols begin from their earliest years to ride on horseback. If they have but to go a few hundred yards, they will ride if possible, in preference to walking. They walk with the gait of a duck; indeed, were their legs good—which they are not—the heavy shapeless leather boots they wear would prove an effectual bar to walking. These boots come up near the knee, are made of nearly uniform size, so that the largest feet will go easily into any of their boots. Thick stockings are also used, and the foot has ample play with all that. They are nearly all bow-legged, a circumstance that might be explained by their constant habit of riding, or by the pressure that is put on them when infants to make them sit cross-legged, were it not frequently developed in children before the age when nurses begin to cross their legs. The phenomenon may nevertheless be the indirect result of both these causes. The habits of the tribes being fixed and uniform for many ages, the bow-legged tendency which these habits are calculated to produce, may have been gradually impressed on the race as a permanent feature, by the mystery of hereditary influence. Thus the peculiarity, although originally accidental, would become permanent and constitutional. The Mongol is rarely seen standing upright. He is either sitting on horseback, or crouching in a tent.
The Mongols are rather dark-complexioned; the face and hands, which are constantly exposed to sun and weather, are deeply bronzed; the skin is very coarse; the covered parts of the body are much lighter than the exposed parts, but among the men there is nothing like a white skin. The whitest of them are yellowish. During our ablutions the whiteness of our skins was a subject of constant remark among the Mongols, although the skin of our faces became, by constant exposure to the sun while in Mongolia, as dark as that of the Mongols themselves. The Mongols, nevertheless, have often a ruddy complexion, but it is uncommon among the men. The women are much fairer than the men, and are much less exposed to the sun, being mostly in the tents attending to household duties. Their faces, although rough and weather-beaten more or less, have all a "roseate hue." Old women frequently become pasty white in the face. Their children are born fair skinned, and with brownish hair, which gradually becomes darker as they grow up. Shades of brown are however not unfrequent even in adults, and a tendency to curl is sometimes observable. Their eyes are seldom quite black, but run on various shades of brown. The white of the eye is usually "bloodshot" in middle-aged men, probably from two causes, exposure to wind and weather, and the argol smoke of their tent fires. They live, without any inconvenience, in an atmosphere of sharp biting smoke, which our eyes could not tolerate. The small eyes of the Mongols are shaded by heavy wrinkled eyelids, which, in many instances, are permanently contracted, giving the eye a peculiarly keen expression, as it peers out from under the mass of soft muscle that surrounds it. This feature is entirely absent in children, and is no doubt produced in adults by exposure to glare and the habit of straining after distant objects in a dry sandy country.
The almost entire absence of beard is a remarkable feature in the Mongolians. As regards this and other marks of race, it may be useful to compare the Mongols with their near neighbours the Chinese. The two races have a sufficient number of broad characteristics in common to warrant their classification under one great type of mankind. But their differences are also well marked, and are deserving of attention. The northern districts of China are not very different from Mongolia in point of climate. Both have a short but hot summer, and an extremely rigorous winter, differing only in degree. Both climates are dry. The northern Chinese assimilate more closely than any other of their countrymen to the Mongol habit of life. They eat animal food rather extensively, and drink strong liquor freely. Yet in physical development they are further removed from the Mongols in some features than even the southern Chinese who live on rice, fish, and vegetables. In the matter of beards, which led to this comparison, the northern Chinese are in a marked degree more hairy than their southern compatriots, and these again than the natives of Mongolia. In none of them is the beard developed till towards middle life; yet they all attain the age of puberty earlier than Europeans. The beef-eaters of northern China are tall, muscular, and robust, as much superior to the Mongols as they are to their own countrymen who lead a different life. But with their animal diet the northern Chinese eat copiously of vegetable and farinaceous food, while the Mongols live almost exclusively on mutton.
The regularity of habits which prevail in settled populations may also have its influence in the general physical development of the people. The nomads have certain qualities cultivated to excess, and others almost entirely unused. The animal instincts are naturally found highly developed amongst the Mongols. The sense of sight is very acute in them; they are sensitive to indications of changes of weather, and so with various other instincts which to these wandering tribes supply the wants of a more artificial life, and enable them to exist in a state of nature. Individuality is in a great measure lost among such people. The habits and education of each individual among them are identical. Their pursuits are all the same. The very same faculties, both physical and mental, are kept in exercise among the whole tribe, and that through many generations, so that they have become hereditary, and indelibly imprinted on the race. A Mongol who was not a good horseman would be as anomalous as one that was inhospitable. The uniformity of life among the members of these nomad tribes, while it keeps back many faculties, the exercise of which is necessary to the existence of civilised people, also renders the type of whole tribes constant, so that no one individual differs greatly in external features from another. In civilised communities, where the division of labour has become so indispensable as to be in itself one great criterion of civilisation, a variety of types are evolved even in a single lifetime. A tailor can never be mistaken for a blacksmith, nor a soldier for a sailor; but tribes whose habits compel each family to be independent, as it were, of all the rest of the world, whose wants are limited by the means of supplying them, and among whom different occupations are almost unknown, do necessarily present a remarkable uniformity. It would be unsound to generalise too freely, and there are of course the individual distinctions of physiognomy as well marked as among other races, but these differences are more limited in their scope. Some trades are known to the Mongols, such as felt-making, tanning and dressing skins, iron, copper, and silver work, saddle-making, &c. In more settled parts they also make harness, carts, and sledges; and printing from blocks, after the manner of the Chinese and Japanese, is also known among them. These arts are most cultivated among the Bouriats in Siberia, who, by their contact with the Russians, and from the nature of the country they inhabit, are thrown more in the way of artificial life than the desert tribes.
To the casual observer, at least, the Mongols do not present the same individual differences as their neighbours, the Chinese. In complexion they are nearly all alike, although the skin seems to get darker as the face becomes wrinkled with age, which might seem to favour the idea that the brownish skin of the Mongols is due as much to their habits as to their descent, or the effects of climate. But the causes which influence colour are very obscure. In Siberia, where Sclavonic races have been settled for nearly two centuries, living side by side with Mongol tribes, and exposed to the same climatic influences, these show no signs of variation from the complexion of their ancestors, as it is exhibited by their European representatives. Again, the Portuguese settlers in Macao, who degenerate very rapidly, become in two or three generations much darker in the skin than the native Chinese. It is not the smoky atmosphere of their tents that darkens the skin of the Mongols, for in that case, the women, who are more exposed to it, would be darker than the men, the reverse of which is the case. A comparison with the Japanese again would seem to show that exposure exercises at the most an insignificant effect in darkening the skin. The Japanese live much within doors, and are careful to protect themselves from the sun when they stir abroad by means of broad-brimmed hats and umbrellas. Great differences of complexion exist among them, whether regarded as individuals or classes; but it is safe to say they are on the whole quite as dark as the Mongols. The contrast between men and women is singularly marked, the women having fair clear complexions, often rosy. Yet the Japanese women are a good deal out of doors, and are fairer skinned than the Chinese women, who are only blanched by confinement to the house and exclusion from light and air.
The Mongols, although deficient in muscular energy, and incapacitated for sustained activity, are nevertheless gifted with great powers of endurance. I have already noticed their capacity for enduring prolonged fasts, and their ability to go several days and nights without sleep, with equal impunity. The sudden and important changes to which their climate is subject, are also borne without any great suffering. From a hot summer, they are plunged, with but slight gradations, into an extremely rigorous winter, when the temperature falls very low, and is accompanied by keen cutting winds, that sweep over the steppes with merciless fury, and from which they have no better protection than their tents.
The Mongol tribes stand low in the scale of mental capacity. Scattered over vast deserts, remote from civilised man, they are ignorant by necessity. Their intellectual faculties have no stimulus to exertion. Their aims in life, and their whole worldly ambition, are limited to flocks and herds. While there is grass enough to feed the sheep, and sheep enough to feed the men, they have little else to disturb their quiet equanimity. Thus they lead an idle careless life, free from thought and everything that might disturb the negative happiness they enjoy. This kind of existence is truly a low form, having more affinity with the animal than the mental side of human nature, while at the same time it is to be observed that they are almost entire strangers to the varied emotions that fill up the existence of a civilised being; so that both their intellectual and moral qualities are dwarfed and partially destroyed. The prostrate mental condition of the people predisposes them to the domination of superior minds, and when their highly superstitious tendencies are considered, it is not surprising that they are among the most priest-ridden races in the world. It is not easy to say why these people should be more easily imposed upon than others, excepting that ignorance is always found to go hand-in-hand with this mental weakness. The wild solitary life of the desert is also, no doubt, eminently favourable to belief in the supernatural and mysterious.
A man who frequently passes days and nights with no society, except the howling waste below, and the deep blue sky above, has his imagination set free from the trammels of the world of fact. He has no resources but in the spirit-world, and it is not unnatural that his fancy should people the air with superior intelligences, whose voices are heard in the desert winds or the rustling leaves of the forest. Under these conditions of life, the poor nomads are in a proper frame of mind to become the thralls of any one who will undertake to interpret for them the spiritual mysteries on which their imagination runs riot. The lamas fill this office, and are treated with unbounded respect by the masses. The religion of the Mongols is Bhuddism, a superstition which numbers more votaries than any other existing religion, true or false. But the fact is, they are Bhuddists only in name; that is to say, the laity are almost wholly ignorant of the doctrines of Bhuddism. Even the lamas have but vague and confused ideas about it. Their prayers are conned by rote, and these priests are generally ignorant of the Thibetan language in which they are written.
The Mongol religion may indeed be called Lamaism, its leading doctrine being faith, implicit and absolute, in the authoritative teaching of the lamas, and that not in any well-digested system of belief settled and fixed by the united wisdom of the sect, but in such interpretation of spiritual matters as any individual lama may choose to give. The gods are deified lamas. The Dalai Lama of Thibet is a god incarnate, as is also the Lama king of the Mongols; and even the ordinary lamas, whose name is legion, are considered as off-shoots from deity in a sense that entitles them to the worship of common mortals. The abstruse doctrines of the metempsychosis and the future state, are studied by the recluses who live in the retirement of the great monasteries, and spend their time in prayer and meditation. But the every-day lama, although he carries a pocketful of musty papers, in which the eighteen hells and twenty-six heavens are elucidated, cares little for these things. He has more practical matters to attend to than meditating on the Bhuddist notion of bliss consummated by absorption into Bhudda—complete repose—in other words, annihilation. His written liturgies are a powerful spell by which he maintains his moral influence over the people, and it is none the less powerful that neither party fully comprehends their meaning. More regard is paid to the quantity than to the quality of their prayers, and to facilitate their devotions an ingenious machine is in common use, consisting of a roller containing a string of prayers. This is sometimes turned by hand, and sometimes it is attached to a windmill! So long as it is turned round by some means, the efficacy of the prayers is considered the same. No doubt it is. The petitions are long-winded and multifarious.