History's Greatest Mysteries (2020) s06e12 Episode Script

Tonight, Chinggis Khan,
a legendary ancient ruler
who amassed unimaginable wealth.
His riches would be
worth in the neighborhood
of $120 trillion today.
The influence of Chinggis
Khan's Mongol empire
is still felt across
Asia and beyond,
but the fate of his
treasure remains a mystery.
He absolutely wanted to
keep his enemies guessing,
so he probably engaged in
substantial amounts of deception
regarding his fortune.
Great leaders like Khan
were known to be buried
with their treasure,
but 800 years later,
neither his tomb nor his
supposed hoard have been found.
Was he buried with his treasure?
Is it scattered across Asia,
or could it be both?
There's also a curse.
Anybody who disturbs his tomb
will actually cause
the end of the world.
Now we'll explore
the top theories around
exactly where Chinggis Khan's
buried treasure might be.
The Khentii Mountains, a
rugged and remote region
in the most sparsely populated
nation on the planet, Mongolia.
But turn the clock
back 800 years,
and it's the heart of an empire
that covers one fifth
of all land on Earth,
and it's ruled by one
man: Chinggis Khan.
Historians have often struggled
to put the sheer size
of Chinggis' empire
into some kind of
comprehensible scale.
At its height under his rule,
it was well over 9
million square miles.
It stretched from the Caspian
Sea to the Pacific Ocean.
He conquered civilization
after civilization,
civilizations that have
stood in many cases
for thousands of
years on their own.
And now this group
of pastoral nomads
are coming out of
essentially no man's land
in the central
steppes of Mongolia,
and winning nothing but
victory after victory.
Although a lot of times he's
referred to as Genghis Khan,
we believe it's
probably more accurate
to refer to him
as Chinggis Khan.
But for a lot of people,
especially in the West,
when you hear the
name Chinggis Khan,
you think about brutality;
you think about this kind of
cruel, almost barbaric ruler,
but that's really one
small part of the story.
He rules, actually,
with a ton of tolerance.
In a lot of ways, he's
a lot more progressive
than his European
contemporaries.
He understands that allowing
the people that he's ruling
to continue their customs,
their religious practices,
is probably what's
best for his empire.
In a lot of ways, his
rule sets the stage
for the modern world.
Chinggis Khan builds his empire
from practically nothing.
The man we think
of as Chinggis Khan
was born Temujin in
the late 12th century,
and his father was fairly
prominent within their tribe.
However, when Temujin
is about 10 years old,
his father is murdered
by a rival tribe
and when that happens,
all of the standing
of his family
essentially declines
within the tribe.
To be fatherless in
one of the Mongol tribes
is really a huge liability.
His entire family is cast out.
They're essentially homeless,
wandering the steppes,
hunting for their
own food, rodents,
or whatever other
animal they could find.
At one point, there's a
dispute within the family
over the distribution of food.
Temujin actually
murders his half-brother
to end the dispute,
and that tells us something
about his ruthlessness,
even as a young boy.
So as Temujin grows
into his adulthood,
he's able to game
some followers.
He establishes this meritocracy.
So basically, if you are
the strongest soldier,
if you're the best
fighter, the best provider,
then you're gonna have a
place in Temujin's tribe
and this really makes people
wanna join him and follow him.
He starts to
develop a reputation
for being both
ruthless and crafty.
And it seems in hindsight
that Temujin was probably
plotting his revenge
against the tribe that
murdered his father, all along.
And here's where we
see the ruthlessness
of what Temujin
brings to the fight,
because he does take
an awful revenge
for the death of his father.
He orders the murder
of every member of the tribe
taller than a cart axle.
In other words, only small
children were spared;
everybody else was killed.
This area of the world
was characterized by
groups of nomadic tribes.
There is no sense
of social cohesion
like we would think of today,
living in communities together.
So because they are tribal,
there tends to be
a lot of conflict
and it is that sort of situation
that almost requires someone
who could step in and unify,
and that's what Temujin does.
An assembly of Mongol tribesmen
proclaims Temujin
their new leader
and gives him a new
name, Chinggis Khan,
which means universal ruler.
He decides to expand the
territories he rules.
Chinggis builds an
empire within a generation.
When you think about,
this is 25 years,
how can you even draw parallel
with the Roman Empire,
which is built over 400 years?
If you resist Chinggis Khan,
it's probably not gonna
end very well for you.
A lot of times there
are very few people
left in a village to survive.
Often he will only allow
a few people to survive
to go and tell the
other villages,
the other tribes,
about his cruelty
and then hopefully
surrender in advance.
The Mongols
understand intrinsically
that it's inherently better
to actually convince the enemy
to surrender and collaborate,
than it is to have
to slaughter them
or wear them down through an
attrition approach to war.
So on the one hand,
he needs to be a fairly
generous conqueror.
When he conquers you,
he offers to let
you join his society
under very specific rules.
In addition to the
territorial expansion
that goes on as a
result of his conquest,
he's also acquiring treasure
and treasure not
just in the sense
that we might think
of coins and jewels,
he's also amassing a
treasure of people;
of livestock, of land.
At the height of his empire,
Chinggis Khan amassed a fortune
estimated to be worth over
$120 trillion in today's money.
When it comes to
the spoils of war,
whether it was forcibly
taken from a city
or given voluntarily
through tribute,
the possibilities are
quite literally endless.
Any kind of treasure made
of anything from jade,
to porcelain, to ivory,
to gold, to silver.
And so it's fair to think
that all of these treasures
ranging from the far east
to the edge of Europe,
may have made their way back
to the heart of their empire.
Chinggis Khan establishes
his own new currency system,
which is based on silver coins.
We also have some evidence
that him and his successors
were some of the first
to use paper money,
which is really interesting.
So we have to imagine that
there was a lot of gold
and silver and just
precious metals
floating around
the empire as well.
But all of
Chinggis Khan's riches
can't save him from
a mysterious death.
We're not sure exactly
how Chinggis Khan died,
but we do know when
and where he died,
which is August 18th, 1227,
somewhere in what's
today Northwestern China.
There are a lot of
stories about how he died.
He was almost 70
years old at the time,
so that might have been
one of the main causes.
But some stories say
that he took an arrow
and he fell off his horse
and suffered an injury.
There are others who
say he might have died
of some disease like
the bubonic plague.
There's even a story
that a conquered princess
might have injured his
genitalia, leading to his death;
but a lot of these
sound kind of legendary
befitting a Chinggis Khan,
but will never exactly
know what happened.
The Mongols have some
very interesting beliefs
about death and burial.
In particular, they
believe that you really can
take it with you.
You require wealth and
riches in the afterlife,
and so it is entirely plausible
that Chinggis Khan was buried
with a substantial
amount of treasure.
So most experts believe
that if you can find the
burial site of Chinggis Khan,
you are going to find a
great cache of treasure.
Chinggis Khan made sure
that it would be incredibly
difficult to find his tomb.
So even to this day,
we really don't know exactly
where he was buried.
He wanted it to
be kept a secret.
There's a lot of
legends and stories
around how this happened.
One of which suggests
that almost no one
was trusted with the
actual burial location.
The troops that were
detailed to create the tomb
and placed Chinggis
Khan within it
were ordered to kill anyone
they met on the
route to the tomb,
and were then themselves
killed in turn
by a separate unit.
That separate unit was
killed by a third unit,
thus continually breaking
the chain of
information and evidence
as to where the tomb
might be located.
One of the oldest clues
pointing to a potential
location of the tomb
comes from a young explorer
employed by the Mongol Empire
about 50 years after Chinggis
Khan's death, Marco Polo.
Marco Polo served as an emissary
at the court of Kublai Khan,
Chinggis Khan's grandson.
He reports that what
he's hearing at the court
of Kublai Khan is that
the great Chinggis
Khan is buried
in the Khentii Mountain
region in a specific mountain,
which he does not name.
The challenge is that
we're talking about
an area that is thousands
of square miles.
After the fall of
the Mongol Empire in 1368,
the ruling powers of Mongolia
change hands several times.
Then in the 1920s,
the northern region
known as Outer Mongolia,
joins the newly
formed Soviet Union.
After World War II,
the southern region
known as Inner Mongolia
becomes part of China,
where it remains today.
For the next few centuries,
whoever is in charge
of this mountain range
is gonna make it really
difficult to go in and explore.
Even once Mongolia becomes
a puppet state of the
Soviet Union in the 1920s,
the Soviets also wanna
keep this area off limits.
There is the added
dramatic element here
that there's a curse
associated with his burial.
Anyone who opens the grave
of the great Chinggis Khan
doesn't just doom
their own life,
they bring about the
end of the world.
It's not really until
the Iron Curtain falls
that we get to have
some exploration
of this region of the
Khentii Mountains.
So, starting in 1989,
people come and start
exploring the region
looking for his tomb.
During this time,
a wealthy Chicago commodities
trader named Maury Kravitz
grows obsessed with finding
Chinggis Khan's tomb.
He identifies multiple locations
in the Khentii mountains
that he believes might hold
the remains of the great Khan.
In the summer of 2000,
he's ready to begin.
Almost from the beginning,
the Kravitz expedition
is all but doomed.
His horses become exhausted
when they're only
halfway to the elevation
of the intended site.
They have to be taken the
rest of the way by helicopter,
but they do eventually discover
some really interesting sites.
About 150 tombs, but none
of them are Chinggis Khan's.
So, on his second
excursion in 2001,
they meet a local herdsman
who tells him about
this walled structure
on one side of a mountain,
that's signifying some
place of importance.
As they crest the
rise on their climb,
they discover a wall stretching
two miles in distance,
reaching heights as
high as 12 feet high,
surrounding a
mysterious complex.
In 2002, the
Mongolian government
gives Kravitz's team
permission to dig.
Then, trouble hits basically
at every step of the way.
Several of Kravitz's team
are bitten by pit vipers,
which can be deadly.
They have to be medevaced out.
At one point, one of their cars
rolls off the side
of a mountain,
and surprisingly no one is hurt.
There's also an
outbreak of anthrax
among some of the animals.
So, at that point,
the Mongolian government
decides to shut it down.
Kravitz is unable
to resume the expedition
and dies in 2012.
There has been no return to
that site to explore since,
but whenever you're talking
about 800 year old loot
involving a great
Mongol emperor,
there'll be treasure hunters
from all over the world
who are going to seek this site.
Chinggis Khan's
riches may have been buried
with him according to
Mongolian beliefs,
but his tomb has eluded
discovery for nearly 800 years.
After Chinggis Khan's
death in 1227,
there's a special
work commissioned
called "The Secret
History of the Mongols,"
that chronicles his life
and that of his court.
This was never a text that was
meant for public consumption.
This is something
that was written
for the private use of those
closest to the emperor.
This document was
lost for centuries.
It was originally written
in a Mongol dialect,
but eventually since the
Mongols later conquer China,
it gets translated into Chinese
and it is rediscovered
in the 1800s
in a Chinese version,
which we've been
able now to read.
So according to "The Secret
History of the Mongols,"
Chinggis Khan is buried
in a sacred mountain
in the Khentii Mountain range,
one of the highest
mountain there,
some 8,000 feet,
called Burkhan Khaldun.
And this is also the
place where he was born.
Burkhan Khaldun actually
translates to God Mountain,
so it's a very sacred
site to begin with
in Mongolian thinking.
It was a site that
was very, very special
to Chinggis Khan himself.
It was a site where
early in his life,
he had escaped to find refuge
during a battle that
had gone south on him.
He kind of felt this life
debt to the mountain itself,
and it was this place where
he had returned to often.
In fact, there's
one account found
in "The Secret History
of the Mongols,"
which says that one day
he was out on the plains
there at the foot of the
Burkhan Khaldun Mountain,
and there was a solitary
tree growing there,
and that he sat
beneath its shade.
And while sitting there,
he came to the realization
that this was where he
wanted to be buried.
If Chinggis Khan's
wish was honored,
then it's very possible
that not only is he buried
there on Burkhan Khaldun,
but some of the treasure
could be as well.
In 2009, Albert Lin,
an American explorer,
decides he's gonna take
a more modern approach
to searching for
Chinggis Khan's tomb.
Using drones and satellites,
Lin and his team collect
over 85,000 aerial images
of the Khentii Mountains.
It's a very large area.
He has 85,000 images,
so he can't do all this himself.
But in our modern age,
he decides that
he could bring in
more people through the internet
in a form of crowdsourcing.
Now, these people don't
necessarily have to be experts.
They just have to look for
things that seem unusual,
that doesn't look natural there,
and he creates an algorithm
for all of the hits that
people identify there.
And in narrowing these down,
one spot in particular
on the slopes of
the Burkhan Khaldun,
there seems to be a large
man-made structural
remains there.
The only problem for Lin
is that this site is
right in the middle
of an area known
as the Great Taboo
or the Forbidden Zone.
Almost as soon as
Chinggis Khan is gone,
this area becomes off limits
to everyone except
for the Mongol elite.
In fact, it's even said
that it's guarded by a
shaman tribe of Mongols
known as the Darkhans,
who protect the area.
This goes hand in
hand with this notion
of there being a curse for
anybody who disturbs the tomb.
This Great Taboo continues
even during the Soviet
rule of Mongolia.
The Soviets don't want anyone
getting hold of
Chinggis Khan, his tomb,
any of his treasures
that could be used
to spark Mongol nationalism.
It's not until the 2010s
that the Mongolian government
finally allows some
in-person research there.
In 2012,
Dr. Lin and his team
are allowed to examine the site
of the stone
structure in person.
They're able to do
preliminary digging,
and they do find
things like arrowheads
and ceramic pottery shards,
which they're then
able to actually date
to the 1200s when Chinggis
Khan would've lived.
But unfortunately, the
Mongolian government
hasn't granted them permission
to go back and follow
up on that dig.
So that mysterious
stone structure
remains something
of a mystery to us.
But Lin is not the only one
who's interested in this site.
In 2015, there's a team
of French researchers
who use a drone
and identify a site
on the side of a mountain
at Burkhan Khaldun
that appears to be an ancient
mound surrounded by stones.
So this is intriguing,
because it has all the features
of being a potential
burial site.
The challenge is that
these French researchers
didn't receive the
proper approvals
of the Mongolian government,
so the investigation
is shut down.
Although Burkhan
Khaldun seems like
the most likely spot for
Chinggis Khan's tomb,
there are still
other possibilities.
And in fact, maybe people
are working backwards.
We shouldn't think
about the tomb first,
maybe we gotta go to
Chinggis Khan's death
and start working from there.
- 2016.
- Yinchaun, China.
American Explorer Alan
Nichols leads an expedition
he believes will
finally end the mystery
of Chinggis Khan's
tomb and treasure.
Alan Nichols is an
attorney and an explorer
who has made himself into
somewhat of an expert
on sacred mountains.
So Nichols's idea is to start
with the last information
that we know is true
about Chinggis Khan,
which is when and where he died,
and work backwards from there.
Nichols instead
essentially looks at a map
and he says, "Well, we know
where Chinggis Khan died",
and we know that was
Chinese territory.
We're relatively certain
that the Mongols would
not have buried him there.
However, we also know
that the Mongols believed
that burial needed to occur
immediately after death,
and as such, they
probably would've taken
the most direct route
out of Chinese territory
and buried the
Great Khan as soon
"as it was culturally
permissive to do so."
According to Nichols,
there's another
reason why the Khan
would not be buried where
historical accounts indicate.
It's quite possible that
there's false information,
deception in these sources,
like "The Secret
History of the Mongols,"
because we know that
Chinggis Khan himself
was a master of deception.
He used deception frequently
in his military tactics.
Besides the feigned retreats
and then turning on enemies,
we also know that
he would do things
to make the enemy
think that his force
was much greater in
size than it was.
For example, having his
cavalry drag branches
and wood behind
them to kick up dust
to make it seem like
they had a huge force,
so it was common for him
to use deception like this
and so why not to see people
about where he's buried?
There is a belief in shamanism
that as soon as you die,
your physical remains can
be invaded by evil spirits.
Because he represents
the identity
of the Mongolian people,
there would be a
special attention made
to an immediate burial for him
to prohibit that from happening.
Nichols believes that
Chinggis Khan's army
does not go the distance
to take him back home,
but instead goes to
the closest place
that is just over the boundary
of what is Mongol land.
The land today is inside China,
but at the time, this
was Mongol territory.
In 2016, Nichols
claims to have found
Chinggis Khan's likely burial
location in Northwest China,
which he refers to
only as Mountain X.
We do know that this
so-called Mountain X,
it's in a very modern
Chinese city, Yinchaun,
and in addition to
ruins of earlier things,
there's also modern structures.
Unfortunately, he won't tell
us what that mountain is.
He just calls it Mountain X.
He doesn't want anybody else
to go in there and excavate it
and beat him to the punch,
and get all the glory.
Applying for permission
to dig in such an area
is going to require
permissions of the government,
so we have the challenge
of requesting permission
to explore a site
that we are simultaneously
unwilling to reveal.
The Chinese government says
no to further exploration
and shuts this team down.
Finding Chinggis Khan's tomb
has been an obsession of
archaeologists and explorers
for hundreds of years,
but for those focused on
locating the treasure,
his tomb may not
be the only answer.
Not all of his treasure
might be in his tomb.
After all, the Mongol
Empire continued.
In fact, it would
continue to expand
even after Chinggis Khan,
under his successors
and they would've had
to have some wealth
to continue on the empire,
so surely his successors
would've retained
some if not most of that wealth.
We don't have an exact number
for how many children
Chinggis Khan produced,
but we're fairly certain that
it's well over a thousand.
There is a 2003
DNA study conducted
that suggests that 16
million men on Earth
may have a direct
genetic heritage
that can be drawn
from Chinggis Khan.
However, in his lifetime,
he only publicly
acknowledged four sons
and he determines that the
third of those sons, Ogedei,
will be his chosen successor.
When Chinggis Khan dies in 1227,
he leaves his vast Mongol Empire
to his third son, Ogedei Khan.
The new Emperor,
much like his father,
conquers people and territory
with terrifying efficiency.
He expands the Empire west
all the way to
modern-day Poland,
but it's Ogedei's transformation
of the Mongolian capital
that may hold clues to his
father's missing riches.
The capital of the Mongol
Empire was Karakorum,
which is located on
the famous Silk Road.
It is the nexus of the
East-West trading route.
So Chinggis Khan
established this capital
really as a base of operations
from which his
armies would go out.
At his time, it
was not much more
than a collection of yurts,
but this is going to
dramatically transform
under the reign of his son.
Ogedei unlike Chinggis,
doesn't really see himself
as a nomadic warrior
of the steppes.
He's been raised
in the environment
that's populated by Mongol
power and all of these riches.
And so Ogedei is
going to start to look
for more forms of permanence,
and that's going to
include the construction
of a massive palace
at Karakorum.
What's really
interesting about Karakorum
is that it's not a village
that grows gradually
from a village into
a town, into a city.
It's essentially like a
pop-up city all at once
that Ogedei creates,
and it's meant to be sort of
the jewel of the Mongol Empire,
the place where people from
all over can come and visit
and essentially be impressed
by what they've accomplished.
One of the first
thing that he does
is he brings in all
of the conquered,
captured and
conscripted craftsmen
from across the
Eurasian continent,
and collectively, they
pour their talents
into the construction of this
quite glorious capital city.
It was kind of a site
of cultural blending
unparalleled at that time.
Walking down the street,
you would see Buddhist temples
next to Islamic mosques,
next to Christian churches.
It is designed to
over-awe anyone visits it.
When you start to think about
how you show off
wealth and power,
that's what you see
embodied in this palace,
and it's where the
loot flows back to
because it's important
to keep in mind
that Ogedei is still conquering.
He's still expanding the Empire,
so that's probably where a
lot of this treasure was.
We have eyewitness accounts
showing all of this opulence.
Everything seems to be covered
in gold and silver,
ivory and precious gems.
One of the most
detailed accounts of the palace
is written by a
visiting missionary
known as William of Rubruck.
William of Rubruck
describes these buildings,
calling them "as long as barns."
He describes these barns
as holding treasures,
and if you consider
what that means
to a European observer,
you're talking about
a vast, long hallway.
William of Rubruck describes
this incredibly opulent
silver and gold fountain
in the shape of a tree,
where literally the tree
branches serve as pipes
that can dispense and
serve wine, milk, mead.
It's incredible.
Just this fountain alone
is a really good indicator
that the Mongols have a lot
of precious metals on hand.
In regards to the wealth
accumulated by the Mongols,
while it's doubtful
that all of it
was contained in a tomb left
for the Great Khan himself,
much of it would've been
brought into the
city of Karakorum.
However, the city of
Karakorum is kind of
a temporary capital in the
history of the Mongol Empire.
By the 1270s, the Mongols have
abandoned Karakorum
as their capital,
basically because it doesn't
really have the resources
to support such a
large population
and then later on in 1380,
it gets ransacked and destroyed
by a marauding Chinese army.
For all intents and purposes,
it's no longer a center of
imperial power of any type,
it's a relatively
small settlement,
but what's left
there is destroyed.
Two hundred years
after that in 1586,
a large Buddhist monastery
is built on the same site.
In the 1940s, Soviet
archaeologists claim
that they have
discovered the ruins
of this palace of
the Great Khan,
but other experts disagree
and believe that what
they found was a temple
and that it's possible that
the ruins of the palace
are actually underneath
the monastery itself.
The main problem is
that the monastery
is still in use today.
They have to get a
lot of permission
from the Mongolian government
to actually dig under the site.
But technological
advances in the 2000s
make it possible
to search Karakorum
without extensive digging.
This sparks renewed interest
in the hunt for
Chinggis Khan's riches.
In 2021, German researchers
spend fifty two days
surveying the site
using something
called super sensitive
magnetometry.
It's designed to detect
voids and pockets
beneath the surface of the Earth
that might identify previously
existing structures.
So if they were able to discern
that this was probably
the site of a palace
beneath the monastery.
Archaeologists have discovered
a lot of really interesting
artifacts around Karakorum,
including Muslim silver coins,
Chinese pottery,
an Egyptian mask,
and even a gold bracelet
in the shape of a phoenix.
The main problem is
that we don't know
if these treasures are related
to Chinggis Khan's leadership,
or they're just more
evidence of Karakorum
as this bustling
center of trade.
The Mongols built great
palaces in many locations.
This is not the only one.
If you really wanna make sure
that you have ruled out
every possible location
for this treasure,
you've got to go to Xanadu.
Some believe the key
to finding Chinggis
Khan's riches
is to investigate his
successors' extravagant palaces,
and none are more impressive
than those constructed by
the mighty Kublai Khan.
Kublai Khan is
Chinggis Khan's grandson.
He's actually going to
oversee the Mongol Empire
kind of at its height,
at its absolute apex.
Kublai Khan is the
one that actually
kind of wins the war with
China once and for all.
He's obsessed with bringing
about the final conquest
of the southern Chinese cities,
that up until the
time of his reign
had been able to withstand
the Mongol assaults.
So one of the things
that helped Kublai
Khan conquer China
is a new kind of catapult.
The Mongols called
it the Huihui Pao,
and basically by having
a heavy counterweight,
it can sling a large
projectile of some 600 pounds
a good three hundred yards
to smash through enemy
walls of fortified cities.
The Mongols don't just
fling stone projectiles
or explosives into
Chinese cities,
they will also try to
poison the water supplies
by flinging the carcasses of
dead livestock over the walls.
They will also fling the
heads of their enemies
over the walls.
There's nothing quite
like a pile of skulls
to serve as a wonderful message
to anyone who might be thinking
about resisting your conquest.
With his invasion
of China complete,
Kublai Khan now controls
20% of all land on Earth.
So Kublai Khan inherits
the capital in Karakorum,
but because his focus is on
controlling and ruling China,
he wants to build
palaces further south,
closer where he can keep
an eye on the Chinese.
So after he conquers China,
Kublai Khan wants
to be closer to it
rather than staying
in Karakorum.
And so he creates
this new capital
some 200 miles
away from Beijing.
There are many
experts who believe
that Kublai Khan would've wanted
to bring Chinggis Khan's
treasure along with him
to this new capital
that he built
to showcase all of
the Mongol riches.
Kublai Khan names his
new capital Shangdu,
but at the same time,
Marco Polo is working for
the Empire as an advisor
and through his accounts,
the name becomes
somewhat garbled,
and it's why we now
know it as Xanadu.
Xanadu is this splendid,
wealthy, magnificent place,
a couple of palaces, gardens,
hunting grounds, streams
running through it.
In fact, this is what inspired
the famous poem
called, "Kubla Khan"
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
which starts off
with the famous line,
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
a pleasure dome decree."
Xanadu is in some
ways mythological
and in some ways entirely real.
It's like a Shangri-La,
only we know for sure that
it was actually constructed.
Marco Polo claimed to have seen
storehouses filled
with treasures
belonging to the Great Khan,
as well as golden and bronze
statues in every room.
Several surviving accounts
document the vast
treasure held at Xanadu,
but none of them indicate
what happened to that treasure.
When Kublai Khan dies in 1294,
there's a lot of infighting
among the Mongol successors,
there's a lot of Chinese revolts
and things really go
south for the Mongols.
And by 1368, about 75 years
after Kublai Khan's death,
the Empire falls.
So by 1430, the city
of Xanadu no longer
has any real influence.
And as a matter of fact,
the great structures themselves
begin to be reused to
build domestic dwellings,
or for other civil purposes.
So the image that we might
have of Xanadu is lost to us
because it is incorporated
into the next page of history.
There's really no doubt
that a lot of the loot conquered
by Chinggis Khan's armies
continues to amass in
the various palaces.
It starts in Karakorum, it
winds up next in Xanadu.
That's how empires work.
And as their capital moves,
the riches that underpin
it move along with them.
And so it really shouldn't
come as a surprise
that when you go to
construct a new palace,
you're probably gonna
strip the old one
of most of its wealth.
You're gonna reuse a lot
of the same materials.
But the legend of
this glittering city lives on.
The legacy of Xanadu lives on
partly because of
Marco Polo's writing,
partly because of
the Coleridge poem.
But it's important to remember
that this is not a
fictional paradise.
It was a real place.
We know where Xanadu is.
You can Google map it
right now with satellite
and you can see where it is.
There's still a possibility,
with further archaeological
investigation,
that something more
can be found there.
It's just a matter of what.
In the 1930s, we know that
there are Japanese soldiers
that are using metal detection
as a way of exploring Xanadu,
and they came up empty.
But in many ways, that only
contributes to the mystique.
We know that we
found clay figures,
things that would be
considered great treasures,
but not the kind of treasure
that we're talking about
when we say we're looking for
the treasure of Chinggis Khan.
So with no luck
so far in Xanadu,
some treasure hunters believe
that we should look a
little bit further south,
a few hundred miles
down the Silk Road
at another place where
Kublai Khan held court.
Kublai Khan decides that
he needs to move his palace
even closer to the
centers of power in China.
And so he's going to wind up
building an even bigger palace,
thus outdoing what his
predecessors had done.
Beijing has been China's capital
for over 3000 years,
but in the late 1200s,
it's not the Chinese
who control it.
At the time, the city
is known as Shangdu,
and is the capital of
Kublai Khan's empire.
Kublai Khan really sees himself
as both Mongolian and
Chinese in a lot of ways.
He's adopted many of the
mores of Chinese culture,
and so he's going to move
to what we now call Beijing,
and build a massive palace there
as the center point to
administer his far-flung empire.
Everywhere you look,
all of the treasure and loot
and inordinate
wealth of the Mongols
is within this great
palace of Kublai Khan.
And this is of course Kublai
Khan's proudest achievement,
the conquest of China.
So if that's going to
be his new capital city,
he's going to bring
his treasury with him,
and that again is
the inheritance
that goes back to Chinggis Khan.
In 1271, Kublai Khan builds
his most over-the-
top palace yet.
In fact, Marco Polo
describes this palace
as the greatest
palace that ever was.
Its walls were covered
with gold and silver.
It has a dining hall that
could seat some 6,000 people,
and then it had
private chambers,
according to Marco Polo,
which housed treasures
including gold, silver, gems,
and the private property
of the Great Khan.
But these were off
limits to outsiders,
so who knows how much was
in these private rooms?
The cult of worship that
springs up around Chinggis Khan
intensifies under the reign
of his grandson, Kublai Khan.
At one point, Kublai Khan
is gonna go so far
as to construct
a giant eight-chambered temple
at the palace there at Shangdu,
in devotion to
Chinggis Khan himself.
And this was going to become
a site of great
ceremonial importance.
In this temple,
he's going to stock
it with several relics
that were associated
with Chinggis Khan,
along with perhaps jade
ornaments and porcelain goods.
Shangdu is where
Kublai Khan settles down
for the remainder of his rule
until his death in 1294.
After Kublai Khan,
we don't have a clear
line of succession.
The Mongol Empire effectively
tears itself apart.
Administering this
size of an empire
over this wide of an area
is all but impossible,
unless you have a very
charismatic leader,
a shared common culture,
and a willingness for
the different disparate
parts of the empire
to remain together.
And that's just really not
the case with the Mongols.
Given that this is
the primary location
of Kublai Khan
for over 20 years,
this is a really
good potential site
for Chinggis Khan's treasure.
After the Mongol
Empire falls in the late 1300s,
the Chinese retake Shangdu
and according to some accounts,
burn Mongol palaces
to the ground.
They renamed the city Beijing,
capital of a new Chinese regime,
the Ming Dynasty.
They destroy Kublai
Khan's Mongol palace
and they set up a new palace
center for themselves,
called the Forbidden City.
This would be the
administrative center
for the royal family
of the Chinese Emperor
and his administration,
and it was off limits
to everyone else.
The Mongol period is forgotten.
Those buildings were destroyed.
Who knows what happened to them?
Then in 2016,
archaeologists working
in Beijing
propose a startling new theory.
Archaeologists examining
the Forbidden City
find that beneath the palace
today are earlier levels.
They find from the more
recent Ching period,
that underneath this you
have the Ming period,
and below that there
is the Mongol period.
So it turns out that the
palace of Kublai Khan
is probably there.
It's not near there,
it's actually under the
Forbidden City today.
It's very possible that
if we explore these ruins,
that that might be the site
of Chinggis Khan's
lost treasure.
But like with a lot
of these other sites,
the Chinese government has been
really hesitant to allow digs
underneath the Forbidden City.
For one, its an incredibly
important historic site,
and it's a very large
tourist attraction.
If it's the case that
Chinggis Khan's treasure
is retained by his successors
and is brought to Beijing
to be in Kublai
Khan's palace there,
it's still possible that
it's down there today.
But unless a way can be found
to do less invasive
archaeological investigation
using modern technologies,
we're in the dark.
We're just gonna have to wait
until that day comes
to figure out
what's under there.
The influence of
the Mongolian Empire,
and specifically Chinggis Khan,
is still felt around
the globe today.
Chinggis Khan might
very well have been
the wealthiest
human ever on Earth,
and yet we've found
very little evidence
of what happened to his wealth.
After 800 years,
the lure of Chinggis
Khan's lost riches
is still driving explorers
to corners of his vast
empire in search of clues.
Archaeologists have uncovered
more ancient burial
sites in Mongolia
and a palace in Turkey
belonging to one of
Chinggis Khan's grandsons.
Nothing of great value
has been found yet,
but treasure hunters
can take heart.
There's no shortage
of places to search.
I'm Lawrence Fishburne,
thank you for watching
"History's Greatest Mysteries."