THE ninth Bogd Khan says he cannot remember much about the life of his previous incarnation, but no-one who met him could forget the self-styled Champion of God and Supporter of Civilisation.
The eighth god-king of Mongolia lived a life of medieval splendour in a city, then called Urga, filled with the chants of 60,000 monks and the smell of burning yak butter.
In 1919 a British traveller called Mrs Bulstrode described him as bloated, dissipated and cruel, while a Polish geologist, Dr Ossendowski, wrote that he was a 'stout old man with a heavy, shaven face with wide-open blind eyes'. His blindness was a consequence of excessive drunkenness.
A Russian who lived in Urga at that time alleged that the Bogd Khan was usually inebriated by early afternoon and his cabinet meetings usually ended in drunken brawls.
Russian-led communists who usurped his rule said he had gone blind by contracting syphilis through indulging in religious orgies.
For Mongolians, the Bogd Khan or 'holy Khan' was the saviour of the nation who had thrown out the tyranny of Manchu rule when, in 1911, the empire collapsed. He enlisted imperial Russia's protection until the Russian Revolution allowed a Chinese general, Hsu Shu-tseng, to invade in 1919, when he reduced the country to penury by exacting back taxes from 1911 onwards.
The Chinese left, only to be replaced by a White Russian, the Mad Baron Unger-Sternberg, who dreamed of forging a Buddhist empire with an army raised from the descendants of Genghis Khan.