The life of 34-year-old Cha'ergan may seem too simplistic to a sophisticated urbanite.

He has never traveled out of the 5,000 acres of grassland where he was born and has worked all his life. In spring and summer he shepherds sheep, cows and horses owned by his family. And in autumn and winter he makes yogurt and cheese out of milk and sells the cheese to business people who pay occasional visits.

He married a daughter of one of his neighbors and they have two sons. Sometimes he rides his horse and visits two or three neighboring families, who live miles away.

"I cannot imagine myself leading so quiet a life, but I also cannot help envying the sheer happiness in his eyes when he sings before me with so much passion and pride of his life and family," said Su Donghai, renowned museologist and researcher with the National Museum of China in Beijing.

Cha'ergan's community in the remote grassland is in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region where Genghis Khan's descendants have largely retained the lifestyles of their horseback ancestors.

Eco-museum

Since the shepherds divided the grassland in a large part of the region in the early 1980s while farmers in other parts of China divided farmlands on contracts in the country's reforming tide, each family works in an area of about 250 acres at most and usually chooses to live in a house built of hampered soil, or preferably bricks, instead of roving around and spending nights in tents.

"It's too cold at night in tents, especially in the winter. The greatest wish of a nomadic family today is to have a house," said Mengke Deliker, 72, Cha'ergan's neighbor who has his own one-story house.

"But it has become a worrying fact that our traditions are being lost when we abandon the nomadic life, when we get richer and imitate those we see on televisions, when all our young go to cities to receive education or to earn money. You can hardly see anyone below 30 here in the grassland besides children," said Deliker.

The shepherds call Deliker "old lord" with respect. A descendant of a Mongolian noble family, Deliker received education in Hohhot, capital of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and Beijing, worked in several cities and returned to the community after retirement.

After years of living in cities, in hustle and bustle and the monotonous routine, Deliker finds the old Mongolian traditions valuable.

He and Su are promoting a project to build the semi-nomadic community of 15 families, including Cha'ergan's, into an "eco-museum" where residents are encouraged to retain traditions handed down by ancestors and develop the economy at the same time.

The community lives around the ruins of the 1,000-year-old city of Olunsum in the Darhan-Muminggan Banner (County) at the border between China and Mongolia, about 200 kilometres from Baotou, a big city of Inner Mongolia.

Olunsum, also known as Zhaowang or Heishui in the Han language, allegedly became an Oriental capital of the Christian religion in the 13th century and later of Catholicism and Lamaism. It fell into oblivion after the 17th century before Chinese archaeologist Huang Wenbi and a team of Swedish explorers re-discovered it in 1927.

The "eco-museum" will be the first of its kind for the ethnic group on horseback and also the first for the grassland civilization.

"I am involved in the project because the Mongolians are truly admirable. They cherish a great pride of their traditions and never think the traditions inferior to the mainstream culture that makes the globe a village," said Su.

"The feeling of inferiority felt by an ethnic group, or even a nation, about their traditions before the mainstream modern civilization, has been the primary reason for the losing of traditions and for the diminishing of differences between peoples caught in the globalization and commercialization tide, as I have observed in my decade of efforts to retain the heritages of ethnic minority groups," he added.

Four such "eco-museums" have been built in southwest China's Guizhou Province to maintain the cultural heritages of the local Miao, Bouyei, Dong and Han ethnic groups. Since 1996 Su and late Norwegian museologist John Gjestrum have promoted the four projects with a Norwegian fund.

The grassland project was launched in 2000 with some funds from the local government.

Since then Deliker and Su have persuaded the herdsmen to reduce the number of sheep and cows in the community and also lobbied the county government to give herdsmen compensation for the reductions.

Grasses in the area of 5,000 acres are more than 1 meter tall now. Just as an old folk song describes, sheep and cows are hidden among grasses and they appeared only when the grasses dance in the breeze.

"Our grassland used to be like this when I was young, but now the 'eco-museum' is the only place around where you can see such beautiful grasses," said Deliker.

"We raised more sheep as our lives got better and sheep ate grass. The place was ugly years ago. Grass grew only as high as the ankle," said Abgai, head of the community in the Altaic-based Mongolian language.

With the natural ecosystem restored, the project aims at further restoring the cultural aspects of the local community, such as reviving ethnic Mongolian festivals and handicrafts.

Jesus to the Buddha

Across the grassland flows a river also called Abgai. It originates from the Yinshan Mountain ranges in north China.

"Our grassland lies between the Yinshan Mountain to our south and the Mongolian Desert to our north. The place was the military and political capital of Mongolian power in the grassland to the south of the desert in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368)," said Deliker.

In the 13th century, ancestors of the herdsmen, who formed the Golden Horde army, conquered most of Asia and Eastern Europe and built an enormous Mongol Empire.

"Where horses tread is my land," Genghis Khan (1167-1227), their leader, was documented as saying.

The Abgai River leads to the ruins of Olunsum, capital of the Wanggu tribe, who ruled in the 13th and 14th centuries the grassland to the south of the Mongolian Desert, including today's Hohhot and Baotou.

Huabur, Cha'ergan's sister, and her husband ride to the ruins every day. They have never visited a modern Olunsum, "the city" in the Mongolian language.

The site remains untouched. Last year the State Administration of Cultural Heritage consolidated banks of the Abgai River flowing by to prevent possible floods.

"We have a look to ensure it's intact," said Huabur. "It's land of the Buddha."

Huabur and her neighbors believe in Tibetan Buddhism, which prospered in this area only after the fall of the Mongolian empire.

Ruins of lamaseries, which can be dated back to the Ming Dynasty, are found in Olunsum that is 960 meters long from the north to the south and 570 meters from east to west.

However, Olunsum was the land of Jesus in the Yuan Dynasty, said Liu Huanzhen, an archaeologist and director of the municipal museum of Baotou, Inner Mongolia.

White tombstones belonging to Christian Nestorians, which bear crosses and ancient Syrian script, were scattered on the ground in the city before archaeologists sent them to local museums. In the city there are also ruins allegedly of a magnificent Catholic church.

"The tribe's belief in Christianity and later in Catholicism and the existence of a great Catholic church in Olunsum were recorded in a number of historical files in China, Rome and the Vatican," said Liu.

The tribe disappeared mysteriously after the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, though legends about it have been handed down till today.

Herdsmen in the "eco-museum," especially the young, are writing down the legends told by the elderly in the Mongolian language, said Yu Shuguang, the museum director.

Deliker has been recording the legends and also ethnic customs for a decade. His collection includes costumes worn on all occasions, various saddles, whips and stirrups, and hundreds of photos documenting festival celebrations, weddings and other customs.

"We use such saddles less and less. It's even difficult to find such things in a house in the grassland," he said.

Besides the Wanggu tribe, the grassland has witnessed a dozen more tribes, or ethnic groups, rising to power in a few decades and disappearing suddenly, like a meteor crossing the sky.

With their cultures forgotten and religions abandoned, the groups, including the Donghus of 2,000 years ago and the succeeding Huns, Xianbeis, Shiweis, Turks, Khitans and Nuzhens, left only carvings in the shapes of horses, sheep, deer, leopard and other animals on rocks in the grassland and in the Yinshan Mountains.

"There have been too many ethnic groups that easily lost themselves in the grassland," said Deliker.

"We Mongolians did not, partly because we have developed and maintained our own cultures and traditions and have always respected them in this land of variety, and we are to retain them in the modern world," he said.

(China Daily October 11, 2004)