# The Burkhan Khaldun *A Biography of Genghis Khan* — Legendary Biographies No. 194 - **Subject:** Temüjin (Genghis Khan) - **Written by:** Edward Forrester - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / History - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 225 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 225 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-141-3) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Theo Brackett (ISBN 979-8-90623-240-3) - **Content notes:** mass violence; sexual violence Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/194-the-burkhan-khaldun.html ## About this book August 1227, the Liupan Mountains of what is now Ningxia, China. Temüjin, around sixty, the Mongol khan who has spent the past twenty-one years building the largest contiguous land empire in human history, dies on campaign against the Western Xia. The cause is unclear: a fall from a horse the previous winter, an infected arrow wound from the Tangut siege, malaria, or — in the more sensational sources — the knife of a Tangut princess he had taken as a concubine. His body is returned to the Burkhan Khaldun mountain in northeastern Mongolia for burial in a secret tomb that has never been found. Edward Forrester's biography opens earlier — at the Onon River, where Temüjin was born around 1162, the eldest son of the Borjigin chief Yesügei — and follows the arc through the poisoning of Yesügei when Temüjin was eight, the long flight with his widowed mother Hoelun and his brothers Khasar and Begter, the killing of Begter, the early years of vassalage and the long Jamukha-anda blood-brotherhood and breach, the 1206 kurultai at which Temüjin was given the title Chinggis Khan, the long Western Xia and Jin and Khwarazmian campaigns, the 1219-1222 Khwarazmian destruction, the 1227 Western Xia second campaign, and the Yelü-trained-administration that survived him through the Yuan dynasty. What emerges is a portrait of the founder of the largest contiguous empire in human history — and the historiographical debates the Mongol-conquest scholarship has spent eight hundred years working out how to write. ## Contents 1. Burkhan Khaldun, c. 1162 2. The Poisoning 3. The Killing of Begter 4. Börte 5. Toghrul and Jamukha 6. The Tangut Beginning 7. The Jin Invasion 8. The Khwarezmian Provocation 9. Bukhara and Samarkand 10. Urgench, Merv, Nishapur, Herat 11. The Reconnaissance West and the Kalka River 12. Yelü Chucai and the Administrative Innovation 13. The Mongol Women 14. The Succession Question 15. The Final Tangut Campaign 16. August 1227 17. Ögedei and the Continuation 18. The Four Khanates and the Genetic Legacy ## Questions **Who is The Burkhan Khaldun about?** Temüjin (Genghis Khan). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Burkhan Khaldun — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 2,915 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 64,000 words, 18 chapters, 225 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: mass violence; sexual violence. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Edward Forrester is a Princeton-trained historian whose work for The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement has focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the long arc by which the modern political world was made. His detailed biographies explore how individual leaders and pivotal figures navigated the shifting tides of historical change. His published works include The Opening, The Castro Camera Storefront, The Bedroll, The Burkhan Khaldun, and The Saint Helena Exile. These volumes demonstrate his commitment to archival research and accessible historical storytelling. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he spends his free time restoring antique furniture and hiking.