Did Ghengis Kahn have red hair?

Question

My own family are descended from the Bourtechai, the tribe of Ghengis Kahn. The tribal name means "The Grey Eyed People". According to family tradition, red and blond hair was common among the Bourtechai. According to The Secret History by Rashid Al Din, Temuchin had red hair and grey eyes. Even today, among the Mongol peoples, red haired, and blond haired, and hazel eyed people can be found who are of pure Mongol blood, although it is a very uncommon trait.

Answer 1

Did at least some Mongols have Caucasian ancestors?

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According to JP Mallory, the Chinese describe the existence of "white people with long hair" or the Bai people in the Shan Hai Jing, who lived beyond their northwestern border.

The very well preserved Tarim mummies with Caucasoid features, often with reddish or blond hair, today displayed at the Ürümqi Museum and dated to the 3rd century BCE, have been found in precisely the same area of the Tarim Basin. Various nomadic tribes, such as the Yuezhi were part of the large migration of Indo-European speaking peoples who were settled in eastern Central Asia (possibly as far as Gansu) at that time. The Ordos culture situated at northern China east of the Yuezhi, are another example.

Nomadic cultures such as the Yuezhi are documented in the area of Xinjiang from the 1st millennium BCE. The first known reference to the Yuezhi was made in 645 BC by the Chinese Guan Zhong in his Guanzi 管子(Guanzi Essays: 73: 78: 80: 81) . He described the Yuzhi 禺氏, or Niuzhi 牛氏, as a people from the north-west who supplied jade to the Chinese from the nearby mountains of Yuzhi 禺氏 at Gansu. The supply of jade[5] from the Tarim Basin from ancient times is indeed well documented archaeologically: "It is well known that ancient Chinese rulers had a strong attachment to jade. All of the jade items excavated from the tomb of Fuhao of the Shang dynasty, more than 750 pieces, were from Khotan in modern Xinjiang. As early as the mid-first millennium BCE the Yuezhi engaged in the jade trade, of which the major consumers were the rulers of agricultural China." (Liu (2001), pp. 267-268).

The nomadic tribes of the Yuezhi are also documented in detail in Chinese historical accounts, in particular the 2nd-1st century BCE "Records of the Great Historian", or Shiji, by Sima Qian. According to these accounts:

The Yuezhi originally lived in the area between the Qilian or Heavenly Mountains (Tian Shan) and Dunhuang, but after they were defeated by the Xiongnu they moved far away to the west, beyond Dayuan, where they attacked and conquered the people of Daxia and set up the court of their king on the northern bank of the Gui [= Oxus] River. A small number of their people who were unable to make the journey west sought refuge among the Qiang barbarians in the Southern Mountains, where they are known as the Lesser Yuezhi.

According to Han accounts, the Yuezhi "were flourishing" during the time of the first great Chinese Qin emperor, but were regularly in conflict with the neighbouring tribe of the Xiongnu to the northeast.

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(The above information comes from the first of the two web sites below. )

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The Tocharians were an Indo-European people who lived in the general vicinity of where those mummies were found. All that's known about them is from their writing, which was deciphered and found to be written in an Indo-European language.

Answer 2

I think you answered the question yourself.  I haven't noted any description of Ghengis to his hair color.  Apparently, he got around; a large number of people in East Europe and Asia are reported to be genetically related to him; although I can't figure out how to test 800-year old DNA.

Answer 3

yes."Persian historian Rashid al-Din recorded in his "Chronicles" that the legendary "glittering" Genghis was tall, long-bearded, red-haired, and green-eyed."

Answer 4

Why do people always give wikipedia links when the asker himself can access them too? Obviously you have to write more than that, else the asker wouldn't seek assistance would he?

Yes, I have read that in a book about Mongols. It claimed Ghengis Khan had been reported to have red hair and dark green eyes. Cengiz Han lived hundreds of years ago where intermixing between people were at its height due to immigrations, rapes, marriages so it is quite probable that he in fact did have red hair and green eyes.

Answer 5

well, If people have red colored hair and eyes now, even if uncommon, must mean that it has to have come from an ancestor. This means that red gene was there a long time ago, but is recessive in the gene pool. It is very possible Genghis Khan had red hair.