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The Huangjinshi "Golden History" is a history of the Mongols written during the Ming 明 period (1368-1644). There are several books with this title with different content.
The first book is called Menggu huangjin shigang "The Golden Outlines of the History of the Mongols" and was compiled between 1627 and 1634 by an unknown author, written in Mongolian. Together with the Menggu mishi 蒙古秘史 "Secret History of the Mongols" and the Menggu yuanliu "The Origin of the Mongols" it is a part of the three great historiographical works about the Mongols. Its content covers - besides the origin of the Mongols and the history of the dynastic founder Genghis Khan - the final decades of the Yuan Dynasty 元 when Toγon Temür ("Tuohuan Tiemur 妥歡帖睦爾"; Yuan Shundi 元順帝, r. 1333-1368) left the imperial capital Dadu 大都 (modern Beijing) and withdrew to the Mongolian steppe until the rebellion of Ligdan Khan ("Lindan kehan 林丹可汗") against the domination of the Ming empire. The Golden Outlines give an overview of the Mongol imperial house, their relations to other steppe federations like the Oirats (Chinese: Wala 瓦剌) and the Ming empire, the propagation of Lamaism, and much more. The book was originally only extant as a manuscript and brought to Europe by a Russian scholar named Vassilijev. In China, it was only published in 1927, and translated into Chinese in 1980.
A second book of this title is the Da huangjin shi 大黃金史 "Great Golden History", written by a Mongol author named "Luobusang Danjin 羅卜桑丹津" sometime between 1628 and 1649, some scholar even postpone it to the early 18th century. It greatly focuses on the spread of Buddhism and Lamaism but also makes use of the other known sources of Mongol history. It was printed in Mongolia in 1937, and in Inner Mongolia in 1983.
A third book with a similar title is the "Golden History of Genghiz Khan", only known from an anonymous and not exactly dateable manuscript that was discovered in 1958 in a stone cavern of a tomb in Inner Mongolia. Its language is much more a kind of vernacular Mongolian than the Huangjin shigang and was probably used for the compilation of this book, at least in the parts concerning the history of Genghiz Khan and his ancestors. |
| Chapters of the Huangjinshi |
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