Dynastic History | Karakorum — The Fountain Was Built by a Goldsmith Taken in a Raid

William of Rubruck, a Flemish Franciscan sent east by Louis IX of France, reached Karakorum in 1254 and found a Parisian at work there. Guillaume Boucher, a metalsmith, had been seized during the Mongol campaign of 1241–42 — the accounts place his capture at Belgrade or at Gyulafehérvár in Transylvania — by Möngke's half-brother Böchek, and carried across the continent with his wife and an adopted son who worked as an interpreter. At the khan's court he built the drinking fountain Rubruck described: a silver tree with serpents coiled up the trunk, four lions at the base, and a mechanical angel that lifted a trumpet when the drinks were to flow, each liquid from its own mouth — mare's milk, wine, a honey drink, rice mead.

That is the more useful fact about the imperial capital than its dimensions. Ögedei walled the site and built a fixed palace in 1235, after the defeat of the Jin. Rubruck's city had four gates, a quarter for the "Saracens" and one for the "Cathai", twelve temples, two mosques and a Nestorian church. A good part of its skilled workforce had arrived the way Boucher did.

Excavation has since revised the site's own account of itself. Kiselyov's Soviet-Mongolian dig of 1948–49 identified a great hall as Ögedei's palace; the German-Mongolian expedition of 2000–2004 reidentified the same structure as a large stupa temple.

The walls are grass now. A granite tortoise — a bixi, the tortoise-shaped stele base of Chinese tradition — sits in the open ground beside Erdene Zuu, tied with offering scarves.

📸 Cover: The granite tortoise at Karakorum, with Erdene Zuu's wall of stupas behind, Frithjof Spangenberg, CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons