For one month, his army burned, plundered and raped with abandon. The walls were scaled, the defenders overcome, and what followed was utter annihilation. Genghis Khan – the butt of a Chinese emperor’s jokes and leader of two million illiterate nomads – brought the Jin to their knees

And still Genghis Khan waited until, in early summer 1215, with the populace at breaking point, he ordered his men to storm the city. Thousands starved within the walls and the population resorted to cannibalism. “Now they had to learn the guile of the wolf.”Īnd so he waited… and waited, slowly strangling the Jin capital in a long siege. “I had trained my men to attack with the speed of the wind,” Genghis Khan recalled. It was 12 metres high, 10 miles long and bristling with defenders ready to rain down molten metals, crude oil, even excrement and poisons onto the Mongols. Now, having arrived at Beijing, Genghis Khan faced another wall, the one surrounding the city. Instead of attempting to assault it, he simply took his army around the side.

A few years earlier, he had launched a massive invasion of northwest China, pillaging, plundering and killing on an epic scale. By the time his Mongol army first attacked Beijing in 1214, tens of thousands of hapless Chinese men, women and children had already become acquainted with Genghis Khan’s ‘talents’ as a brutal, destructive force.

Total war genghis khan