Sulde

Sulde is not the name of an object. It is a word for something closer to vital force, the presiding spirit or animating power of a person, a lineage or a people, and the standard is called a sulde because it is where that power is held. Getting this the wrong way round produces the common mistranslation of the sulde as a flag, and a flag is precisely what it is not. A flag represents. A sulde houses.

The physical form is a shaft, wooden or metal, topped by a broad disc or a spearhead, with the tail hair of stallions hung in a skirt from the rim so that it moves in wind. Mongol tradition distinguishes a white standard of nine tails, associated with peacetime and with the state, from a black standard associated with war, and both are attached to Chinggis Khan in the tradition.

Because a sulde holds something, it is attended rather than stored. Responsibility for that attendance falls to named people, and the standards are brought out, dressed, offered to and returned rather than displayed continuously. That is a materially different relationship from the one a nation has with its flag, and it survives into the present arrangement in Mongolia, where the nine white standards are state property and are also, unambiguously, treated as what they are.

The standards of the Mongol empire did not come down to the present as objects. What came down is the practice of keeping them, and the ones in state custody in Mongolia today are later than the empire. That distinction is worth holding onto, because a good deal of writing about the sulde slips into treating the present standards as relics of the thirteenth century, which they are not.

What is genuinely continuous is stranger and more interesting than a surviving object would be. A sulde needs someone to look after it, and that responsibility has been transmitted, reassigned and fought over across centuries of political change. The standards passed through the Qing period, through the twentieth century, and into the ceremonial of a modern republic, and at each stage the question of who holds them was a real political question rather than a matter of curation.

Today the nine white standards appear at Naadam, the national festival, carried in procession before the wrestling and the racing begin. They are the property of the state and they are also the object of practice, and no one in Mongolia appears to find that combination odd. For an atlas of religion, the sulde is a useful reminder that the line between national symbol and ritual object is drawn by outsiders far more often than by the people using the thing.