The thunderstorm over Qinghai Lake in 1227 wasn’t a natural phenomenon. Witnesses swore that they saw a woman in black robes, her face etched with fury and grief, stride into the churning waves as Mongol soldiers closed in. A whirlpool swallowed her. But on the shore, no body washed up. Only a single, intricately carved bone skull-cup—a kapala—lay gleaming in the mud.
The Mongols declared the “Lake Witch” dead. History forgot her. Yet 800 years later, artifacts from Wuwei’s ancient alleys and tantric sites, now safely housed in a museum, whisper of a different tale about a vanished queen, a spiritual assassination, and a hidden Yogini cult born from the ashes of a slaughtered kingdom.
This story resurrects a seemingly erased historical chapter: the tantric resistance by the Buddhist Western Xia (1038–1227) against Genghis Khan (1162–1227). Scattered themes—the mysterious 13th-century cult of a dark yogini, the pervasive Mahakala worship among the Mongols and Tibetans, and the enigmatic ruins of the modern-day Kumbum Monastery’s royal temple, Gyal Lhakhang, and Wuwei’s Vajravahari cave—suddenly come together into a single narrative of resistance and inspiration. It challenges the monolithic Mongol conquest saga, revealing a sophisticated spiritual counter-offensive engineered by Tibetan Buddhist masters and a sorceress-queen, whose final act was not surrender, but strategic disappearance and a legacy of wrathful compassion.
I have been on a quest to find this enigmatic woman, from consulting with my contacts at Kumbum Monastery, one of my spiritual Gelug homes, to scouring Chinese-language sources and materials on Wuwei Museum (one of my favorite museums) about what happened to the Tangut Empire after 1227.
Imagine the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau not as a passive spiritual realm, but as a pulsating nerve center of esotericism. From the 11th century, Tangut emperors transformed their Silk Road kingdom into a Buddhist citadel, first with Mahayana Buddhism, then with tantric power. They recruited masters like Atisha’s disciple, Dromton, and later, Kagyu luminaries. Vajrayana was not just practised but weaponized. Mahakala, the fierce protector, became the state deity. Vajrayogini’s Chod rite, the offering of one’s own body, became practiced among the royals.
When the Mongol storm broke, it was not just the Tangut armies that were deployed, but also magic, curses, and divine wrath aimed at the very heart of Genghis Khan’s destiny. The Tanguts did not only fight for survival. They were waging a kind of tantric holy war.
The chronology of a hidden war
The Guru’s gambit: Sangye Repa’s “Mission Impossible” (1200s)
As Genghis Khan’s hordes invaded Xixia, the Tangut emperor, seeking more than soldiers, turned to his spiritual minister, Sangye Repa. A direct lineage holder of the great Atisha (982–1054), Sangye Repa was at once advisor and master of rituals, including those of Mahakala. The emperor’s plea was desperate: “Stop the khan, who I’ve angered with my politicking and ransoming.”
Historians record that the Mongols saw the Tanguts as standing in their way of the conquest of all Asia. But they were to become more than a strategic threat; they would become the Mongols’ most detested, eternal foe. Our theory, based on the improbability of the timing of Genghis’s death, suggests that Sangye Repa launched a spiritual offensive. Harnessing his tantric artillery, he delivered a sustained invocation of Mahakala aimed at cursing the khan himself. Monasteries across Xixia became fortresses of wrathful mantras.
For Sangye Repa, this was a grim “Mission Impossible.” It was a great karmic burden to orchestrate the spiritual assassination of history’s most feared conqueror. Yet this is a theory that Sam van Schaik (head of the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library) and Alexander Berzin (founder of the Study Buddhism website), among others, have considered favorably.
Sangye Repa, it’s said, dreamt of returning to Tibet’s pure mountains. His grim task required wielding lethal black magic. But for his emperor, for the Western Xia, he stayed.
The Sorceress-Queen: Vajrayogini’s blade (1220s)
At the heart of this tantric storm stood a royal woman, likely a princess or queen consort. History is not sure of her name, but for now we can call her the “Tangut Machik,” since folkoric sources say she was a Tangut beauty who channelled the great female Chod master, Machik Lapdron. Trained by Kagyu masters, she embodied Vajrayogini’s fierce grace. While Sangye Repa orchestrated the Mahakala onslaught, she mastered the Chod. She would dance in the moonlit charnel grounds of Yinchuan, the Tangut capital, visualizing the offering of her own flesh to demons and terrifying deities, transmuting fear into fearless compassion, weaving protective psychic shields around her people. She was the kingdom’s living Vajrayogini, a conduit of esoteric power. Her rituals were as vital as any army.
The Khan’s curse and erasure (August 1227)
Did it work? Genghis Khan, seemingly invincible and already the ruler of so much, died mysteriously in August 1227 during the brutal siege of Zhongxing (modern-day Yinchuan). Mongol chronicles are vague: illness, or a fall from a horse? Tangut whispers, preserved in Tibetan fragments, spoke of a wasting disease, vivid nightmares, a body succumbing to unseen forces. Enraged by his imminent end (and perhaps suspecting foul play beyond the mundane), the dying khan ordered that the Tangut memory be forever reviled and obliterated. “Let not a cock crow upon their walls.”
His successors gladly obeyed. Emperor Mozhu, Empress Luoshi, and the entire imperial Weiming clan were slaughtered. Yinchuan drowned in blood. Libraries burned. The Tangut script, culture, and state were systematically erased. Mongol vengeance sought to extinguish not just a people, but their memory.
The Lake Witch’s last stand (late 1227)
Amid the carnage, the Sorceress-Queen escaped Yinchuan’s fall. Her path led west, towards the high plateau and Gyal Lhakhang near Qinghai Lake, which was loyal to the Tanguts and a spiritual powerhouse dedicated to Mahakala. Here, surrounded by her lieutenants (warriors, monks, and artisans), she made her final stand. For weeks, she invoked Mahakala with unprecedented fury, weaving protective mantras over the fleeing remnants of her people. But the Mongol tide was inexorable. As soldiers breached the monastery gates, folklore says she walked calmly into the storm-lashed Qinghai Lake, uttering a final curse upon her pursuers. The Mongols saw her vanish and declared her defeated. The “lake witch” was dead.
The ghosts of Wuwei and the Sow Mother (1228 onwards)
But the kapala on the shore was a message, not a relic. My theory, aligning with Wuwei’s local legends and archaeological clues, suggests the vanishing was a masterful trompe-l’œil, a feigned death. While Mongol patrols scoured the lake, the sorceress-queen, disguised, led her tattered band, metaphorical “ghosts,” eastward along the Hexi Corridor. Their destination was Wuwei in Liangzhou. It was the Xixia’s eastern capital, and had submitted to the Mongols years earlier. Ironically, this made it a safer haven, overlooked in the immediate post-conquest fury. It was a place where refugees could blend. Here, amidst a ruined 10th-century cave dedicated to Vajravahari (the Diamond Sow, an aspect of Vajrayogini), the Sorceress-Queen found sanctuary.
The Vajravahari Cave Temple: a legacy in stone and blood-milk
Wuwei’s oral traditions, recorded by modern researchers, speak of a Pale-Skinned Witch-Queen arriving from the lake around 1228. She rebuilt the ruined temple, now known as Xiamu Si (Sow Mother Temple). Legends say she dug caves with her nails and fed builders with blood-milk. These are potent tantric symbols of creation and fierce compassion. Crucially, archaeology confirms a major reconstruction phase precisely in the early 13th century.
The temple’s treasures, now housed in the Wuwei Museum, also provide tantalizing clues: Vajravahari statues bearing distinct Tangut stylistic fingerprints and inscriptions, murals echoing Khara-Khoto’s color palette, and fragments of Chöd texts mirroring Machik Lapdrön’s lineage. This was not coincidence. The Sorceress-Queen, with her surviving Xixia artisans, had transformed the cave into a hidden nerve center for the exiled Yogini cult, a final act of defiance and preservation.
Centuries later, after an earthquake damaged the sacred site, the Yongzheng Emperor (1678–1735) renovated the cave, purposely building upon the foundations laid by Tangut’s last queen and her ghosts. This tantalizing event is recorded at the Wuwei Museum, which I visited last year. Qinghai is a place of tantric magic, and there is no doubt the Yongzheng Emperor knew something that we did not.
The Unquiet Lake
The Mongols erased their eternal foe and existential nemesis, the Tangut Empire, from the records and chronicles. But they couldn’t erase the whispers about Qinghai Lake, the tantric vibrations encoded in Wuwei’s murals, or the enduring devotion to Mahakala and Vajravahari. The story of the Sorceress-Queen—Sangye Repa’s partner in spiritual warfare, the Lake Witch who defied death, the Sow Mother who rebuilt in the shadows—is a testament to the indomitable but hidden power of tantric Buddhism to resist annihilation. Her kapala may rest in a museum, but her fierce compassion, forged in the crucible of mass death and destruction, still echoes in the mantra of Vajravahari, a defiant whisper from a kingdom the world forgot, but whose magic endures.
The quest for Xixia’s ghosts continues, one skull-cup, one moon knife, one whispered legend at a time.
Om Vajrayogini Hum Hum Phat!
See more
History of Buddhism in Mongolia (Study Buddhism)
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Tangut Time
