Qiu Chuji

In 1219 the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan, then in his own sixties and deep in his campaign against the Khwarazmian empire, sent an envoy across half of Asia with a summons for a Chinese Daoist monk he had heard could teach him the secret of long life. Qiu Chuji, already seventy one and the senior surviving disciple of the Quanzhen founder Wang Chongyang, accepted, and spent nearly three years travelling with a small party of followers through Mongolia, the Gobi, the Tian Shan mountains and into Central Asia to reach the khan's camp near Samarkand, a journey his disciple Li Zhichang recorded in the travel diary Xiyou Ji, the Journey to the West that predates and is unrelated to the later novel of the same title.

When the two men finally met in 1222, Qiu Chuji told the khan plainly that he possessed no elixir of immortality, only methods of moderation, restraint of desire and reverence for life that might lengthen a life already being lived. Whatever Genghis Khan made of the philosophy, he was persuaded of the man, granting Qiu Chuji authority over all monks and clergy in the empire and, crucially, exempting Daoist temples and their tenants from taxation and forced labor. The protection transformed Quanzhen Daoism from one reform movement among several into the dominant Daoist institution of Yuan dynasty China, and the Dragon Gate lineage Qiu Chuji founded, still transmitting ordination today, is the direct institutional legacy of that walk across Asia.