Cemeteries still fascinate me. The older I get, the more their hold over me grows. All those lives–the years of work, happiness, sadness, love and hate, all now lying peacefully and peaceably under the dirt–now becoming part of the earth from which humans sprang and from which we are made. We place grand markers, often, to call our attention to remembering those who have died. Sometimes, we place no markers at all. And sometimes, those who die wish that no one ever knows where their mortal remains lie.

Take the instance of a man in Asia who lived and died 800 years ago. He wished that no one would discover where he body was after he died. His instructions were to place his body near where he was born–this much we know–but to cover up the grave site. The reasons for this remain a mystery to this day. He was wealthy and powerful, this much we know, and 800 years later his nation still celebrates his life. And that makes the mystery of his grave site even more intriguing.

We westerners usually honor our great leaders with not only praise but also with memorials. Grant’s Tomb is only one example of building a large memorial tomb to honor a hero or a famous leader. And this man was a hero to his people. He was, as at least one historian has said, not only a leader but also a civilizer. He brought a safe postal system to the land. He introduced paper money. He established religious freedom. He made it safe for foreign diplomats to conduct political and trade business within the nation’s borders. And those borders stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Caspian Sea, the largest empire up to that time in the world. And remember that this was 800 years ago. So, it makes sense to a western mentality that to find and honor this man’s gravesite is the right thing to do.

But the social construct of middle Asia is different. The honor they give their heroes is to honor their memories with less tangible methods. They have put him on their money in the modern nation, surely, and there are statues in many of the cities there, but to mark or commemorate his gravesite would be a sign of great disrespect to the man’s memory. The prevailing mentality is that if the man had wanted his gravesite memorialized and marked, then he would have made it obvious where it was to the wider public.

Instead, as his body was carried to its final resting place, those who were met on the way were dispatched by those accompanying the body. After the coffin was interred in the earth, it has been said that 1,000 horses ran over the site for an entire day in order to hide where the great man lay. Today, there are some guesses as to where he’s buried (such as some sacred mountains or a mesa or plain in those mountains), but no one knows for sure. And, apparently, that’s exactly as he wanted it.

And that’s why we may never find the burial site of history’s greatest conqueror, the Mongol Emperor, Genghis Khan.