The year is twelve eighty, somewhere in Central Asia a crowd has gathered at a royal palace. It's loud, hundreds of people crowded shoulder to shoulder in the courtyard craning to see. The stone underfoot is cold, outside the gates a thousand horses stamp and snort and swish their tails, and the dusk they kick up hangs in the sunlight like gold flower. A young prince has arrived. Marco Polo describes him as the son of a rich, puissant king, handsome, rich, confident. And he has brought a thousand horses with him, not as a gift, as a bet. Because he's here to wrestle the princess. If he wins, he marries her. If he loses, she keeps the thousand horses. And backstage, her mother and father, the king and queen, are quietly begging their daughter to let him win. To understand what she does next, you have to understand where she came from. A place so tough that even the grass is tough. That wasn't the plan. Hi. Welcome to That Wasn't the Plan. I'm your host, Emily White. Thanks for tuning in today. And thanks for tuning into these short stories we have coming your way these days. I love history and doing the research for them, so hold on to your horses. This week is a fun one. Close your eyes for a second. Unless you're driving, of course, then keep them open. Imagine you're standing in grass that comes up to your knees. Not lawn grass, feather grass. Each stalk ends in a long, silvery plume, thin as hair, and when the wind moves through it, the whole hillside shivers and turns silver, then green, then silver again, like someone running a hand the wrong way across velvet. The wind never really stops here. It comes across the hills with nothing to slow it down. No trees, no walls, it hums in your ears and pulls at your sleeves. Under your boots, every step crushes something that smells sharp and green, like sage. That's wormwood, a wild cousin of sagebrush. Mixed in with it are little tufts of wild onion, so the whole place smells a little like someone's about to start cooking. Overhead, larks hang in the air, singing nonstop. Somewhere off to your left a marmot pops up out of its burrow, stands on its back legs, and whistles a warning, then drops out of sight. The sky here is enormous. It starts at your feet and goes all the way around you. Mongolia is often called the land of eternal blue sky, and when you stand in it, you understand why. You feel very small like a crumb on a giant green tablecloth. This is the steppe, and it goes on like this for about five thousand miles. That's eight thousand kilometers. A belt of grassland stretching across Europe and Asia like somebody unrolled a carpet and just forgot to stop. But don't get too comfortable because this place has moods. In summer, the sun cooks the hills to about thirty degrees Celsius, that's eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit, the grass goes gold, and the dust gets in your teeth and the horizon wobbles in the heat. And in the winter, it drops to negative forty degrees Celsius, which is also negative forty degrees Fahrenheit. It's the one temperature where Celsius and Fahrenheit finally agree. And what they agree on, it's absolutely fucking cold. At that temperature, the snow squeaks under your boots, your eyelashes frost together, your breath freezes in the air in front of your face before you can even finish a sentence. And out there, in all of that, are horses. No barn, nobody brings them dinner. Mongolian horses live outside all year long, in the heat and the negative forty degree cold. They find their own food. In winter, they push the snow aside with their lips to reach the frozen grass underneath, gently, patiently, like they're brushing crumbs off a table. They're small, almost pony sided, shaggy and round as barrels in their winter coats. Nobody might think to put them on a magazine cover, but they're sure cute, and they are some of the toughest animals you will ever meet. This is the land that raises everybody in our story. The horses, the herders, and around 1260, a little girl. Her name is Kat Tulun. Marco Polo wrote it as Ayaruk and said it meant bright moon. She's born around 1260, and her family tree is very intimidating. Her great-great grandfather is Genghis Khan. Her father is Kaidu, a Khan who rules a huge stretch of Western Mongolia and Central Asia. And Kaidu spends decades at war with his own relative, a man named Kublakan, Emperor of China. So if you think your families are crazy on the holidays, these guys are way worse. Kaidu reportedly had 14 sons, and the one who ended up riding next to him into battle was his daughter. So how do you live in a place with no trees, no walls, and forty degree winters? You bring your house with you, and you bring five kinds of animals. So come inside one. Duck your head, the door is low, and step over the threshold, never on it. Stepping on it is bad manners, possibly bad luck, and definitely a look from your host. Inside it's round, dim, and warm. The wind that's been screaming at you all day drops to a hush behind thick felt walls. A little stove sits in the middle, and the smoke curls straight up through a round opening in the roof where a small circle of sky looks down on you. It smells like wood smoke and warm milk. Somebody hands you a bowl of milk tea. It's salty, not sweet. Mongolian herders call them the five snouts horses, sheep, goats, cattle, including yaks, and camels. And those five animals give you everything. Sheep wool gets pressed into thick felt that becomes the walls of your home, the round tent called a gur. Goats grow a soft undercoat to survive the winter. You might know it as cashmere. Yaks and camels carry stuff when you're on the move, and you move a lot because the animals eat the grass, and when the grass runs out, everybody packs up and goes to find more. The heat in your gur, dried dung, burned in the stove. And your happy hour, arag, fermented mare's milk. It's sour, a little fizzy, and just slightly boozy. And to this day it's Mongolia's national drink. In summer, mares get milked about six times a day every two hours. So let's recap. Your house is sheep, your coat is goat, your truck is a camel, your heat is poop, and your cocktail is horse. And every one of those animals is alive and doing fine. Now, in a world like this, the big sport is wrestling. Mongolian wrestling has a rule. There are no weight classes, which means a small guy can be paired against a man more than twice his size. So size does matter a lot. And Marco Polo, who heard about Katulun, described her as so tall and strongly built that she might almost be taken for a giantess. He also said no man in her father's whole realm could beat her at feats of strength. So when it came time to talk about marriage, Cuttulon had one rule. Her and her father agreed to it. And that one rule was about to make her the richest single woman on the steppe. Here's how it worked, according to Marco Polo. Any man who wanted to marry Cuttulon had to wrestle her. If he won, she'd be his wife. And if she won, he paid her a hundred horses. And her father, the most powerful man for a thousand miles, said yes to this. He agreed she could marry whom she chose when she chose. The word went out across the kingdoms and men started showing up. One after another they came. They wrestled, they lost. One after another, their horses moved into her herd, until Marco Polo says she won more than 10,000 horses. One modern writer Hannah Jewell put it this way the Mongolian steps were littered with the debris of shattered male egos. 10,000 horses, which raises a question I had immediately. What is 10,000 horses worth? Okay, and why horses? On the steppe, your wealth had to be able to move. You can't pack a castle and you can't load a vault onto a camel. But a horse, a horse walks itself to the next pasture, it eats free grass, and it makes more horses. A horse was your car, your milk supply, and in war, your army. Mongols didn't ride one horse into war. Each rider brought three to five, sometimes up to twenty, and switched between them so none of them got worn out. They even preferred mares so the horses could provide milk on the road. Mongolian saying goes, a Mongol without a horse is like a bird without wings. So what's a horse worth in dollars? There's no real way to convert 13th century horses into 2026 money. Nobody had dollars, and a horse back then meant something very different than it does to most of us now. But here's one way to picture it. In Mongolia in late 2025, an average stallion sold for about 2.6 million turic. That's about $730. Younger horses went for about half of that. So let's do the math at today's Mongolian prices. 100 horses, what each losing suitor paid, roughly $36,000 to $73,000. The prince's thousand horses, roughly $365,000 to $730,000, and cut to Loon's 10,000 horses, somewhere around $3.6 to $7.3 million today. And horses she never had to feed because they fed themselves. She was single, she was undefeated, and she owned a cavalry. So how exactly did she keep winning? Mongolian wrestling called buok is simple. You lose if your knee, your elbow, or your back touches the ground. No punching, no choking, just grab, twist, push, and throw. The wrestlers today wear little briefs, leather boots, and a tight short sleeve jacket, and that jacket is cut open across the chest. There's a reason for that, supposedly, and we'll get there. Katalun didn't just wrestle, she went to war. Picture a Mongol army on the move, you feel it before you hear it, thousands of hooves drumming the ground, a slow rumble that comes up through your boots and into your ribs, dust rising so thick it turns the sun orange, horses breathing hard, leather creaking, metal rattling. And somewhere in the middle of all that is one rider with a braid. The Persian historian Rashid al-Din wrote that she often went on military campaigns where she performed valiant deeds. And Marco Polo describes something that sounds like a cartoon, but he wrote it down much more like a sports report. In the middle of a battle, she would ride straight into the enemy army, grab a man, and carry him back to her father. Polo says she did it as deftly as a hawk pounces on a bird. She didn't take prisoners, she collected them. Fourteen brothers remember, and a dad keeps bringing his daughter. And then in the year 1280, the prince with a thousand horses rides in. So now we're back to where we started. The palace, a crowd, a prince and his ten thousand horses. Marco Polo says the prince was so rich, so handsome, so suitable that her parents wanted this one badly. So they pulled her aside and secretly begged her to let herself be beaten. And Cut Talun said, in Marco Polo's words, that never would she let herself be vanquished if she could help it. If he beat her fairly, she'd marry him, gladly, but she would not throw the match. The whole court gathers, and Marco Polo, I promise you, describes the outfits. She walks in wearing a tight velvet jacket, he walks in wearing silk. They lock up, and for a long time Polo says nobody gains the advantage. The whole courtyard goes quiet, hundreds of people, and you can hear two of them breathing. The scuff of boots on stones, the creak of velvet against silk as they shove and twist, a horse when he's somewhere outside the gates, but nobody turns to look. Push, pull, nothing. And then she throws him. In Polo's words, she threw him right valiantly on the palace pavement. The prince gets up, deeply embarrassed and goes home to his father, without a wife and without his thousand horses. Her parents, according to Polo, were very annoyed. And from that day on, her father never went on campaign without her. And you'd think that a woman who couldn't be beaten would get whatever she wanted, and that's where we'd be wrong. Kaidu gets older and he starts thinking about who should take over when he's gone. He has fourteen sons to choose from. And he reportedly tries to name Kutalun. The brothers and the cousins were not having it, her male relatives blocked it, and she did not become Khan. Kaidu dies in 1301, and Katalun guards her father's tomb while her brothers and relatives fight over who gets what. And so what about her marriage? Remember her plan, only a man who could beat her. She did get married, but the accounts don't agree on who it was. One version says it was a man who tried to kill her father and got captured. Another says he was one of her father's companions. What the stories do seem to agree on, she chose him, and she never wrestled him. The woman who couldn't be beaten made her own rules, and then when it mattered, she changed them herself. Katalun dies around thirteen oh six in her mid forties, and that should be the end of her story, except her story was about to get a second life, and the second life was a lie. First, the steppe remembered her in its own way. Every July, Mongolia holds a national festival called Nadam. The big events are horse racing, archery, and wrestling. So here we are, July, a hot, bright sky, flags snapping in the wind, the smell of dust and horse sweat and sunscreen. Out on the open steppe, kids, some of them barely big enough to see over a saddle, race horses across the grass while crowd screams their names. Before and after each match, the wrestlers do a dance, they spread their arms and move like a falcon taking off. And the champions get titles Falcon, Elephant, Lion. Which brings us back to the jacket, cut wide open across the chest. The legend goes like this Long ago a wrestler beat every single man in the competition, and when the champion tore open their jacket and revealed she was a woman. And ever since, so it can never happen again, the jacket is cut open in front so everybody can check. Is it true? Is it legend? Nobody can prove it, and nobody can prove it was her. But if I'm a nation of wrestlers and I need a woman to blame for my wardrobe, I know who I'm picking. And meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a European writer was about to do something much worse to her than a jacket. Marco Polo's books get copied, translated, and pasted around Europe for centuries, and in 1710, a writer named Petit Delacroix publishes a collection of tales. One of them is about a princess from the East. In his version, a princess doesn't wrestle her suitors, she asks them three riddles, and if they got one wrong, she has them executed. So let's compare. The real Cut Talon beat men at wrestling and took their horses. The European version asked men riddles and cut off their heads. They took a woman who won horses and turned her into one who killed men, and it keeps going. An Italian playwright, Carlo Gozzi, turns it into a play. The German poet Schiller adapts it, and finally, Giacomo Puccini turns it into the opera Turendo. You may know the most famous song from it, Nessun Dorma, it means nobody sleeps. Puccini died in 1924 before he could finish it, it premared in 1926. Seven hundred years later, the most famous version of Catulun is a woman that she never was. But out on the steppe nobody singing opera. The wind is still moving through the feather grass, turning the hills silver, then green then silver again. Step forward and the wormwood still smells like sage under your boots. A lark is still hanging somewhere up in the sky, singing like it's never going to stop. The horses are still out there, still living outside at negative forty degrees, still pushing snow off the grass with their lips, still finding their own food. The wrestlers still dance like falcons, their jackets are still open at the front. And somewhere in that story is a girl who was told to lose, to marry the rich one, to let the boys run things. And who said no every time she could. Thank you for tuning in to That Wasn't the Plan. If you have any questions for us, you can always reach us at That Wasn'tThePlan Pod at gmail.com or go to our website, that wasn't the plan.com. I want to thank you so much for tuning in listening today. I hope you'd enjoy all the visuals that I've got in these stories for you if you're watching anywhere on Spotify or YouTube. 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