This BBC story jumped off the screen at me this morning:

Mongolia has moved to register the name of its legendary conqueror Genghis Khan as a commercial brand.

The parliament in Ulan Bator is debating a law that
would allow the Mongolian government to license the use of his name and
image.

   This is a possible outcome of the moves in China to establish a "standard image" of Confucius, which have been criticized as the first step of a branding strategy.  The Mongolians are also trying to establish a single, trade-markable, portrait:

The law would allow the government to set fees for the
use of Genghis Khan’s name. It would also permit the Mongolian
President to select one official portrait from the 10 in use and define
which bodies could use this image.

     None of this is surprising of course: it is how global capitalism works.  Everything is reduced to a commodity, even the images of famous people; culture is viable only to the extent that it can be "branded" and sold in global markets.  Confucius and Genghis are being branded now (I wonder if, in the case of Confucius, the trade-markers will try to demand that only one interpretation of "Confucian" thought is "genuine," and others that use the "Confucian" brand name will be liable to legal suit for trademark infringement….).  Will Chuang Tzu be next?  How about Lao Tzu?  Can you create a "standard image" and brand of a person who never existed?

     As I think of it, though, Genghis Khan might be quite appropriate for adaptation into global capital: he was always something of a transnational presence.