SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Red-bodied ogres dance ferociously beneath a canopy of skeletons to venerate a truly horrific monster in a one-of-a-kind sculpture at Golden Gate Park's museum of Asian art.

"Mongolia: The Legacy of Chinggis Khan," the first large-scale display of Tibeto-Mongolian art in the United States, introduces Begtse, warrior god and mythological protector of one of the world's newest democracies.

Menacing grin. Crown of skulls. Garland of freshly severed heads. Begtse brandishes a scorpion-handled sword in his right hand. He holds a human heart to his mouth with his left. His sister, beside him, rides a red lion.

"That is so cool," says a cool-looking guy, stooping to get a better look. The admirer, sporting a baseball cap and goatee, does not look like your stereotypical museum geek. But his enthusiasm seems typical of public response to this traveling display at the Asian Art Museum.

Bring the kids for a pre-Halloween treat. Shock your own imagination. Meditate on the duality of Green Tara, a golden Buddhist icon representing both wrath and compassion. Study the art of politics and manipulation by the creators of the largest empire history has ever known. Lose your capacity for exaggeration while immersed in the best that 900 years of artistic, religious and military endeavor have to offer from a part of the world that left indelible cultural markings from Vienna to Korea.

Chinggis Khan's reputation was so frightful that armies just up and quit when they heard he was coming. The artistic alliances forged by his successors rival Buddhist and shamanistic renderings in other countries with their distinctive warmth, earthiness and lithe sensuality.

The Buddhist icons of Korea and Japan - though much better known and more widely displayed than Tibeto-Mongolian counterparts - seem rigid and chunky by comparison. Much of the credit goes to Zanabazar, a masterful artist and diplomat who established the Mongolian renaissance in the mid-17th century.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of his school is the use of "cold gold," gold dust mixed with yak glue. The rough, lustrous metal is reserved for an icon's "flesh." It offsets the gleam of the more customary metal, limited by Zanabazar's school to garments and implements.

The effect is a more textured, less remote religious figurine better able to draw in admirers and uplift their earthly sensibilities. The model for many of the sculptures is thought to be Zanabazar's girlfriend, who died at the age of 18. The influence of "the girl-prince," as she was called, may explain the youthful sensuality of his works.

Tibeto-Mongolian art is distinctive for its use of coral beads and turquoise inlay. The effect is like embroidery on metal.

The baubles are best appreciated as redeeming features on burdensome-looking headdresses for women who had to dress up as cows. Mongolians, whose livelihoods depend on livestock because the soil and climate are not suitable for other types of farming, are said to be descended from a shamanistic nature spirit who mated with a cow.

So upper-class married women honored their celestial lineage by stiffening their hair with congealed sheep fat and shaping it into long, flat horns. The coral and turquoise baubles turn up on gold and silver barrettes, helmets and shoulder adornments meant to suggest the cow's prominent shoulder blades.

Though fascinatingly weird in function, they are beautiful to behold. Many of the national treasures in the exhibit have been a secret since the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. But Mongolia was among the first to break toward parliamentary rule as the Soviet Union split up, and the inspiration for taking its art on the road was born soon thereafter.

Even the Mongolian government did not know quite what it had. Asian Art Museum curators played a crucial role in restoring pieces that were locked away, in some cases, for hundreds of years in substandard conditions.

Modern Mongolian life can be glimpsed at the end of the museum journey. An authentic tent-like home called a ger stands at the exit to the three-room exhibit. It is furnished Mongolian-style, with doodads such as family photos and pots and pans and such strewn around for a lived-in feel.

The exhibit will be at the Denver Art Museum from Nov. 11 to Feb. 25, and at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., from April 3 to July 7.