Chinggis City

The Khentii mountains and the valleys of the Onon and Kherlen are the cradle of the Mongols. Temüjin, later proclaimed Genghis Khan in 1206, is held by the Secret History of the Mongols to have been born in 1162 at Delüün Boldog near Dadal in the far north-east of the province, one of several places claimed as his birthplace, and the sacred mountain of Burkhan Khaldun, where he offered worship, stands in the same range. None of that made a town here: for centuries the region held herding camps, monasteries and the mobile courts of nobles rather than permanent settlements.

The town itself began as the administrative seat of the Tsetsen Khan aimag, one of the great divisions of Khalkha Mongolia under the Qing dynasty. A walled palace complex of brick and timber halls in Chinese style was built for the khan's household and offices, and a market and monastic quarter gathered around it. Under the name Öndörkhaan the settlement became a provincial centre of the Mongolian People's Republic in the twentieth century, gaining apartment blocks, a hospital, schools and a power plant, while the surviving palace buildings were turned into the provincial museum.

Outside events touched it rarely. On 13 September 1971 an aircraft carrying Lin Biao, vice-chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, crashed near Öndörkhaan, an episode still tied to the town's name in Chinese history. After 1990 the state farms and herding collectives were broken up and animals returned to private hands, and young people began leaving for Ulaanbaatar. On 18 November 2013 the town was renamed Chinggis City, in the province where Genghis Khan is held to have been born, although many Mongolians and older maps still call it Öndörkhaan.

Khentii is Khalkha heartland, and the province wears its association with Genghis Khan openly: in the renaming of the town, in monuments, and in the pilgrimages Mongolians make to Deluun Boldog and to Burkhan Khaldun, a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose slopes are climbed with offerings left at ovoo cairns. In the north of the province are Buryat communities who keep their own dialect, dress and songs, and whose ancestors moved south across what is now the Russian border.

Town life keeps the rhythms of the countryside it serves. Families divide their time between a flat or a house in town and relatives' herding camps; horses and livestock are the common subject of conversation; and the summer Naadam, with its wrestling, horse racing by child jockeys and archery, is the year's fixed point. Buddhism has revived since 1990 alongside older shamanic practice, and the ruined and rebuilt monasteries of the Khentii valleys are visited by local worshippers as much as by travellers.

Manners are those of the steppe: hospitality offered without question, tea and dairy handed over and received with the right hand, and a directness that can read as brusque. Visitors are unusual enough to be noticed and generally welcomed. Russian is understood by older residents, English by fewer people, and a few words of Mongolian go a long way.

Chinggis City is a middling provincial capital by Mongolian standards — large enough for a hospital, a college and a bus stand, small enough that most residents know the same handful of shops. The town divides between heated apartment blocks in the centre and the fenced ger plots that spread up the surrounding slopes, where stoves burn coal and wood through a long winter.

Work is mostly public: the provincial administration, schools, the hospital and utilities, alongside shops, transport and small workshops. The surrounding countryside lives from livestock — horses, cattle, sheep and goats — and cashmere is the main cash crop for herding households, sold on through traders in town. Wheat and fodder are grown in a few places along the Kherlen. Mining and exploration in the province provide some jobs but little of the wealth that has transformed the South Gobi.

The concerns are those of rural Mongolia everywhere: the dzud winters of deep cold over iced ground that can kill livestock in their millions, drought and grassland fires in dry summers, the cost and difficulty of the road to Ulaanbaatar, and the steady departure of young people for the capital. Against that, the province has put considerable hope in its Genghis Khan heritage and the visitors it might bring.

Eating here is steppe eating: meat, flour and dairy, with vegetables a recent and still limited addition. Mutton and beef are boiled or made into buuz, the steamed dumplings eaten by the dozen at Tsagaan Sar and Naadam, and khuushuur, the fried flat version sold from stalls at every festival. Tsuivan, thick hand-cut noodles fried with meat and a little cabbage or carrot, is the standard canteen meal, and guriltai shul, mutton soup with noodles, the standard winter one. Suutei tsai, milky salted tea, accompanies everything.

For feasts the animal is cooked whole or in quarters: khorkhog, mutton layered with fire-heated stones in a sealed metal churn, is the eastern favourite, and the steam-hot stones are passed from hand to hand afterwards. Horse meat appears in winter, when it is considered warming, and strips of air-dried borts hang in sheds to keep the household through the cold months.

Summer belongs to the white foods, and Khentii's grasslands make them well: öröm, a thick clotted cream skimmed off boiled milk and spread on fried bread; aaruul, hard dried curd left in the sun on ger roofs; tarag, sour set yoghurt; and airag, lightly alcoholic fermented mare's milk, drunk by the bowl and pressed on guests. Wild onion and chive gathered on the steppe flavour dumplings and soups, and the market sells honey, berries and pine nuts brought down from the Khentii forests in season.