Kharkhorin

Kharkhorin owes its existence to what stood here before it. In 1235 Ögedei Khan walled a capital on the Orkhon for the empire his father Genghis Khan had built, and Karakorum became the administrative centre of a realm that reached from Korea to Hungary. It was a modest city by Chinese or Persian standards, but ambassadors, craftsmen and captives from across Eurasia lived in it; the Flemish friar William of Rubruck, who arrived in 1254, described mosques, churches and temples and a silver drinking fountain shaped like a tree, made by a Parisian goldsmith. When Kublai Khan moved the capital to Khanbaliq, later Beijing, the city lost its purpose. Ming armies occupied Karakorum in 1372, razed it in 1380 and destroyed the palace in 1388.

The stones were put back to use. In 1585 Abtai Sain Khan, a Khalkha prince newly converted to Tibetan Buddhism, founded Erdene Zuu on the ruins, building the first monastery of its kind in Mongolia within a square wall later lined with stupas. It grew into a large religious centre with dozens of temples and hundreds of monks until 1939, when it was ordered destroyed in the purge that closed Mongolia's monasteries and killed thousands of lamas. Three small temples and the wall of stupas survived, and were turned into museums in 1947.

The modern town grew beside it in the socialist decades as a district centre, with a state farm on the irrigated river flats, a school, a hospital and blocks of flats. Worship resumed at Erdene Zuu in 1990, German and Mongolian archaeologists excavated the imperial city between 2000 and 2004, and the Kharakhorum Museum opened in 2011. The valley is inscribed by UNESCO as the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape.

For Mongolians, Kharkhorin is less a town than a place of pilgrimage. Karakorum stands for the empire at its height, and schoolchildren, wedding parties and families on summer trips come to walk the ruin field and the monastery's wall of stupas. Erdene Zuu draws worshippers as well as visitors: monks hold services in its temples, people circle the wall and the stupas clockwise, and prayer scarves in ceremonial blue are tied at shrines.

The surrounding countryside is old Khalkha herding land, and the town keeps its rhythms. Families move animals between seasonal camps, cut hay along the Orkhon in late summer, and gather in July for the district Naadam, where wrestlers in open-fronted jackets compete on grass and children ride the long cross-country horse races that are the heart of the festival. Horsemanship is a matter of pride, and the valley's racing lines are well known.

Craft and music follow the same inheritance. Zanabazar, the first Bogd Gegeen and a sculptor of great skill, worked in these mountains, and the Buddhist art he shaped is part of the monastery's story. Visitors hear throat singing and the horsehead fiddle at camps and at festival time. Hospitality is formal and generous: guests entering a ger are offered milk tea and dairy at once, and refusing the bowl outright is impolite.

About 14,000 people live in the district, most of them in the town itself, which makes Kharkhorin one of the larger settlements of Övörkhangai without being anything like a city. Life runs on herding, on the irrigated farmland along the Orkhon that grows wheat, potatoes and vegetables, on the district administration, school and hospital, and increasingly on visitors: many households run a guesthouse or ger camp, drive tourists, hire out horses or sell souvenirs and dairy at the monastery gate.

The built town is a grid of single-storey shops and offices with a few blocks of flats, ringed by fenced compounds of gers and small houses. Water is drawn from wells and standpipes in much of the ger area, and coal and dung stoves heat homes through the winter, so a haze of smoke settles over the town on cold mornings. The day starts early, the market is busiest in the morning, and by nightfall the streets are quiet.

Summer transforms the place. Vehicles from the capital pass through daily, camps fill along the river, and the meadows are dotted with tents and herds. Winter is long and hard; families watch the weather for dzud, the combination of drought and deep cold that kills livestock, and young people leave for Ulaanbaatar for work and study, a steady drain the town shares with the rest of rural Mongolia.

Eating in Kharkhorin means Mongolian country cooking. Buuz, steamed dumplings filled with minced mutton, fat and onion, are the everyday dish and the festive one; khuushuur are the same filling in a flattened pastry fried until blistered; tsuivan is hand-cut noodles steamed over meat and whatever vegetables are available. Bantan, a thick flour-and-meat broth, and guriltai shul, mutton noodle soup, appear on every canteen menu. Mutton dominates, and beef and yak meat from the Khangai appear alongside it.

The white foods, tsagaan idee, come from the herds. Tarag is soured milk, close to yoghurt; öröm is the thick clotted cream skimmed from boiled milk and eaten with bread; aaruul is milk curd dried into hard pieces on ger roofs and chewed through the year. In summer families ferment mare's milk into airag, lightly alcoholic and faintly sour, and sell it in churns by the roadside. Suutei tsai, tea boiled with milk and salt, is offered to every guest.

Guests at ger camps are often served khorkhog, mutton cooked in a sealed metal churn with fire-heated stones, which are passed around hot for people to hold. The market supplies flour, rice, root vegetables, dried curds and imported goods trucked in from Ulaanbaatar, and bakeries sell Russian-style loaves, a legacy of the socialist decades.