Tsetserleg

The Khangai valleys around Tsetserleg were the heartland of the steppe empires long before the town existed. Bronze Age monuments, Turkic-era stones and the ruins of imperial capitals lie within a day's ride, and the pastures here were prized by every power that held central Mongolia. The town itself grew out of a religious foundation: Zayain Khüree, built by the first Khalkha Zaya Pandita, Luvsanperenlei (1642–1715), and enlarged by his successors into one of the larger monasteries of Khalkha Mongolia, with several temples, a printing tradition and hundreds of monks.

A settlement of traders, craftsmen and herding families gathered around the monastery walls, as it did at monastic centres across the country. The suppression of Buddhism ended the monastery: the sixth Zaya Pandita, Jambatseren, was killed in 1932 and the main Güden temple was turned into a museum, and the rest of Mongolia's monasteries were closed later in the decade. The surviving temples hold the Museum of Arkhangai Province.

Under the socialist system Tsetserleg was rebuilt as the capital of Arkhangai aimag, gaining a square, apartment blocks, a theatre, a hospital and schools, while the surrounding herds were organised into collectives producing wool, meat and dairy. After 1990 the collectives were dissolved and animals returned to families. The paved road from Ulaanbaatar and the growth of travel through the Khangai brought guesthouses and ger camps, and the town became a natural stop between Kharkhorin and the lakes to the west.

Arkhangai thinks of itself as classic Mongolian herding country, and Tsetserleg carries that identity. Yaks and their khainag crossbreeds are herded throughout the province, its horses have a strong reputation, and its Naadam in July is followed closely, with wrestling in the stadium, archery and cross-country races ridden by children over the open grassland. Singing, the horsehead fiddle and the long song tradition of the Khangai are still taught and performed locally.

Buddhism shapes the town's landmarks even where practice was broken. The monastery hill is a place of pilgrimage as well as a museum, with an ovoo cairn at the top, prayer flags, and a Buddha image painted on the rock face; people climb it at the new year and at other auspicious times, circling clockwise. Shamanic practice is present in the province too, as it is throughout northern Mongolia.

Manners are rural and unhurried. Guests entering a home or ger are given milk tea and dairy before anything is discussed, snuff bottles are still exchanged among older men as a greeting, and things are passed and received with the right hand. Relatives from the districts stay with town families when they come in for school terms, hospital visits or paperwork, so households are often larger than they look.

About 16,000 people live in Tsetserleg, which makes it a middling provincial capital, and the town has a noticeably different look from most of them: trees line the streets, hills close in on three sides, and the built centre of flats and offices is small against the ger districts spreading up the slopes. Work is in the provincial administration, the hospital, schools, the market and transport, together with the dairy, meat, wool and cashmere that come in from the surrounding districts.

Herding is the economy behind everything else. Arkhangai families keep yak, horses, cattle, sheep and goats, moving between seasonal camps in the valleys, and cashmere is the main source of cash income. Summer brings visitors passing between Kharkhorin, the hot springs and the Khangai lakes, which supports guesthouses, drivers and guides for a few months.

The difficulties are the familiar rural ones. Winter is long, heating comes from coal and wood stoves, and smoke settles in the bowl the town sits in during still weather. Dzud winters, when deep cold follows a poor summer, can kill livestock in numbers a family cannot recover from, and pasture degradation from growing herds is widely discussed. Young people leave for Ulaanbaatar to study and often stay there.

Tsetserleg eats the food of the Khangai, which means dairy before anything else. Yak milk gives the region's öröm, a thick clotted cream skimmed from the top of boiled milk and eaten with bread; tarag, soured milk close to yoghurt; aaruul, curd dried hard in trays on roofs and fences and chewed through the year; and eezgii, curd cooked until it toasts and crumbles, a speciality of these valleys. Suutei tsai, tea boiled with milk and salt, is drunk all day.

Meat dishes are the national ones, made with mutton, beef and yak. Buuz are steamed dumplings of minced meat, fat and onion; khuushuur the same filling flattened and fried; tsuivan hand-cut noodles steamed over the meat; guriltai shul a mutton and noodle soup. Khorkhog, mutton cooked in a sealed churn with fire-heated stones, is the dish prepared for guests and celebrations at camps around the town.

Summer adds airag, mare's milk fermented in a leather or plastic churn and drunk by the bowl, and shimiin arkhi, a light spirit distilled from milk. The forests and hills give wild blueberries, lingonberries and pine nuts in late summer, sold by the bag at the market. Restaurants in the centre also serve the Russian-influenced food of the socialist decades, and bakeries sell heavy white loaves.