Ulaanbaatar & Central Mongolia

The land around the Tuul river was a seat of power long before the modern city. The Kereit khans, rivals and early allies of Temüjin, camped in the Tuul valley, and the steppe east of today's capital is linked in legend to the young Genghis Khan. The city itself began in 1639 as Örgöö, a mobile monastery camp founded for Zanabazar, the first Jebtsundamba Khutughtu and head of Mongolian Buddhism. It moved many times before settling on the Tuul in 1778, and grew as Ikh Khüree — known to foreigners as Urga — a town of temples, monks and Chinese trading quarters.

In 1727 the Kyakhta treaty fixed the Russian–Qing border in the north of today's Selenge province, and the tea caravans to Siberia passed through Urga. The same year the Qing emperor ordered Amarbayasgalant Monastery built to honour Zanabazar. After 1911 Urga became the capital of the Bogd Khan's theocratic state, and in 1921 revolutionary troops under Damdin Sükhbaatar took the Chinese garrison at Kyakhta Maimaicheng on the border before marching on the capital with Soviet help. In 1924 the city was renamed Ulaanbaatar, "Red Hero".

The purges of the 1930s destroyed most of the monasteries around the capital, including Manzushir on the slopes of the Bogd Khan mountain. The communist decades built a Soviet-style city of apartment blocks and factories, and in 1961 Darkhan was founded as a planned industrial town. Since 1990 the capital has been the stage for the country's politics, including the democratic protests on its main square, and its growth has been driven by migration from the countryside.

Ulaanbaatar sets the tone of modern Mongolian life: its universities, theatres, television and pop music reach every province, and its slang travels outward with students and migrants. The State Opera and Ballet, the national song and dance ensembles and folk groups playing morin khuur and throat singing all perform here, while a hip-hop scene has grown in the apartment blocks and ger districts. The city remains the centre of Mongolian Buddhism, with Gandan monastery as the seat of the revived monastic community.

Naadam is at its grandest in the capital. The opening ceremony at the National Sports Stadium brings out the horse-tail standards of the state, wrestling and archery follow, and the child jockeys race over long distances on the open steppe outside the city. During Tsagaan Sar, the lunar new year, families visit their elders in order of seniority, exchange greetings with the younger person's arms supporting the elder's, and eat through tables laden with dumplings.

Beyond the city the customs are rural: ovoo cairns on the passes around Terelj, horse culture among herders in Töv, and farming villages in Selenge that grew up around Soviet-era state farms. Many families in the capital still keep close ties with relatives on the steppe and return to them in summer.

Ulaanbaatar has about 1.6 million people, around half the country's population. Its centre is a grid of Soviet apartment blocks, glass towers and shopping malls, ringed by ger districts where migrants have settled on fenced plots without piped water or sewers. Traffic congestion and winter air pollution are the city's defining problems, and a ban on burning raw coal in the capital, introduced in 2019, has only partly eased the smog.

Darkhan, with about 80,000 people, is the north's industrial town, built around steel, cement and food processing, and Sükhbaatar is the border and railway town facing Kyakhta in Russia. Selenge province, in the fertile basins of the Selenge and Orkhon rivers, is the region's farm country. Töv is herding country, with its small capital at Zuunmod; many of its herders sell milk, meat and airag to the city.

The capital's working day looks like any Asian city's, with long commutes, offices, markets and crowded restaurants in the evening. Weekends and summer holidays pull residents out to country cottages and camps in Terelj and the valleys north of the city.

The capital eats the widest range of food in the country. Canteens and chains serve the standards — buuz and khuushuur, tsuivan fried noodles, bansh (small dumplings, often in soup or milky tea) and guriltai shöl, a mutton and noodle soup — while the city also has Korean, Russian, Chinese and Japanese restaurants, hotpot houses and a growing café culture. For Tsagaan Sar, households steam large batches of buuz and set out mutton, rice with curds and dairy foods.

Around the city, summer roadside stalls and herders sell airag and fresh dairy, and weekend trips to Terelj often include khorkhog, mutton cooked with hot stones in a sealed pot. Wheat and potatoes from the farms of the Selenge valley add bread, noodles and vegetables to a diet built on meat and dairy.

Vodka is the most popular alcoholic drink, and Chinggis vodka, named after Genghis Khan, is the best-selling brand. Salted milk tea, suutei tsai, remains the everyday drink in homes.

In Ulaanbaatar, Gandan monastery holds the tall gilded statue of Migjid Janraisig, rebuilt after its Soviet-era removal. Sükhbaatar Square is lined by the Government Palace with its seated Genghis Khan, and nearby are the National Museum of Mongolia, the Choijin Lama temple museum, the Bogd Khan Winter Palace and the Zanabazar Museum of Fine Arts. The Zaisan memorial on a hill south of the centre gives the best view across the city and the Tuul valley.

East of the capital, the Genghis Khan Equestrian Statue at Tsonjin Boldog rises from the steppe, and Gorkhi-Terelj National Park offers granite outcrops such as Turtle Rock, riding and hiking along the Tuul. The forested Bogd Khan mountain, protected since the 18th century, rises directly south of the city, with the ruins of Manzushir monastery on its far side above Zuunmod. To the west, Hustai National Park shelters herds of takhi.

North along the railway lie Darkhan and the farmland of the Selenge valley, where the Orkhon and Selenge rivers meet near Sükhbaatar before the Selenge crosses into Russia. In a remote side valley of Selenge province stands Amarbayasgalant Monastery, an 18th-century complex in Chinese style where restoration began in 1988.