Ulaanbaatar

Ulaanbaatar began as a monastery on the move. In 1639 a camp of felt temples was founded around the young Zanabazar, the first Jebtsundamba Khutughtu and Mongolia's great Buddhist teacher and artist, and for more than a century it travelled between river valleys as the herds did. Known as Örgöö, then Ikh Khüree, the Great Camp, it settled on the Tuul River in 1778 and grew into the religious and trading heart of the country.

When Mongolia declared independence from the Qing in 1911, the camp became the capital of the Bogd Khan's state as Niislel Khüree. In 1924, after the revolution, it was renamed Ulaanbaatar, Red Hero. The socialist decades that followed reshaped it with Soviet-style avenues and apartment blocks, and the purges of the late 1930s closed or destroyed almost every monastery in the country. The city you see now layers all of it: temples that survived, a square built for parades, glass towers, and ger districts housing the families who keep arriving from the countryside.

Gandan Monastery, founded in 1809 and at its present site since 1838, was closed in 1938 and reopened in 1944 as the only monastery allowed to function under socialism. Its white temple now holds Migjid Janraisig, a 26.5-metre gilded statue dedicated in 1996 to replace the original taken to the Soviet Union in 1938. Near the centre, the Choijin Lama Temple of 1908 keeps its tsam dance masks and thangka paintings intact among the office blocks.

South of the river, the Bogd Khan Palace Museum preserves the winter residence of Mongolia's last theocratic ruler, built between 1893 and 1903 and turned into a museum in 1926, which is why it survived. The Chinggis Khaan National Museum, opened in October 2022 behind Sükhbaatar Square, traces the plateau from the Xiongnu to the early twentieth century through more than 10,000 exhibits, and the Natural History Museum holds the Tarbosaurus bataar skeleton returned from the United States in 2013.

Few capitals sit so close to wild country. Bogd Khan Uul, the forested mountain along the city's southern edge, was placed under protection in 1778 and is often cited as one of the oldest protected areas in the world. It became a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1996 and still shelters musk deer, roe deer and sable within sight of the city. An hour and a half west, reintroduced takhi, Przewalski's horses, graze the steppe of Hustai National Park.

The pressures are just as visible. About half the city's residents live in ger districts, many of them families who lost herds in severe dzud winters, and the coal and briquettes that heat those homes make Ulaanbaatar's winter air among the most polluted of any capital. A ban on raw coal in 2019 brought real improvement, but smog returned on most days of the 2025 to 2026 winter. In August 2026 the city hosted the UN desertification conference, COP17, at which Mongolia's government said nearly 77 percent of its land is already degraded.