Hidden in a quiet valley in northern Mongolia, far from the busiest routes, Amarbayasgalant is one of those surprises that make a detour worthwhile. For many, it is the most beautiful Buddhist monastery in the country: a complex of more than twenty temples aligned with perfect symmetry, with curved roofs and painted eaves, built in the 18th century in the style of China's imperial temples. Its name means 'Monastery of Tranquil Felicity', and the place lives up to it: surrounded by meadows, livestock and gentle mountains, it gives off a serenity you pick up as soon as you step through the gate.
Behind that beauty lies a powerful story. The monastery was commissioned by the Qing emperors of China to serve as a mausoleum for Zanabazar, the most important figure in Mongolia's spiritual and artistic history: the country's first great Buddhist leader, a brilliant sculptor and the creator of an alphabet. It is also one of the few large monasteries that survived — though badly damaged — the brutal religious destruction of the 1930s, when the communist regime razed hundreds of temples and executed tens of thousands of monks. That Amarbayasgalant still stands, restored and active again, with young monks praying every morning, is almost a miracle.
This guide tells you how to reach this remote valley (about 6-8 hours from Ulaanbaatar, with a final stretch of dirt track), what to see at the monastery and around it, why it's worth sleeping nearby to attend the dawn ceremony, when to go and what you need to know, from the lack of ATMs to how to behave in a working temple. Amarbayasgalant rewards those who take the trouble to seek it out: few places combine so much beauty, so much history and so much peace.
Amarbayasgalant was built between 1727 and 1736 by order of the Yongzheng Emperor of China's Qing dynasty — and completed under his successor, the Qianlong Emperor — for a precise purpose: to serve as the mausoleum and funerary temple of Zanabazar (1635-1723), the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, supreme leader of Buddhism among the Khalkha Mongols, as well as an extraordinary sculptor and creator of the Soyombo script. Zanabazar's remains were moved here in 1779. The complex, in an elegant Manchu-Chinese style with almost perfect symmetry, once had more than forty temples and housed hundreds of monks. Its great ordeal came in the 1930s: during the Stalinist purges of the Mongolian communist regime, between 1937 and 1939, almost every monastery in the country was destroyed and tens of thousands of lamas were executed or imprisoned. Amarbayasgalant was one of the very few that were partly spared — reportedly because of the beauty of the complex and efforts to preserve it — although it lost many of its temples, monks and treasures. Restoration began in 1988, with support from UNESCO and private funds, and the monastery came back to life. Today it is a World Heritage Site and an active Buddhist centre once more. Our history page tells in detail the life of Zanabazar, the building of the monastery and the tragedy of the purges.
Read the full history ↓The forested north next to Siberia: Lake Khövsgöl, the crystal-clear 'blue lake', the taiga of the Tsaatan and their reindeer, and Amarbayasgalant, one of the most beautiful monasteries in the country, which partly survived the purges.
Read the history of The north and Lake Khövsgöl →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Amarbayasgalant, you have to start with one man: Zanabazar. Born in 1635 into a family of the high Mongol nobility, a descendant of Genghis Khan's own lineage, he was recognised as a child as a spiritual reincarnation of the very highest rank and sent to Tibet for his religious education. There, the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama confirmed him as the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, also called Bogd Gegeen. That made him the supreme spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism among the Khalkha Mongols, a figure roughly equivalent to a 'pope' of Mongolian Buddhism. He was only a few years old, and the religious leadership of an entire people rested on his shoulders.
But Zanabazar was much more than a church leader. He was, quite simply, the greatest artistic genius in the history of Mongolia. A sculptor of extraordinary talent, he created gilded bronze images whose beauty, serenity and technical perfection are still astonishing today: his depictions of the goddess Tara and of the Buddhas rank among the high points of Buddhist art anywhere in Asia. He was also an innovator. He designed the Soyombo alphabet, a script for writing Mongolian, Tibetan and Sanskrit, and created the Soyombo symbol, a column-shaped emblem that sums up Buddhist and cosmological ideas. Three and a half centuries later, it still flies at the centre of Mongolia's national flag. Few figures have shaped a country's identity so deeply.
Zanabazar lived in turbulent times. Over his long life, the Khalkha Mongols were caught between two great powers: the Oirats to the west, with whom they fought devastating wars, and the rising Qing Empire of China, ruled by the Manchu dynasty. Facing the Oirat threat, Zanabazar played a decisive role in steering the Khalkha towards the protection of the Qing emperors. The move saved his people from annihilation, but it also opened more than two centuries of Chinese rule over Mongolia. He died in 1723 in Beijing, one of the most revered figures of his time. And it was the Qing emperor himself who decided to honour him with a monastery worthy of his stature.
When Zanabazar died, the Yongzheng Emperor of the Qing dynasty, son of the great Kangxi, ordered the construction of a temple-mausoleum worthy of the Mongol spiritual leader's memory. It was built between 1727 and 1736 in a peaceful valley in the north of what is now Mongolia, beside the Iven River and at the foot of Mount Büren-Khaan, in today's Selenge Province. The monastery was completed under the next emperor, Qianlong, and given the name Amarbayasgalant, 'Tranquil Felicity'. Finally, in 1779, Zanabazar's remains were moved there, fulfilling the purpose it had been built for.
Imperial funding explains why the complex looks so unusual. Most Mongolian monasteries grew without a fixed plan, mixing gers, temples and buildings in different styles. Amarbayasgalant, by contrast, was designed to the strict rules of Chinese imperial temple architecture: a walled enclosure with the buildings laid out in perfect symmetry along a central axis, curved tiled roofs, painted eaves, red columns and gilded decoration. This Manchu-Chinese style gives it an elegance and balance that set it apart from every other monastery in the country. At its peak, the complex had more than forty temples and housed several hundred, perhaps even thousands, of monks.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Amarbayasgalant was one of the great centres of Buddhism in Mongolia, a place of pilgrimage, study and art, upheld by Zanabazar's prestige and by its role as the mausoleum of the successive Jebtsundamba Khutuktus. By then, Tibetan Buddhism had become the backbone of Mongolia's spiritual, cultural and even economic life: a huge share of the male population were monks, and the monasteries were the country's centres of learning, healing, trade and power. Nothing hinted at the catastrophe that would sweep over that whole world in the 20th century.
In 1921, after a revolution backed by Soviet Russia, Mongolia became the second communist country in the world, and in 1924 the Mongolian People's Republic was proclaimed. Over the following decade, the new regime drew ever closer to Stalin's Soviet Union and came to see Buddhism and the vast power of the monasteries as its great internal enemy: a rival institution holding wealth, land and the people's loyalty. In the late 1930s, that tension erupted into one of the most brutal campaigns of religious repression of the 20th century.
Between 1937 and 1939, under Khorloogiin Choibalsan, the 'Mongolian Stalin', and following the model of the Soviet purges, the state unleashed systematic terror against religion. Almost all of the country's monasteries, around seven or eight hundred, were closed and demolished. Their treasures, libraries and works of art were looted and destroyed. A devastating number of lamas were executed or imprisoned: historians estimate tens of thousands of people, perhaps between 18.000 and 30.000 or more, many of them shot in mass executions. It was a deliberate attempt to wipe out religion at the root, along with an entire monastic civilisation centuries in the making. Within a few years, Mongolia's spiritual landscape had been flattened.
Amarbayasgalant did not escape entirely, but against all odds, part of it survived. It was one of the very few major monasteries that was not completely demolished. It lost many of its temples, its monks were scattered, executed or imprisoned, and much of its treasure (thangkas, statues, manuscripts) was looted. Even so, some pieces were saved, hidden by anonymous hands that kept them safe for better times. Its partial survival is put down to the exceptional beauty of the complex and to efforts to preserve it as heritage. Of the original complex of more than forty temples, only the central core was left standing: a fraction of what it had been, but enough to keep the memory from being lost completely.
For the following decades, under the socialist regime, Amarbayasgalant stood abandoned and half in ruins, closed to worship, a silent witness to a vanished world. Recovery began to show in the 1980s, still under communism but with a degree of opening. In 1988, restoration work on the monastery began, funded by Unesco and private donors, and some of the new statues were even commissioned from workshops in New Delhi, in India, the birthplace of Buddhism. It was the first step in a slow resurrection.
The big change came with the end of communism. The fall of the socialist regime and the arrival of democracy in Mongolia in the early 1990s brought religious freedom and a revival of Buddhism, which had survived in people's memory, badly wounded but not dead. Amarbayasgalant reopened as a working monastery: a new community of monks, many of them young people and children, moved into its restored temples and took up the liturgy that had been cut off half a century earlier. Chanting, drums and ritual horns once again rang out every morning in the Iven valley. In 1996, the monastery was inscribed, together with other sacred sites, in the international recognition of its heritage value.
Today, Amarbayasgalant is both a monument and a living place of faith. Largely restored, though still far from its original splendour, it welcomes Mongolian pilgrims and travellers from all over the world who come for its symmetrical beauty, its history and the peace of its valley. Watching the dawn ceremony, with young monks reciting texts that came close to being lost forever, means witnessing the survival of a tradition that a regime tried to destroy and could not. In that sense, Amarbayasgalant is much more than a beautiful group of temples. It is a symbol of the resilience and rebirth of Mongolia's Buddhist soul, and a lasting tribute to Zanabazar, the child lama who became the genius of his people.
