Looking at the quiet town of Kharkhorin today, it is hard to imagine that this corner of the steppe was, for a few decades, the centre of the world. Here, on the banks of the Orkhon River, Ögedei — Genghis Khan's third son and successor — founded Karakorum around 1235, the capital of the Mongol Empire, the city from which a territory stretching from the China Sea to the gates of Europe was governed. Its streets saw envoys of the Pope and the kings of France, craftsmen brought from Paris and Persia, Silk Road merchants and monks of every religion. For a moment in history, it was the capital of the largest empire ever built on horseback.
Very little of that legendary city remains visible: its walls and palaces were abandoned when the capital moved to China, and later razed. But on its site, with its own stones, Erdene Zuu was built in 1585, Mongolia's first great Buddhist monastery, an awe-inspiring compound enclosed by a white wall crowned with 108 stupas. Visiting Karakorum is therefore a double journey: into the memory of Genghis Khan's empire and into the history of Mongolian Buddhism, two threads that cross at this exact point in the Orkhon Valley.
This guide sets out the essentials of Karakorum: what to see at the Erdene Zuu monastery and the Kharkhorin museum, how to make sense of the invisible ruins of the imperial city, how much admission costs, how to get there from UB and how to link the visit with the rest of the Orkhon Valley, a World Heritage Site. It is one of the most historically significant stops in the whole country, and the best place to touch — literally, in the monastery's stones — the greatness and the fall of the Mongols' capital.
Karakorum was founded as the capital of the Mongol Empire around 1235 by Ögedei Khan, third son and successor of Genghis Khan, although Genghis himself had already used the site as a base camp. For a few decades it was the administrative heart of an immense empire: a cosmopolitan walled city, with quarters for Chinese and Muslim craftsmen, temples of several religions (Buddhist, Nestorian Christian, Muslim, Taoist) and a famous 'silver tree' with drink fountains, the work of the Parisian goldsmith Guillaume Boucher, described by the Flemish friar William of Rubruck, who visited the court around 1254. When Kublai Khan moved the capital to Dadu (present-day Beijing) around 1264, Karakorum lost its central role and declined. In 1388, troops of China's Ming dynasty sacked and destroyed it. Two centuries later, in 1585, Abtai Sain Khan founded the Erdene Zuu monastery, the oldest in Mongolia, on its ruins, reusing the stones of the old imperial city; its outer wall is lined with 108 stupas (a sacred number in Buddhism). The monastery was damaged in the communist purges of the 1930s, but partly survived and today is once again a place of worship and a museum. In 2004, UNESCO declared the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape, which includes Karakorum, a World Heritage Site. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The sacred valley of the Orkhon River, cradle of steppe empires and a World Heritage Site: this is where Karakorum, the capital of Genghis Khan and Ögedei, once stood, and where Erdene Zuu rises, Mongolia's oldest Buddhist monastery, enclosed by a wall of 108 stupas.
Read the history of The Orkhon Valley (centre) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In 1235, on a meadow beside the Orkhon River, Ögedei Khan, the third son and successor of Genghis Khan, ordered walls built around the camp his father had used as a base and formally founded a city: Karakorum. For the next three decades, this remote spot on the Mongolian steppe was, quite literally, the capital of the world. From here the Mongol Empire was run. It was the largest contiguous land empire in history, and at its height it stretched from the China Sea and Korea to the steppes of Russia and the gates of central Europe, and south as far as Persia.
The contrast is hard to picture. The Mongols were a nomadic people with no urban tradition. They lived in felt gers and, in a way, looked down on the settled cities they conquered. Yet to govern such a vast empire they needed a centre: a place to receive ambassadors, keep the treasury, and coordinate the armies and the postal routes. That meant the famous yam, a relay system that let messengers cross the empire at astonishing speed. Karakorum was that unlikely capital: a walled city in the middle of the nomadic world, populated largely by foreigners brought from the conquered lands.
Above all, Karakorum was cosmopolitan. Its quarters were home to Chinese craftsmen, Muslim merchants from Central Asia, Persian officials, and European captives and travellers. Buddhist temples, mosques, Nestorian Christian churches and Taoist shrines stood side by side. Visitors from a Europe where wars of religion were commonplace were amazed by this religious tolerance. The city was where the Silk Road met the power of the steppe, a crossroads unlike any other in history.
Much of what we know about 13th-century Karakorum we owe to a Flemish friar. In 1253, King Louis IX of France sent the Franciscan monk William of Rubruck (Guillaume de Rubrouck) as an envoy to the court of the Great Khan. The mission was partly religious and partly diplomatic espionage. Rubruck reached Karakorum in 1254 and was received by Möngke Khan. On his return he wrote a detailed and very sharp account of everything he had seen, and it remains one of the best sources on the Mongol capital and life at court.
Rubruck described a city more modest than he had imagined. He remarked, with some disdain, that a French king's town district was bigger. But the city was full of wonders. The most famous was an extraordinary 'silver tree' at the heart of the khan's palace. This monumental tree-shaped fountain was the work of the Parisian goldsmith Guillaume Boucher, who had been captured in Hungary and taken to the steppe. Four serpent-shaped spouts, crowned by an angel with a trumpet, poured out four different drinks: grape wine, fermented mare's milk (airag), mead and rice beer, which flowed whenever the master of ceremonies gave the order. It was the height of the capital's cosmopolitan luxury.
Rubruck's account portrays a court where religion was openly debated. He himself took part in a famous theological debate the khan organised between Christians, Buddhists and Muslims. Mongol power lived alongside dozens of cultures, and the whole world, from Europe to China, sent embassies there. Karakorum was Asia's centre of gravity, and for a few decades every road across half the planet led to this city on the steppe.
Karakorum's splendour was as intense as it was brief. Paradoxically, the empire's own success caused its decline. When Kublai Khan, Genghis's grandson, became Great Khan and completed the conquest of China by founding the Yuan dynasty, he moved the centre of power south to Dadu, today's Beijing, much closer to the empire's wealth and population. Around 1264, Karakorum stopped being the real capital of the Mongol world. The steppe city was pushed into a secondary role, and without the court and the constant flow of resources, it began to wither.
The final blow came later. In 1368 the Yuan dynasty was overthrown in China and the Mongols withdrew to their homeland. For a while Karakorum regained some importance as a refuge for the Mongol court in exile. Then, in 1388, an army of China's new Ming dynasty stormed it, sacked it and razed it. The city that had been the capital of the world was reduced to ruins. Over the centuries its walls and palaces crumbled and disappeared under the grass of the steppe. Even its exact location was partly forgotten, and for a long time Karakorum was more legend than visible place.
We can place it on the map today thanks largely to modern archaeology. Russian, German and Mongolian teams excavated the site through the 20th and 21st centuries and uncovered the city's foundations, craftsmen's workshops, coins, pottery and objects that confirmed the chroniclers' accounts. The Kharkhorin museum now displays these finds, along with a scale model that reconstructs the lost capital. On the ground, though, what the traveller sees is not Ögedei's city. It is what was built from its stones two centuries later.
In 1585, almost two centuries after Karakorum was destroyed, a Mongol noble named Abtai Sain Khan, grandfather of Mongolia's future first Buddhist leader, made a decision full of symbolism. He built Mongolia's first great Buddhist monastery on the ruins of the old imperial capital. He called it Erdene Zuu, 'the hundred treasures' or 'the sacred jewel'. It was built with stones reused from the khans' old city, so the monastery is, literally, Karakorum reborn as a temple.
Erdene Zuu was founded during the great spread of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia, driven by the alliance between the Mongol princes and the lamas of Tibet. The monastery grew into a huge religious complex with dozens of temples and thousands of monks. It was protected by its distinctive outer wall, lined with 108 white stupas, the sacred number of Buddhism. For centuries it was one of the country's most important spiritual centres, a beacon of faith and learning in the heart of the steppe.
Like nearly every monastery in Mongolia, Erdene Zuu came close to disappearing in the 20th century. In the communist purges of the 1930s, the pro-Soviet regime destroyed almost all of the country's Buddhist temples and executed or scattered tens of thousands of monks. Erdene Zuu was largely demolished and shut down. Its core, the three Zuu temples and a few other structures, survived as a state museum, perhaps as a show of tolerance for foreign eyes. It was one of the few complexes to reach the end of communism intact, though silent.
Karakorum was not built just anywhere. It stood in the valley of the Orkhon River, which had been the political and spiritual heart of the steppe peoples for more than a thousand years before the Mongols. The Xiongnu (the Huns of Asia) had their centre here. So did the Turks, who in the 8th century put up the Orkhon inscriptions nearby. These monuments carry the oldest known texts in a Turkic language, true stone records of a nomadic empire. The Uyghurs also built their capital, Ordu-Baliq, in this valley. For the steppe peoples, controlling the Orkhon meant controlling the throne of the nomadic world.
That is why Genghis Khan and his successors chose this valley when they looked for a site for their capital. It was the sacred land of power, the place where the legitimacy of the steppe empires was rooted. Karakorum was the last and greatest of a long line of nomadic imperial centres set in the same landscape. That historical depth led UNESCO in 2004 to declare the 'Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape' a World Heritage Site. The listing covers not a single monument but a whole territory where the history of the steppe has built up layer upon layer.
And that landscape is still alive. Beside the ruins and monuments, the Orkhon Valley is home today to nomadic herders who still move with their flocks and gers exactly as they did centuries ago, in a remarkable cultural continuity. Watching a rider cross the steppe in front of Erdene Zuu monastery means seeing Mongolia's imperial past and nomadic present at the same time.
Travellers who arrive in Kharkhorin today find a modest town of a few thousand people, with its market, roadside guanz, houses and gers, set down in the middle of the steppe. Nothing about everyday life here suggests that the heart of the largest empire in history once beat on this spot. And yet the memory is everywhere. It is in Erdene Zuu monastery and its 108 stupas, built from the stones of the khans' capital. It is in the granite turtles that marked the boundaries of the imperial city, and in the museum that reconstructs its lost splendour. And it is in the hilltop monument that tells the story of the three great empires of the steppe.
After communism fell in 1990, Erdene Zuu became a place of worship again, and monks resumed ceremonies that had been interrupted half a century earlier. The town opened up to tourism and to the tours that travel through the Orkhon Valley. Kharkhorin became one of the essential historical stops on any trip through Mongolia. Here you can touch both the greatness and the fragility of human glory.
Perhaps that is the great lesson of Karakorum. This city ruled from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, received embassies from the Pope and the kings of Europe, and had a silver tree that poured four drinks. Within barely two centuries it vanished almost without a visible trace, swallowed by the same steppe that had seen it born. On its ruins, Buddhist faith raised a monastery that also nearly died, and then came back to life. Visiting Kharkhorin is a glimpse of the swing between splendour, destruction and revival that runs through all of Mongolia's history. In the silence of the Orkhon Valley you can still sense the distant echo of the capital of the world.
