Ulaanbaatar baffles and hooks you at the same time. It is a young, chaotic capital set down in the middle of the steppe at 1.300 metres, where a single block can hold an incense-filled Buddhist monastery, a monument to Soviet soldiers, a glass office tower and a row of gers with smoke curling from their chimneys. Almost half of all Mongolians live here, many of them herders who have left nomadic life in recent decades and now live in the huge 'yurt districts' that climb the hillsides. To understand UB is to understand today's Mongolia: a country tiny in population and vast in territory, wedged between Russia and China, which in thirty years went from communism to a lively democracy and an economy driven by mining.
For travellers, UB is above all the gateway and the headquarters. It is where you land, change money, buy a SIM card, hire the 4x4 with a driver and put together your trip into the interior. But it would be a mistake to treat it as just a stopover: it has the country's best museum for understanding Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, Gandan Monastery with its colossal golden Buddha, vibrant markets, a growing food scene and surprising nightlife. And from here, in just one or two hours by car, you reach the open steppe, the wild horses of Khustain and the rocks of Terelj National Park.
This guide lays out the essentials of the capital in a practical, friendly way: what to see without wearing yourself out, how to get around, where to change money and hire transport to the interior, when the great Naadam festival falls, and what you need to know about the language, the cold and the altitude before you set off into the steppe. UB is not a pretty city in the classic sense, but it is the heartbeat of a fascinating country and the best place to take Mongolia's pulse before losing yourself in its vastness.
The Tuul valley was home to nomads from ancient times, but the city was born in 1639 as a travelling Buddhist monastery called Örgöö ('palace-tent'), the seat of the young Zanabazar, the first Bogd Gegen or spiritual leader of Mongolian Buddhism. For almost two centuries the monastic camp moved dozens of times across the steppe until it settled on its present site at the end of the 18th century, under the name Ikh Khüree ('the great monastery'); Russians and Chinese called it Urga. It was a key religious and trading centre on the tea route between China and Russia. In 1911, with the fall of the Qing dynasty, Mongolia declared independence under the Bogd Khan, its last theocratic ruler. After the 1921 revolution, led by the hero Damdin Sükhbaatar with Soviet support, and the death of the Bogd Khan in 1924, the Mongolian People's Republic was proclaimed, the second communist nation in the world, and the city was renamed Ulaanbaatar, 'Red Hero'. Under the pro-Soviet regime, the purges of the 1930s destroyed hundreds of monasteries and tens of thousands of monks were executed. In 1990, a peaceful democratic revolution ended seven decades of communism and opened the country to the world. Since then UB has grown explosively and haphazardly, driven by rural migration and the mining boom. The full story, from Zanabazar's camp to today's capital, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of the country: Ulaanbaatar, the capital born from a nomadic monastery and today Mongolia's only big city, surrounded by steppes and parks where the wild Przewalski's horse still grazes and where the world's largest equestrian statue, dedicated to Genghis Khan, stands.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Almost no capital in the world began the way Ulaanbaatar did: not as a fortress, a port or a crossroads, but as a monastery on the move. In 1639, Mongol nobles gathered in assembly recognised a four-year-old boy, Zanabazar, as the reincarnation of a great lama and the first Bogd Gegen, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia. Around his residence grew a camp of tents and gers that worked as a travelling monastery, called Örgöö, 'the palace-tent'. In a country of nomads, even the capital was nomadic.
For almost a century and a half, that monastic camp moved again and again through the valleys of central Mongolia (historians count more than twenty relocations) in search of pasture, water and safety, and following the ups and downs of steppe politics. Only in the late 18th century, around 1778, did the great monastery settle for good on its present site, in the valley of the Tuul River, at the foot of the sacred mountain Bogd Khan Uul. There grew Ikh Khüree, 'the great enclosure', a city of temples, gers and workshops that foreigners knew as Urga.
Zanabazar, the boy who became a religious leader, was much more than a high cleric: he is the great artist of Mongolian history, a brilliant sculptor whose gilded figures of Buddhas and Taras, perfectly serene, are kept today in the city's museums. Under his influence, Urga became the spiritual heart of Mongolia and a trading hub on the tea route linking China with Siberia, travelled by camel caravans loaded with tea bricks, silks and furs.
Throughout the 19th century, Urga was a strange and fascinating city, split into very different quarters. There was the sacred precinct of the monasteries, with thousands of monks in maroon robes; there was the Chinese merchant quarter, Maimaicheng, with its shops and moneylenders; there were the ger camps of nomads and officials. Mongolia was then part of the Qing empire, the Manchu dynasty that ruled China, and Urga had a Chinese governor alongside the Buddhist leader.
Buddhism ruled daily life: it is estimated that in the early 20th century almost a third of Mongolian men were monks, and the great monasteries held enormous wealth and power. It was a theocratic, poor and isolated society, but with a very strong identity rooted in nomadism, the horse and the Buddhist faith. The city had no walls and hardly any stone buildings: it was largely a sea of felt tents that could be taken down and moved.
When the Qing empire collapsed in 1911, Mongolian nobles and lamas saw their chance. They declared Mongolia's independence and crowned the eighth Bogd Gegen, the highest Buddhist leader, as Bogd Khan, theocratic monarch of a new state. Urga became the capital of a sovereign Mongolia for the first time in centuries. But it was a fragile independence, contested between a China that did not recognise it and a tsarist Russia that used it as a sphere of influence. The Bogd Khan's court, half sacred and half decadent, would last only a decade before the storm of the 20th century hit the city.
The chaos that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917 swept Mongolia along with it. Between 1919 and 1921, Urga was occupied first by Chinese troops and then by a White Russian army led by Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a fanatical and bloodthirsty aristocrat who dreamed of restoring empires and spread terror through the city. Against that backdrop, a small group of Mongolian revolutionaries emerged with Bolshevik support, led by a young military commander named Damdin Sükhbaatar.
In 1921, Sükhbaatar's forces, together with the Soviet Red Army, took Urga and drove out Ungern, who was captured and shot. A revolutionary government was set up which, for a few years, kept the Bogd Khan as a symbolic monarch. But when the Buddhist leader died in 1924, the monarchy was abolished and the Mongolian People's Republic was proclaimed, the second communist state in the world after the Soviet Union. That same year, Urga was renamed Ulaanbaatar, 'Red Hero', in honour of Sükhbaatar, who had died young in 1923 and became the father of the nation.
The equestrian statue of Sükhbaatar that today presides over the city's central square, which bears his name, marks the spot where tradition places the proclamation of independence. With the new republic, Ulaanbaatar stopped being a city of tents and slowly began to turn into a modern Soviet-style capital: with avenues, government buildings, schools and, later, the concrete apartment blocks that still dominate the centre today.
The communist period had a bright side and an atrocious one. On the one hand, Mongolia went from an almost feudal, illiterate society to a country with schools, hospitals, industry and near-universal literacy; the Cyrillic alphabet was adopted and Ulaanbaatar filled up with modern institutions. On the other, the pro-Soviet regime, above all under the dictator Khorloogiin Choibalsan, unleashed brutal repression in the second half of the 1930s.
In the name of the fight against religious 'feudalism', the state destroyed virtually all the country's Buddhist monasteries (hundreds of temples razed) and executed tens of thousands of people, many of them monks, as well as nobles, intellectuals and alleged political enemies. It is one of the darkest chapters in Mongolian history, comparable in proportion to the great Soviet purges. Of the vast monastic world that had given birth to the city, only a shadow remained: Gandan monastery half survived, closed and later tolerated as a showcase for foreigners.
During the Cold War, Ulaanbaatar was the capital of a loyal Soviet satellite, wedged between the USSR and communist China, with which Mongolia had a tense relationship. The city grew to Soviet plans: Sükhbaatar Square as the civic centre, the National University, the opera house, the microrayon housing districts. The Zaisan Memorial, with its socialist realist mosaic, went up in 1971 to celebrate friendship with the USSR. It was an orderly, grey and controlled capital, very different from today's lively chaos.
In the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union was cracking apart, the winds of change reached Mongolia too. In the winter of 1989-1990, young activists began demonstrating in Sükhbaatar Square, calling for democracy and freedom. There were hunger strikes and huge rallies in the depths of the extreme cold. Unlike in other places, the transition was peaceful: the communist government accepted the demands, the Politburo resigned and in 1990 the first free elections were held. Mongolia became a parliamentary democracy and embraced the market economy.
The end of communism transformed Ulaanbaatar at dizzying speed. The withdrawal of Soviet aid brought years of severe crisis and shortages, but it also opened the country to the world. Monasteries were reborn, the great Migjid Janraisig Buddha at Gandan was rebuilt (inaugurated in 1996 with donations from ordinary people), and Genghis Khan, taboo under communism for fear of nationalism, returned to the centre of national identity: his face appeared on banknotes, at the airport and in the great statue on the central square.
The other great transformation was demographic. From the 1990s, and even more after catastrophic winters (the dzud, which killed millions of animals), hundreds of thousands of ruined herders migrated to the capital and pitched their gers on the hillsides. That is how the huge 'ger districts' were born, which today house a large share of UB's population, without adequate services and with the chronic problem of winter pollution from coal stoves. The city, designed for a few hundred thousand inhabitants, passed a million and a half.
21st-century Ulaanbaatar is a city of dizzying contrasts. The mining boom (copper and gold from Oyu Tolgoi, coal from Tavan Tolgoi) filled the centre with money and glass towers, next to the old Soviet blocks and the rebuilt monasteries. There are luxury shopping centres, speciality cafés, a vibrant art and music scene and hyperconnected young people, just a few metres from districts without running water. It is a noisy and sometimes turbulent democracy, shaken by corruption scandals and by the challenge of sharing out the mining wealth.
The problems are huge: winter air pollution, among the worst in the world; gridlocked traffic; inequality; dependence on two giant neighbours, Russia and China, between which Mongolia balances with its 'third neighbour' policy of moving closer to the West, Japan and Korea. But the city brims with energy and national pride. In 2021 the new Chinggis Khaan International Airport opened, and in 2022 the imposing Chinggis Khaan Museum, a sign of a capital that wants to tell the world its own story.
For travellers, understanding Ulaanbaatar is the best key to understanding all of Mongolia: a country tiny in population and immense in territory, heir to the largest empire in history, which in barely a century went from Buddhist theocracy to Soviet communism and from there to a market democracy. In the same square where a monk-artist founded a travelling monastery, Genghis Khan now gazes from his bronze throne towards a horizon of towers, gers and endless steppe. Few capitals pack so much history into so little time.
