Dynastic History | Erdene Zuu — The Monastery Built Out of the Capital

Abtai Sain Khan, ruler of the Khalkha, ordered a monastery built in 1585 on the ground of the abandoned Mongol capital, and had it built out of that capital. Stone and brick from the ruins of Karakorum went into the fabric. The proof is embedded in the walls: fragments of a Sino-Mongolian inscription of 1342 have been found reused at different points in them.

The plan called for an enclosure carrying 108 stupas, the count of a Buddhist rosary. The full 108 were probably never completed. What went up inside grew, over the following centuries, into a substantial monastic establishment on the site of a vanished imperial one.

Then the state that inherited the ground turned on it. Between 1937 and 1939, Soviet and Mongolian authorities destroyed the great majority of the country's Buddhist institutions and executed thousands of lamas; a survey made in the 1960s counted almost 941 monasteries standing before the purge. Erdene Zuu was demolished in 1939. Three temples and the outer wall with its stupas survived, and in 1947 those were converted into museums.

After 1990 the monastery was handed back to the lamas, who restored it as a place of worship. It works as both now: an active temple inside a museum precinct, with the grass of Karakorum outside the wall and the Kharakhorum Museum — opened in 2011, built with Japanese funding — holding some three thousand objects the excavations took out of that ground.

📸 Cover: The surviving temples inside the enclosure at Erdene Zuu, Bernard Gagnon, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons