In Search of the Khutugtu's Monastery: The Site and Its Heritage

Abstract

About 70 kilometers northeast of Mongolia’s capital of Ulaanbaatar, in the Saridag Mountains of Khan Khentii, a range that includes Chinggis Khan’s sacred Burkhan Khaldun,1 lie the ruins of a seventeenth-century monastery. The site was first reported by Russian scholars in the early twentieth century, and in 1915 a Russian expedition conducting the first Mongolian population census visited this site; however, they did not explore it. Since then, no excavations have been made at this site (figure 1)2 due to the inaccessible nature of the landscape that requires substantial technical and human resources. In addition to being discouraged by the size and physical difficulties of the terrain, scholars generally were not much interested in the research of seventeenthcentury city planning and architecture of Mongolia. Since 2010, despite scarce funding, I have excavated and studied this site, and for the past two years I have also collected and studied the oral history of the area, which credits Öndör Gegeen Zanabazar (1635–1723) as the founder of the complex. 3 Discovering the timeline of this site became my primary goal. Thus, we began our project titled “A Seventeenth-Century City” in 2013 and made a record of about ten sites of city ruins from this time period. On October 15, 2013, we decided to start off