Who ruled Karakorum?

In the mid-thirteenth century Karakorum served as capital of the Mongol Empire, a walled city on the upper Orkhon River in central Mongolia from which the successors of Genghis Khan governed their vast conquests. It served as the imperial seat only from 1235 to 1260, but envoys, merchants and captives from across Eurasia passed through it. Its ruins lie beside the modern town of Kharkhorin and the Buddhist monastery of Erdene Zuu.

The Orkhon valley had been the heartland of earlier steppe empires long before the Mongols. The Xiongnu, the Göktürks and the Uyghurs all ruled from this region, and the Uyghur capital of Karabalgasun stood only about 27 kilometres downstream. Choosing the same valley gave the Mongols a central position, rich grazing in what was then a warmer, wetter climate, and the prestige of following in the footsteps of earlier rulers of the steppe.

Genghis Khan gathered his army at a place called Karakorum in 1218–1219 before marching against the Khwarazmian Empire, and the city's founding is usually dated to 1220. In its first years it was apparently not much more than a camp of tents. Only in 1235, after the conquest of the Jin dynasty in northern China, did his successor Ögedei give it walls and a permanent palace, the Palace of Myriad Peace, completed within about a year.

Under Ögedei and Möngke Karakorum became a centre of world politics. Möngke enlarged the palace and completed a great Buddhist stupa temple. A captured Parisian goldsmith, Guillaume Boucher, built for him a famous silver tree, a mechanical fountain from which drinks flowed for the khan's guests. Russian princes sometimes had to make the long journey to the city to have their titles confirmed.

The Flemish friar William of Rubruck arrived in 1254 as an envoy and left the most detailed description. He was not greatly impressed, judging the town smaller than the village of Saint-Denis near Paris, but he noted its mix of peoples and faiths: separate quarters for Muslim and Chinese residents, twelve temples, two mosques and a Nestorian church.

When the empire split apart in 1260, Kublai Khan built a new capital at Dadu, modern Beijing, and Karakorum became a regional centre of the Yuan dynasty. It suffered in the wars between the Mongol princes: Kublai cut off its grain supply in 1260, and his rival Kaidu seized it in 1277 before being driven out the following year. In the early fourteenth century the city revived as the seat of a province covering roughly present-day Mongolia, and new buildings and inscriptions date from this time.

After the Yuan were driven out of China in 1368, the fugitive Mongol court of the Northern Yuan made Karakorum its residence again in 1370. Ming armies occupied and badly damaged it in 1372 and destroyed it once more in the 1380s. A Mongol chronicle reports a decision to rebuild it in 1415, but no archaeological trace of such work has been found. The site was inhabited again in the early sixteenth century under Dayan Khan, then passed back and forth between Oirats and Chinggisid princes before it was finally given up.

The Buddhist monastery of Erdene Zuu, probably the oldest surviving in Mongolia, was later raised beside the ruins, partly from building materials taken from the abandoned city. For a long time scholars disagreed over where Karakorum had stood, some placing it at Karabalgasun, until the explorer Nikolai Yadrintsev identified the site near Erdene Zuu in 1889. Excavations began in 1933–1934, and a Soviet-Mongolian team in 1948–1949 believed it had found Ögedei's palace. German-Mongolian digs in 2000–2004 instead suggested those remains belonged to the great stupa temple. Finds include paved streets, heated floors, kilns, metal workshops and coins from China and Central Asia.

The ruins form part of the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape, listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2004, in independent Mongolia.