Who ruled Ulaanbaatar?

Ulaanbaatar lies in the valley of the Tuul River in north-central Mongolia, at about 1,350 metres above sea level, between wooded mountains on the south and open steppe on the north. It is one of the youngest capitals in Asia and one of the few that began life on the move: for nearly 140 years it was a travelling monastery of felt tents that shifted from pasture to pasture. Its story is that of Mongolia itself, from Buddhist theocracy under Qing overlordship to Soviet-style socialism and then democracy.

The steppe around the Tuul had been the heartland of nomad empires long before any town stood here, from the Xiongnu and the Göktürks to the Uyghur Khaganate. In the 12th century the Kerait khans pastured their herds along the river, and the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan and his heirs was ruled from Karakorum, some 350 kilometres to the west. None of these powers built a lasting city on this site.

The city's own history begins in 1639, when Khalkha nobles proclaimed the young Zanabazar the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, the leading lama of the Mongols, and gave him a camp of tents known as Örgöö, the "palace-yurt". Europeans later called it Urga. The monastery-camp moved more than twenty times along the Orkhon, Selenge and Tuul rivers before settling at its present site in 1778. It was also called Ikh Khüree, the "great camp".

After the Khalkha Mongols submitted to the Qing dynasty in 1691, Urga became both a religious capital and an administrative post of the Manchu empire, with a Qing governor from the mid-18th century. A separate Chinese merchant town grew up a few kilometres east of the monasteries, and Urga became a stop on the tea caravan route between China and Russia through Kyakhta. By the early 20th century it held tens of thousands of people, a large share of them monks.

When the Qing collapsed in 1911, Mongolia declared independence and the eighth Jebtsundamba Khutuktu was enthroned in Urga as the Bogd Khan, head of a Buddhist monarchy; the city was renamed Niislel Khüree, "capital camp". Chinese troops reoccupied it in 1919. In February 1921 the White Russian adventurer Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg drove them out, and in July Mongolian revolutionaries led by Damdin Sükhbaatar entered with the Soviet Red Army. After the Bogd Khan died in 1924, the Mongolian People's Republic was proclaimed and the capital was renamed Ulaanbaatar, "red hero".

In the late 1930s the communist government, closely tied to the Soviet Union, destroyed most of the country's monasteries and killed thousands of monks. Gandan Monastery was reopened in 1944 as a showpiece and survives. The old tent city gave way to a planned capital of ministries, apartment blocks, factories and a central square, much of it built with Soviet help.

In the winter of 1989 to 1990, peaceful demonstrations on Sükhbaatar Square led to the end of one-party rule, and a democratic constitution followed in 1992. Since then herders displaced by hard winters and the lure of jobs have streamed into the city, many settling in districts of traditional gers on the surrounding hills. Ulaanbaatar now holds roughly 1.7 million people, close to half the population of Mongolia, and is the country's political, economic and cultural centre.