The Silver Tree in the Khan's Palace, 1254
It is summer 1254. William of Rubruck, a Franciscan friar from Flanders, is standing in the courtyard of the Khan's palace at Karakorum, taking notes on a silver fountain shaped like a tree. Four silver serpents coil around its roots, their mouths pouring grape wine, fermented mare's milk, mead, and rice wine into separate silver basins. An automaton angel at the top blows a trumpet when the basins run dry. The fountain was designed by a Parisian goldsmith named Guillaume Boucher, captured during the Mongol sack of Belgrade fifteen years earlier and carried east as imperial property. Boucher and his apprentices live in a small workshop somewhere inside the palace compound. They will never go home.
William has been told he is in the capital of the world. The empire around him stretches from the Pacific coast to the gates of Vienna. The Khan he is here to convert, Möngke, governs more land than any single ruler before or since.
William looks at the small, walled, dusty city. He pulls out his report — the long letter that will travel back to Louis IX of France — and writes that Karakorum is not as fine as the village of Saint-Denis outside Paris.
The line is the most famous sentence ever written about the Mongol capital. It is also, as far as we can tell, accurate. Karakorum was a small stone town. Its walls enclosed a space barely larger than a medieval European market quarter. The empire that conquered most of Eurasia built itself a capital that a Franciscan friar from a backwater of Christendom found provincial. The improbability is the entire story. Karakorum is the geographic anomaly at the heart of Mongol history — a stone capital built on the open steppe by a people who did not build cities, used to administer the largest contiguous land empire in human history, and abandoned by the Mongols themselves within forty years of its founding. They walked away from their own creation. The greatest empire in history left the smallest physical footprint.
The Stone Capital That Should Not Have Existed on the Steppe
The Mongol World Before the City
The Mongols of the early thirteenth century were not city-builders. They were not city-dwellers. The political units of pre-imperial Mongolia were tribal confederations whose authority moved with the herds, governed from a ger — a portable felt tent — that could be struck, packed, and pitched anywhere on the steppe within an afternoon. The Khan's court was wherever the Khan was. The capital of the Mongol nation, before Karakorum, was the saddle of the Khan's horse.
This was not a primitive arrangement. Steppe governance was sophisticated, fast-moving, and adapted to a landscape that punishes anything that does not move with the seasons. Permanent stone construction was a sedentary phenomenon — Chinese, Persian, Khwarezmian, Russian. The Mongols had spent centuries fighting and trading with people who built cities, and had no use for the model. A stone capital was a tax base, an administrative seat, a place an empire's enemies could march on. The Mongol answer was to have none of those things.
The decision to build one was therefore a profound break. It marked the moment the Mongol state stopped being a nomadic confederation and started becoming an empire — a transition that almost no nomadic power has ever survived intact, and that the Mongols, in the long run, did not.
Genghis Khan's 1220 Founding and Ögedei's Construction in 1235
The site at Karakorum was first marked by Genghis Khan himself in 1220, in the valley of the Orkhon River in central Mongolia. The Orkhon valley was already a sacred political landscape; Turkic and Uyghur khaganates had centered their power there in the seventh and eighth centuries, and ruined steles inscribed in Old Turkic still stood among the grass. Genghis chose the site for what it represented as much as for its location. To plant a Mongol capital in the Orkhon valley was to claim succession from every steppe empire that had ruled before.
Genghis did not build the city. He marked it and moved on. The actual construction began under his third son, Ögedei, who was elected Great Khan at the kurultai of 1229 and committed to the project of giving the empire a fixed administrative seat. Construction at Karakorum began in 1235. Within five years, a city of stone and rammed earth had risen on the steppe, complete with a palace, a treasury, an arsenal, residential quarters for foreign craftsmen, and walls of unfired brick that enclosed a roughly rectangular site of about 1.5 by 2.5 kilometers.
The labor was overwhelmingly foreign. Mongol artisans capable of stone construction did not exist in the necessary numbers. The walls and the palace went up under the direction of Chinese architects working alongside Persian, Khwarezmian, and central Asian craftsmen, all of them either captives, conscripts, or specialists whose families had been moved to Karakorum as imperial property. Karakorum was, from its first stone, a city built by the conquered for the conquerors.
The Four Quarters of Karakorum: Inside the Mongol Capital at Its Peak
The Muslim Quarter, the Chinese Quarter, and the Palace Compound
William of Rubruck's report and later Persian and Chinese sources describe Karakorum as a city of distinct ethnic quarters segregated by trade and origin rather than by status. The Muslim quarter in the western part of the city housed merchants, scribes, and the long-distance trade networks that connected the empire to Persia, Khwarezm, and the Arab world. The Chinese quarter in the eastern part housed craftsmen — silversmiths, ironworkers, weavers, paper-makers, the practical labor force the Mongols had transferred from north China to maintain the imperial machinery. Twelve idolatrous temples (William's term for Buddhist and Daoist establishments), two mosques, and a Nestorian Christian church stood within the walls.
The palace compound sat at the southwest corner of the city, walled separately from the rest, with its own ceremonial gates. The palace was called the Tumen Amgalan — "Pavilion of Ten Thousand Tranquilities" in Chinese — and was the only large stone structure inside Karakorum. Sixty-four columns in eight rows supported its roof. Its scale was modest by Chinese imperial standards and modest by Persian standards, but it was the only building of its kind for two thousand kilometers in any direction, and it contained the silver tree.
Outside the walls, in every direction, lay the encampments of the steppe. The Khans never lived inside Karakorum for long. They lived in their movable camps and entered the stone capital only for ceremonies, audiences with foreign envoys, and the administrative business that required permanent records. Karakorum was a working tool. It was not a home.
The Silver Tree and the Mechanical Wonders of Ögedei's Court
Guillaume Boucher is one of the strangest figures in thirteenth-century history. He was a goldsmith from Paris, trained in the workshops of one of the wealthiest cities in Latin Christendom. Mongol forces captured him during the sack of Belgrade in 1241 — a city he had presumably traveled to for commercial reasons — and the empire's standing policy on skilled craftsmen kicked in immediately. Boucher was not killed. He was inventoried. He was sent east, with his family and his apprentices, across roughly seven thousand kilometers of empire, to Karakorum, where he was assigned to the imperial workshops and put to work.
The silver fountain William saw in 1254 was Boucher's masterpiece. Four silver lions at the base poured fermented mare's milk — airag, the Mongol national drink. Above them, four serpents coiled around the trunk of a silver tree, and from the serpents' mouths flowed wine, bal (mead), rice wine, and grape wine. At the top of the tree, an angel holding a trumpet was rigged to a system of bellows operated by a man hidden inside the base. When the basins ran low, the cellarer below shouted up; the operator pumped the bellows; the angel raised the trumpet and blew. Servants then refilled the basins with the appropriate drink for whichever serpent had run dry.
The fountain was a piece of imperial theater. It was also a technological flex aimed at every foreign envoy who saw it. A Mongol Khan, on the empty steppe, could command a captured French goldsmith to build a four-liquor automaton fountain that no European court possessed. The point of the silver tree was not the wine. The point was the message it sent to William of Rubruck and every other foreign visitor: this empire owns the people who built your civilization's masterpieces, and it has assigned them to decorate our wine table.
Mosques, Nestorian Churches, and Buddhist Temples on the Same Streets
The famous religious pluralism of Karakorum was not an accident. It was Mongol imperial policy. The Yassa code attributed to Genghis Khan exempted clergy of all religions from taxation, and Mongol khans patronized Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Daoists in roughly equal measure across the empire's first half-century. Möngke Khan's mother, Sorghaghtani Beki, was a Nestorian Christian, and Nestorian priests had a permanent presence at the imperial court. Möngke's principal wives included Christians and Buddhists. The Khan himself, when pressed on religious matters, gave answers that suggested he viewed all the faiths as roads to the same summit and considered the question of which road was correct to be politically unproductive.
The most famous illustration of this came in May 1254, when Möngke staged a formal religious debate at Karakorum among representatives of the four major faiths present at his court. William of Rubruck argued for Latin Christianity. A Nestorian priest argued for Eastern Christianity. A Muslim scholar argued for Islam. A Buddhist monk argued for the Dharma. The debate lasted hours. Translators worked through three languages. William, by his own account, performed creditably but did not convert anyone, and the proceedings ended with all parties drinking airag together until late in the night. The Khan declared no winner. He had not expected one.
How Karakorum Governed a Continent From a Single Walled Town
The Great Khan's Administration and the Yam Postal Network
The administrative apparatus that ran the Mongol Empire from Karakorum was almost entirely the work of foreign bureaucrats — Chinese, Persian, Khitan, and Uyghur scribes who had been integrated into the imperial service and whose technical knowledge of taxation, record-keeping, and provincial government the Mongols had no interest in replicating themselves. The Khans set policy. The bureaucrats made it work. Karakorum housed the central archives, the imperial treasury, the offices that issued the paiza — the tablets of authority that gave the bearer the right to demand horses, food, and lodging anywhere in the empire — and the headquarters of the empire's signature institution, the Yam.
The Yam was the imperial postal and relay system. It consisted of a network of stations, roughly forty kilometers apart, distributed across the empire's main roads from the Pacific to the gates of eastern Europe. Each station maintained fresh horses, food, and lodging for imperial messengers. A rider carrying urgent dispatches from Karakorum could change horses at every station and cover three hundred kilometers in a day. A message could travel from Beijing to Karakorum in five days, from Karakorum to the western provinces of Persia in roughly two weeks. No empire before the Mongols had moved information at that speed, and few would do so again until the railway and the telegraph. The system was administered, maintained, and expanded from Karakorum.
The Diplomats, Hostages, and Captive Engineers Who Made the City Work
Karakorum's foreign population was the population. The city's inhabitants, by every contemporary account, were overwhelmingly people who had not been born in Mongolia. Skilled artisans transferred from conquered cities. Foreign envoys waiting for audiences. Hostages from royal families across the empire — Korean princes, Russian princes, Armenian and Georgian nobles — held in Karakorum as guarantors of their fathers' loyalty. Christian and Muslim clerics serving the imperial court. Chinese and Persian officials administering the empire's day-to-day business.
John of Plano Carpini, the Italian Franciscan who reached Karakorum in 1246, eight years before William of Rubruck, attended the coronation of Güyük Khan there. He counted four thousand envoys present, from Russia, Korea, Persia, Georgia, Armenia, the Caucasus, the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, the Caliphate of Baghdad, and the Tibetan kingdoms. They had come to swear loyalty, deliver tribute, and witness the formal accession of the new Great Khan. Karakorum, for those few weeks, was almost certainly the most diplomatically dense city on earth — more concentrated foreign representation than any European capital of the period could have managed. Then the envoys went home, and Karakorum returned to its usual size: a few thousand permanent residents, mostly foreign, mostly working.
Why the Mongol Khans Abandoned Their Own Capital
Möngke's Death and the Succession Crisis of 1259
Möngke Khan died in August 1259 during a campaign against the Southern Song in China. He was probably struck down by dysentery or cholera in a military camp on the Diaoyu Fortress in Sichuan province. He was forty-nine. His death triggered the most consequential succession crisis in Mongol history — a multi-year civil war between his brothers Kublai and Ariq Böke that fractured the unified empire permanently. Ariq Böke held Karakorum and was elected Great Khan there by a kurultai of the steppe princes. Kublai, campaigning in China, refused to accept the result and was elected Great Khan by his own kurultai of the eastern princes a few weeks later.
The civil war that followed lasted four years. Ariq Böke had Karakorum and the loyalty of the steppe nobility. Kublai had north China, the agricultural tax base, and the grain supply that fed Karakorum itself. Kublai cut off the food shipments. By 1264, Ariq Böke had starved out and surrendered. Karakorum had been weaponized against itself; the city's dependency on Chinese grain had been exposed as a fatal vulnerability.
Kublai Khan's 1260 Move to Khanbaliq and the End of Karakorum's Imperial Status
Kublai never moved to Karakorum. He never had any intention of moving to Karakorum. From 1260 onward, his political center was at Shangdu — the summer capital, immortalized by Coleridge as Xanadu — and from 1267, increasingly at the new city he was building on the site of modern Beijing. He named it Khanbaliq, "City of the Khan," and made it the capital of the Yuan dynasty in 1271. Khanbaliq was an entirely different proposition from Karakorum. It was a Chinese-style imperial capital, built on the foundations of a former Jin dynasty city, designed to govern north China and the agricultural empire that produced the wealth the Mongols now ran on. The center of gravity of the Mongol world had shifted south. Karakorum, on the steppe, no longer fit.
The decision was rational. By 1271, the Mongol Empire was, in functional terms, a federation of four khanates that no longer obeyed a single Great Khan, and the only one that mattered economically — the Yuan — was administering China. Governing China from a steppe town was not viable. Kublai built his capital where the empire's tax base was. Karakorum was demoted to the administrative seat of one province.
From Imperial Capital to Frontier Outpost
Karakorum's decline after 1260 was slow but absolute. The foreign envoys stopped coming. The hostage princes were sent home or to Khanbaliq. The artisan workshops emptied as their craftsmen aged out and were not replaced. The bureaucratic apparatus migrated south. Within a generation, Karakorum was a regional Mongol town with a small garrison and a memory of having once been more. It functioned as the administrative seat of the Mongolian heartland under the Yuan, but the city no longer governed an empire — only a province whose capital lay two thousand kilometers to the southeast.
Through the early fourteenth century, Karakorum survived as a frontier outpost. By the time the Yuan dynasty itself collapsed in 1368, Karakorum was still standing, still walled, still inhabited — but it was no longer a place where the world's business was done. The world's business had moved to Khanbaliq, then to Nanjing under the new Ming dynasty. The town in the Orkhon valley was a relic.
The Ming Destruction of 1380 and the Stones That Became a Monastery
The Ming Campaign Against the Northern Yuan and the Sacking of Karakorum
After the Yuan dynasty fell in 1368, the surviving Mongol court retreated north of the Gobi and continued to claim imperial legitimacy as the Northern Yuan. Karakorum became, briefly, an imperial capital again — the seat of a rump government claiming to be the rightful rulers of China-in-exile. The new Ming dynasty in Nanjing did not tolerate the claim.
In 1380, a Ming army under General Xu Da crossed the Gobi Desert and attacked Karakorum directly. The campaign was punitive. The Ming had no intention of holding the steppe — the army would withdraw afterward — but they intended to destroy the symbol. Xu Da's troops sacked the city, burned what would burn, and tore down the walls. The palace compound was reduced to rubble. The civilian quarters were leveled. The city's foreign population, by this point a small remnant, was killed or scattered. Karakorum was stripped to its foundations and left to the wind.
The Mongol court fled into the steppe and did not return. For two centuries, the site was a ruin grazed by herds, with broken walls and the stumps of foundations the only evidence of what had stood there. The stone turtles that had marked the city's four corners — squat, weathered sculptures bearing inscribed steles whose texts had long since worn away — were the most visible surviving features. They are still there.
Erdene Zuu Monastery and the Literal Recycling of Karakorum's Walls
In 1585, Abtai Sain Khan of the Khalkha Mongols converted to Tibetan Buddhism and decided to mark his conversion by founding a monastery in the Orkhon valley. He chose the site of Karakorum specifically. The choice was political and theological. Abtai was reclaiming the sacred geography of the steppe — the Orkhon valley as the seat of Mongol legitimacy — and rededicating it from imperial rule to Buddhist faith.
The monastery he founded was Erdene Zuu — "Hundred Treasures." Its walls were built from the stones of Karakorum. The blocks of the imperial palace, the pieces of the wall, the carved fragments of public buildings — all of it was quarried from the ruin and reassembled, a few hundred meters away, into a Buddhist enclosure surrounded by 108 stupas along its perimeter walls. The number 108 is sacred in Tibetan Buddhism. The stones were the bones of the empire.
The recycling was literal and complete. There is no architectural feature of Karakorum that survives in its original location. The palace foundation is grass. The walls are mounds. The columns of the Tumen Amgalan are gone. But three hundred meters away, the walls of Erdene Zuu still stand, built from the same blocks, shaped by the same hands that quarried them in the thirteenth century, repurposed in the sixteenth from the architecture of conquest to the architecture of devotion. The empire's capital had been turned, stone by stone, into a temple.
This pattern — a fallen capital reabsorbed into the next civilization that occupied its ground — has parallels across the lost imperial cities of antiquity, including Persepolis, where the Achaemenid ceremonial heart of Persia was burned and its stones scattered. The Karakorum case is starker than most. The empire that built the city was not destroyed by an external civilization that erased it; the city was abandoned by its own founders, and its destruction completed centuries later by their distant heirs.
The Modern Excavations and What Still Stands at the Site
The 1889 Identification by Yadrintsev and the Soviet Excavations of 1948–49
The location of Karakorum was lost to the western and Russian academic worlds for centuries after Erdene Zuu was built. The monastery was known. The fact that it stood on top of an imperial Mongol capital was not. In 1889, the Russian explorer Nikolai Yadrintsev identified the site during an expedition to the Orkhon valley, recognizing the layout of the ruined walls and the surviving stone turtles as the remains of the Mongol capital described in medieval sources. The identification was confirmed over the following decades through comparison with William of Rubruck's report, the Persian historian Rashid al-Din's descriptions, and the Chinese imperial chronicles.
Soviet archaeologists conducted the first systematic excavations in 1948 and 1949 under Sergei Kiselyov. They identified the palace foundation, mapped the city walls, and recovered ceramics, coins, metal fragments, and architectural elements that confirmed the chronology and confirmed Karakorum's role as a multi-ethnic imperial center. The excavations were limited by the resources available in postwar Mongolia and by the political constraints of Soviet archaeology, which framed Karakorum within an ideological narrative that did not always align with the evidence.
The Mongolian-German Excavations of 2000–2005 and the Karakorum Museum
A joint Mongolian-German archaeological project conducted the most thorough excavation of Karakorum to date between 2000 and 2005. The team mapped the full extent of the city walls, excavated sections of the Chinese craftsmen's quarter, and recovered tens of thousands of artifacts — Chinese ceramics, Persian glass, central Asian textiles, Korean and Tangut materials, Christian crosses, Buddhist statuary, Islamic inscriptions — that confirmed every element of the medieval written sources about the city's cosmopolitan population.
The excavations also clarified what had stood where. The Tumen Amgalan palace foundation was conclusively located. The four city gates were mapped. The road network was traced. The artisan quarters were excavated in section. The findings now form the core collection of the Kharkhorin Museum, opened in 2011 next to the Erdene Zuu compound, which is the only place a visitor can see physical fragments of Karakorum without standing in the monastery walls.
The Atlas Entry: Visiting Karakorum and Erdene Zuu Monastery
The site sits in the modern town of Kharkhorin in Övörkhangai Province, Mongolia, roughly 370 kilometers southwest of Ulaanbaatar. The drive takes most of a day on roads that vary from paved to extremely rough. There is a small airport at Kharkhorin with intermittent service. Most visitors come on multi-day overland trips that combine Karakorum with the Khangai Mountains and the Orkhon Valley UNESCO landscape, of which the Karakorum site is the central archaeological component.
What stands today is a field of grass enclosing the foundations of the medieval city, four weathered stone turtles that once supported steles at the city's four corners, and the walled monastery of Erdene Zuu, which is the visible structure that draws the eye for kilometers. The monastery is functioning — Tibetan Buddhist monks live and pray there — and admission to its temples is open, with separate fees for the central halls. The Kharkhorin Museum, just outside the monastery walls, houses the recovered artifacts, the city plan, and a scale model of Karakorum at its imperial peak.
The honest experience of standing at Karakorum is the experience of standing on an absence. The city the Khans built is not there. Almost nothing is there. What is there is the grass, the wind that blows across the Orkhon valley as it has for a thousand years, and the white walls of the monastery built from the stones of the empire that conquered most of Eurasia. The Mongol Empire killed an estimated thirty to forty million people during its expansion. The city from which that violence was administered is now a Buddhist monastery, a small museum, and four stone turtles in the grass. The discrepancy between what was done and what remains is the most honest reckoning the site offers. Walk the monastery walls slowly. The blocks were quarried from a palace where a Parisian goldsmith built a silver tree for a Khan who governed the world. The blocks are still here. Everything else is gone.
FAQ
What was Karakorum and why was it important?
Karakorum was the capital of the Mongol Empire from 1235, when construction began under Ögedei Khan, until roughly 1260, when Kublai Khan moved the empire's center to Beijing. It was the administrative seat of the largest contiguous land empire in human history, governing territory that stretched from the Pacific coast to the gates of Vienna. The city housed the imperial treasury, the central archives, and the headquarters of the Yam postal network that ran the empire. Despite its importance, Karakorum was a small stone town on the open steppe, built and inhabited mostly by foreign craftsmen and bureaucrats brought to Mongolia from conquered cities.
Where are the ruins of Karakorum located?
The ruins are in modern Kharkhorin in Övörkhangai Province, central Mongolia, approximately 370 kilometers southwest of Ulaanbaatar in the valley of the Orkhon River. The site is part of the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape, a UNESCO World Heritage Site recognized for the layered history of steppe empires that have centered their power in this valley since the seventh century. The ruins themselves are mostly underground — a field of grass with foundation outlines visible to trained eyes — but the Erdene Zuu Monastery, built from Karakorum's stones in 1585, still stands on the site and is fully visible.
What happened to Karakorum after the Mongols left?
Kublai Khan's relocation of the imperial capital to Beijing in the 1260s reduced Karakorum to a regional administrative town. It survived for over a century in declining condition. In 1380, a Ming Chinese army under General Xu Da crossed the Gobi Desert, attacked the city, and razed it as part of a campaign against the Northern Yuan dynasty. The site was abandoned for two centuries until 1585, when the Mongol khan Abtai Sain Khan dismantled the remaining ruins and used the stones to construct the Buddhist monastery of Erdene Zuu, which still stands on the site today.
What is left to see at Karakorum today?
Visitors can see the walled monastery of Erdene Zuu with its 108 surrounding stupas, four weathered stone turtles that once marked the corners of the medieval city, the Kharkhorin Museum next to the monastery containing recovered artifacts and a scale model of the imperial city, and the open field where Karakorum once stood. The original city walls have eroded into low mounds, and the palace foundation is now grass. There are no standing structures from the imperial city itself — almost everything visible above ground is post-1585 monastic construction or modern town.
Who was William of Rubruck and what did he say about Karakorum?
William of Rubruck was a Franciscan friar from Flanders who traveled to Karakorum in 1253–1254 as an envoy of King Louis IX of France. He spent several months at the court of Möngke Khan and wrote a detailed report describing the city, the imperial palace, the silver fountain designed by the captured Parisian goldsmith Guillaume Boucher, and the famous interfaith debate Möngke staged among Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist scholars. His report is one of the most important medieval sources on Mongol life and contains the famous observation that Karakorum was less impressive than the village of Saint-Denis outside Paris.
Why did the Mongols abandon their own capital?
Karakorum's geography did not match where the empire's wealth came from. By the time Kublai Khan won the civil war of 1260–1264, the Mongol Empire's economic center was the agricultural heartland of north China, which produced the tax revenue and grain that supported imperial operations. Governing China from a steppe town was logistically impossible — Karakorum had to be supplied with grain from China to survive. Kublai built a new capital at Khanbaliq (modern Beijing) on the foundations of a former Jin dynasty city, which became the seat of the Yuan dynasty in 1271. Karakorum was kept as a provincial administrative seat but never recovered its imperial status.
Sources
* [The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck] - translated by Peter Jackson and David Morgan, Hakluyt Society (1990)
* [The Secret History of the Mongols] - translated by Igor de Rachewiltz, Brill (2004)
* [The History of the World Conqueror] - Ata-Malik Juvaini, translated by J.A. Boyle (1958)
* [Jami al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles)] - Rashid al-Din Hamadani, c. 1310
* [Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World] - Jack Weatherford, Crown Publishers (2004)
* [The Mongols] - David Morgan, Blackwell (2007)
* [Mongol Imperialism: The Policies of the Grand Qan Möngke in China, Russia, and the Islamic Lands] - Thomas T. Allsen, University of California Press (1987)
* [Karakorum: The First Capital of the Mongol World Empire] - Hans-Georg Hüttel, in Mongolia: The Legacy of Chinggis Khan, edited by Patricia Berger and Terese Tse Bartholomew (1995)
* [Mongolian-German Karakorum Expedition Reports, Volumes I–III] - Bonn University and Mongolian Academy of Sciences (2002–2010)
* [The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age] - edited by Nicola Di Cosmo, Allen J. Frank, and Peter B. Golden, Cambridge University Press (2009)
* [The Mongol Art of War] - Timothy May, Westholme Publishing (2007)
* [Erdene Zuu: A Mongolian Religious and Architectural Site] - Krisztina Teleki, Mongolian-Hungarian Joint Expedition (2011)
