Every steppe empire that mattered put its capital in this one valley, 320 km west of Ulaanbaatar, and the reason is not only grass and water. Under Tengriism the sacred mountain Ötüken conferred the right to rule, so whoever held the Orkhon held the authority to unite the Turkic tribes, which turned a river valley into the political centre of inner Asia for two thousand years. What is left is stacked: Ordu-Baliq, the Uyghur capital; Karakorum, which was Genghis Khan’s; Erdene Zuu, the first Buddhist monastery in Mongolia, built out of Karakorum’s stones; the Tuvkhun hermitage; and the eighth-century steles to Bilge Khan and Kul Tigin, found in 1889, which carry the Orkhon script and are the earliest known writing in any Turkic language, later reinscribed under the Khitan in other tongues. UNESCO listed 121,967 hectares of it in 2004.
Central Mongolia
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