Mapping Yekhe Khüriye’s Cityscape as the “Capital City” 

Yekhe Khüriye or Urga 

The painting depicts the preeminent Mongolian Buddhist monastery of the Jibzundamba reincarnate rulers (Mongolian: Khutugtu).1 Yekhe Khüriye (Classical Mongolian: Yeke Küriy-e, also spelled Ikh Khüree; modern-day Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia), known to foreign visitors as Urga, is shown in a panoramic bird’s-eye view.2 This perspective from above is often used in depicting cityscapes and in architectural drawings in Inner and East Asia. A number of architectural representations provide specific views on the hierarchical organization of the towns.3 Important pilgrimage sites, such as Wutaishan and Lhasa, received significant attention from the artists and their patrons (fig. 2). The title of this map is Capital Yekhe Khüriye, and as it was produced soon after Mongolia’s independence from the Qing Empire in 1911, the map was a part of a larger Mongolian nation-building project, and a royal commission to promote the Khalkha Mongolian monastery as a pilgrimage site, a religious and political center of Mongolia.

Jügdür, an artist from Zoogai aimag (monastic unit),4 completed the painting in 1912, as the inscription in traditional Mongolian script attached to the painting attests. Jügdür was a prominent artist, as other works by him demonstrate (fig. 3). Among his surviving works are a remarkable appliqué of Begtse and a set of paintings of three longevity deities. Jügdür was from Setsen Khan province (modern-day Khentii aimag). His fame was widespread, and he spent the last years of his life working on commissions in Tibet, where he died.5 

The inscription clarifies that the production of the map was initiated and overseen by the Eighth Jibzundamba Bogd Gegeen (1869–1924), who was proclaimed the Bogd Khan of Mongolia on December 29, 1911:

In the second year of All-Inaugurated [1912], Lord Bogd Khan ordered Jügdür from Zoogai aimag of Züün Khüriye, who is good at and renowned for painting deities, to paint the Capital Khüriye, Gandan, and so on, the surrounding mountains, rivers, and even temples, and monasteries in the true reality of that time.6

The All-Inaugurated (Mahasammata) Bogd Khan of Mongolia was both political and religious head of the new state. The theocratic government under the Bogd Khan was a fragile, young state, and as part of his state-building, the Khan initiated many projects, including translations and the reprinting of old and new texts, as well as conducting new cartographic surveys.7 This map was tantamount to his other projects to collect, systematize, and organize the information and knowledge, such as printing a new set of the Tibetan Buddhist canon (Kangyur), known as Urga Kangyur.8 There were other paintings of various parts of Yekhe Khüriye made (fig. 4), and this is the second existent map of Yekhe Khüriye. Mapping the city also contributed to the status of Yekhe Khüriye as a new pilgrimage site akin to Lhasa. Yekhe Khüriye’s abbot, Agwang Lubsang Khayidub (1779–1838), wrote several texts about circumambulation of Yekhe Khüriye and a ritual of mandala offerings to the Jibzundamba, thereby contributing to the elevation of Yekhe Khüriye’s importance in Inner Asia.9 

Jügdür depicts Yekhe Khüriye as a grandiose site with its two major components demarcated in the roughly elliptical arrangement of a traditional khüriye encampment. Khüriye encampments were in regular use among nomads, and the circular structure surrounding a chieftain in the center also had a purpose of defense (fig. 5). The very conception of Yekhe Khüriye begins with a yurt (Mongolian: Örgöö or ger) which was first erected for the five-year-old Zanabazar (1635–1723) in 1639 to commemorate his enthronement as the First Jibzundamba Khutugtu. Zanabazar and the succeeding Jibzundamba Khutugtus strategically developed the Örgöö (yurt) into the monastery Yekhe Khüriye. As an encampment, Yekhe Khüriye consisted of yurts, and from its early days in the 1630s until 1855, it was fully portable and mobile, traversing long distances from the southern border to the north. As the monastery grew and expanded with new temples and increased in population, its migrations became only local, along the trade route between Russia and China. The Mongolian word “Örgöö” was rendered as “Urga” by foreign visitors.

By the time Balgan in the nineteenth century and Jügdür in 1912 mapped Yekhe Khüriye’s holistic structure, the monastery consisted of two major and several minor parts (fig. 6). As we know from later Yekhe Khüriye writers, the large circle in Yekhe Khüriye was commonly known as Züün Khüriye (Eastern Khüriye, at center in image), and the smaller oval settlement denotes Gandan Monastery (at left).10 The core of Yekhe Khüriye was the Jibzundamba’s Yellow Palace, a central compound with several buildings surrounded by a yellow fence. The Yellow Palace was the place where the Jibzundamba Khutugtus resided and where their major temples once stood (fig. 7). Jügdür shows the Yellow Palace annexed by a large plaza where lay festivals (such as wrestling) and Buddhist rituals (such as tsam ritual) took place every summer. To the north of the Yellow Palace, major temples, including Bat-Tsagan (“Firmly White”) Assembly Hall (Tsogchin), Maitreya, and Dechingalba (Kalachakra) Temples also stood (figs. 8 and 9). This nucleus of the Jibzundamba’s monastery was surrounded by thirty monastic units (aimags), where the monastic population was organized based on regional affiliation and relation to the Jibzundamba.

The second encampment, the Gandan Tegchinling Monastery (fig. 10), was built by the Fifth Jibzundamba (1815–1841) in 1838 by moving several colleges (datsans) from Züün Khüriye to the western hills, where new temples were additionally built to form a theological center named after Maitreya’s Tushita Heaven.11 Gandan mirrored the Züün Khüriye in the architectural design by including a central compound with the Jibzundamba’s temples and another Zanabazar-designed Assembly Hall, all surrounded by monastic units (aimags). Yet unlike Züün Khüriye, this monastery was strictly an educational and theological center, closed and inaccessible for lay visitors, especially women and merchants. 

Yekhe Khüriye was destroyed in the 1930s and later rebuilt as the modern-day capital city Ulaanbaatar (“Red Hero”). Among the surviving temples, the latest one still standing is Migjid Janraisig, or Avalokiteshvara Temple (fig. 11), which was built with donations from the entire Khalkha population to commemorate Khalkha Mongolia’s independence from the Qing in 1911.12 The Gandan Monastery continued to serve as the only practicing monastery and the only Buddhist educational center throughout the socialist period (1924–1992). 

Yekhe Khüriye’s other constituents were merchants, who occupied two streets known as Eastern and Western Porters, east and west of Züün Khüriye. Chinese merchants were settled in Maimaicheng, or Traders’ Town to the southeast (fig. 12). Jügdür denotes all these commercial sections on the map in grayish blue color. The same color applies to the Russian settlement situated around the Russian Consulate (fig. 13), opened in Yekhe Khüriye in 1861, on Maakhuuz Tologai Hill to the east of Züün Khüriye, later renamed Consulate’s Hill.13 Jügdür depicts the hill, where the Russian Orthodox Holy Trinity Church was also built.

Yekhe Khüriye was located in the valley of two rivers: in the painting, the Selbe River runs in the middle of Züün Khüriye, and the Tuul River runs south of the two circles. On the bank of the Tuul River, Jügdür depicts the Bogd Khan’s palaces: the largest is the Green Palace (also known as Winter Palace, Shirabpeljeiling, or Bilig Badaruulugchi süme), to the east, Norbuling süm and Khayistai Labrang; to the west, the Bogd’s White Palace (also known as Güngadejidling süme) and Pandelin or Narkhajid Temple.14 At the bottom of the painting, behind the hills, Jügdür depicts another monastery dedicated to Manjushri that was not part of Yekhe Khüriye (fig. 14).15

Yekhe Khüriye’s Many Functions

While primarily a Buddhist monastery and a major pilgrimage site for the Mongols, Yekhe Khüriye served several other important functions. As the main seat of the Jibzundamba Khutugtus, Yekhe Khüriye was the political center of Mongolia, and its political importance strengthened with years. After the Bogd Khan’s death and with the establishment of the new socialist government in 1924, Yekhe Khüriye was destroyed and rebuilt, and remains to this day the capital city Ulaanbaatar.

Yekhe Khüriye was also an important trade center. Several foreign businesses of large or small scale, such as the American Trading Company, operated in Yekhe Khüriye, and the important visitors to Yekhe Khüriye included a then young engineer, later the thirty-first President of the United States, Herbert Hoover (1874–1964), the paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews (1884–1960), the Swedish missionary Frans-August Larson (1870–1957), the Thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876–1933), and the explorer Aleksei Pozdneev (1851–1920), among others.16

Yekhe Khüriye was an important cultural center, where many excellent artworks were produced. The city regularly hosted both secular festivals and religious ceremonies. Given textual references to the Jibzundambas as rulers who fused political and religious spheres of power (dual rulership, or Buddhist Government), these images, as well as Yekhe Khüriye itself—its structure, the activities it sponsored, roles it played, and celebrations it hosted—all were embodiments of the ruler’s dual rulership.17