The Orkhon Valley

Hold this valley and you had the right to rule the steppe, for two thousand years

The Orkhon River runs through central Mongolia about 360 km southwest of Ulaanbaatar, and for some two thousand years the empires of the steppe kept their seats of power along it. The valley had grass and water, and it had Ötüken, a forested mountain that Tengriism held especially sacred because the ancestor spirits of the khagans lived there. A force called kut was believed to come from the mountain and give a khagan the right to rule the Turkic tribes. Whoever controlled the valley could rally them, and every Turkic capital was built here.

People settled the valley long before any empire. Finds at Moiltyn Am and at a site called Orkhon-7 put the first settlement about 62,000 to 58,000 years ago. Later it was held in turn by the Huns, Turkic peoples, the Uyghurs, the Khitans and the Mongols, and each left something behind. The Orkhon inscriptions are early 8th-century memorials to Bilge Khan and Kul Tigin of the Göktürk Empire, found by Russian archaeologists in 1889 and deciphered by Vilhelm Thomsen in 1893. When the Khitans held the valley, one stele was cut again in three languages to record the deeds of a Khitan ruler. The ruins of Ordu-Baliq, the 8th-century Uyghur capital now called Khar Balgas, spread over 50 square kilometres of palace, shops, temples and monasteries. Kharakhorum was the Mongol imperial capital in the 13th and 14th centuries. Erdene Zuu, the earliest surviving Buddhist monastery in Mongolia, was partly destroyed by Soviet authorities in 1937 to 1940, and the Tuvkhun Hermitage on a hill 2,600 metres above sea level was almost totally destroyed. A palace on Doit Hill from the 13th and 14th centuries is thought to have been Ögedei Khan's residence, and Ulaan Tsutgalan is a waterfall 20 metres high that sometimes runs dry or freezes in winter.

UNESCO lists 121,967 hectares as a cultural landscape, with a buffer zone of 61,044 hectares. Nomadic herders still graze it. The listing names what threatens it: a falling water table tied to tree-cutting and mining, polluted watercourses, overgrazing, and modern roads, tracks and power lines across the open steppe.