The last few blogposts have really been digging into the natural world of Mongolia, which is quite impressive, but there is a lot of cultural and historical legacy to talk about too. Starting with this blog and finishing with the next, I will now delve into that historic legacy of one of the largest empires on Earth ever and also of the largest independent Buddhist country in the world (Tibet being occupied or part of China (depending on your political view)).

It was a long ride through the valley trying to pass other road traffic, like sheep and goat herds…

At noon the bus arrived at the center of the largest valley The Wandelgek had seen in Mongolia. There in the middle was the monastery of Erdene Zuu, which he wanted to visit to learn some more of the cultural history of Mongolia. It seemed larger than Amarbayasgalant Monastery, which he had visited a few days earlier.

Erdene Zuu Monastery

This monastery is the largest in Mongolia, but it must have been way more impressive, containing over 300 temples of which nowaday only a handfull have survived. The space inside its walls now looks quite empty.

The pics below show the outside of the monastery with its walls, the many stupas on top and the gates in chinese style.

The Erdene Zuu Monastery (Mongolian: Эрдэнэ Зуу хийд) is probably the earliest surviving Buddhist  monastery in Mongolia. Located in Övörkhangai Province, approximately 2 km north-east from the center of Kharkhorin and adjacent to the ancient city of Karakorum, it is part of the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape World Heritage Site. The monastery is affiliated with the Sakya sect (Sakya-pa school) of Tibetan Buddhism. The Sakya sect is older than the later more powerful Gelug order and it is connected with the first contacts between Tibet and Mongolia around 1260, under the rule of Kublai Kahn.

The Wandelgek visited the Sakya monastery back in 1999, when travelling through Tibet.

History

Abtai Sain Khan, ruler of the Khalkha Mongols and grandfather of Zanabazar, the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, ordered construction of the Erdene Zuu monastery in 1585 after his meeting with the 3rd Dalai Lama and the declaration of Tibetan Buddhism as the state religion of Mongolia. Stones from the nearby ruins of the ancient Mongol capital of Karakorum were used in its construction more of that in my next blogpost though). 

Planners attempted to create a surrounding wall that resembled a Tibetan Buddhist rosary featuring 108 stupas (108 being a sacred number in Buddhism), but this objective was probably never achieved. 

 

The monastery’s temple walls were painted, and the Chinese-style roof covered with green tiles.

 

The monastery was damaged in 1688 during one of the many wars between Dzungars and Khalkha Mongols. Locals dismantled the wooden fortifications of the abandoned monastery. It was rebuilt in the 18th century and by 1872 had a full 62 temples and housed up to 1000 monks.According to tradition, in 1745 a local Buddhist disciple named Bunia made several unsuccessful attempts to fly with a device he invented similar to parachute.In 1939 the Communist leader Khorloogiin Choibalsan ordered the monastery destroyed, as part of a purge that obliterated hundreds of monasteries in Mongolia and killed over ten thousand monks. Three small temples and the external wall with the stupas survived the initial onslaught and by 1944 Joseph Stalin pressured Choibalsan to maintain the monastery (along with Gandantegchinlen Monastery  in Ulaanbaatar) as a showpiece for international visitors, such as U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace, to prove that the communist regime allowed freedom of religion. In 1947 the temples were converted into museums and for the four decades that followed  Gandantegchinlen Khiid Monastery became Mongolia’s only functioning monastery.After the fall of Communism in Mongolia in 1990, the monastery was turned over to the lamas and Erdene Zuu again became a place of worship. Today Erdene Zuu remains an active Buddhist monastery as well as a museum that is open to tourists.

A mayor difference between the Amarbayasgalant monastery and the Erdene Zuu monastery is that the former has exclusively chinese style temple buildings whether Erdene Zuu has a mix of Tibetan style and Chinese style buildings. Apart from the prayer wheels, the many stupas on the surrounding walls and the Golden Stupa within the walls, there is the Laviran (Lavrin Süm) Temple which is clearly based on Tibetan architecture:

Very impressive were also the many treasures that were found indoors of the monastery buildings, like e.g. these thangkas and golden statues portraying old Dalai Lamas…

… or these collections of music instruments and knives or daggers.

Then there were these awesome otherworldly drawings of strange animals and monsters visiting our world to wreak havoc…

I really love those. They somehow make me think of ancient prehistoric rock paintings, but these are much more detailed and although not everything seems anatomically correct, the artist did have a good idea of how camels and elephants looked like.

In the interiors of the temples were beautiful but quite gruesome thangkas ? ?…

A thangka, variously spelt as thangka, tangka, thanka, or tanka, is a Tibetan Buddhist painting on cotton, silk appliqué, usually depicting a Buddhist deity, scene, or mandala.

The temple interiors have al sorts of beautiful decorations, some small and easily overseen, some larger and attracting more attention to themselves…

And then there are the many statues of protector deities, often looking quite monstrous to Western visitors:

Other statues are those of Buddhas and of Dalai Lamas…

The ceilings of these inner sactums are often quite intricately built.

Another quite special thing was a wall on top of which, a story was painted like a comic…

 

The Wandelgek found another room with magnificent, strange drawings…

Somewhere was a small altar with a wooden chest containing prayer scrolls…

Outside of the monastery buildings, but still within the walls were some other remnants of the old monastery like decorated stones…

Although the architecture of the temples was mainly chinese, the art in the interiors breathed the Tibetan Buddhist culture. The Wandelgek had visited Tibet in 1999 and the interiors of these temples were very reminiscent to those he had then seen in Tibet (and also in Nepal where a large minority of Tibetan Buddhists live in exile).

Then The Wandelgek left the terrain of the monastery to visit another historic location, even older than this monastery. More of that in my next blogpost.