One of the most important cities in the history of the Silk Road was Karakorum (Qara-qorum; Mong.: Khara-Khorin). Despite its small size and remote location, it flourished briefly in the 13th century as the capital of the Mongol Empire. The written and archaeological evidence about the town tell us a great deal about the commercial and cultural interactions across Eurasia in which the Mongols played such an important role.

The town was situated in a grassy plain not far from the Orkhon River in north central Mongolia. The Orkhon emerges there from the gorges of the Khantai Mountains and flows northward to meet the Tola (on whose upper reaches the current capital of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, is located). A favorable micro-climate makes the location ideal for pasturage, and it lies along the most important east-west route across Mongolia. As a result, this region was a center of habitation and important political and economic activity long prior to the thirteenth century. The ruler of the Türk Empire in the eighth century, Bilgä Qaghan, erected in this region a stone stele with the long inscription about his activities. Just to the north along the Orkhon was the location of Karabalghasun, the capital of the first Uighur Empire. An Arab ambassador who visited it in 821 CE left a brief description of how he traveled through uninhabited steppes until arriving in the vicinity of the Uighur capital. Karabalghasun itself was “a great town, rich in agriculture and surrounded by rustaqs full of cultivation and villages lying close together. The town has twelve iron gates of huge size. The town is populous and thickly crowded and has markets and various trades.” There is abundant evidence that urban centers (not necessarily sizeable cities) were in fact not unusual in the steppe lands of Mongolia in the centuries prior to the emergence of Chingis Khan’s Mongol Empire.

What we know about Karakorum in the 13th century comes from a few contemporary written sources and from archaeology, since nothing of the original settlement survived above the ground after it was destroyed in the late 14th century. The written sources attribute the building of the town to Chingis’ son and successor Ögedei (left) in the middle of the 1230s. Archaeology tells us that there had been a settlement there earlier, established most likely under Chingis himself (right). Ögedei may have been the one responsible for erecting the town wall, and he presided over the construction of a palace compound on a location where previously there had been a Buddhist temple decorated with high-quality mural paintings.

The town wall enclosed a somewhat irregular rectangle measuring approximately 1.5 by 2.5 km. When the Franciscan monk, William of Rubruck, visited Karakorum in the 1250s, he was not impressed by its size: “It is not as large as the village of Saint Denis, and the monastery of Saint Denis is worth ten times more than the palace [of the Khan].” The walls were sufficient for controlling access to the town but would not have protected it against a major attack. Important economic activities, merchant residences and religious buildings were located within the walls. Given what we know about the settlement and movement patterns of the Mongols, it is clear that at the times when the Khan’s court was present, the population of the town would have grown substantially by the temporary residence of Mongols in their gers (yurts) in the adjoining territory. A Chinese sketch from a later period, suggests as much, where the gers are grouped all around the outside of the walls.

Rubruck’s description provides us with a sense of how cosmopolitan the town was, with merchants, craftsmen, clerics and ambassadors from many countries:

There are two quarters in it: one of the Saracens [=Muslims] in which are the markets, and where a great many Tartars [=Mongols] gather on account of the court, which is always near this [city], and on account of the great number of ambassadors; the other is the quarter of the Cathayans [=Chinese], all of whom are artisans. Besides these quarters there are great palaces, which are for the secretaries of the court. There are there twelve idol temples of different nations, two mahummeries [mosques] in which is cried the law of Machomet, and one church of Christians in the extreme end of the city. The city is surrounded by a mud wall and has four gates. At the eastern is sold millet and other kinds of grain, which, however, is rarely brought there; at the western one, sheep and goats are sold; at the southern, oxen and carts are sold; at the northern, horses are sold.

Many of the craftsmen had surely not come to Karakorum of their own free will. Conscription of artisans was a normal practice under the Mongols when they conquered new territories.

The archaeological evidence fleshes out our picture of the town’s economic life. It was a center of metallurgy where water power from a canal connecting the town with the Orkhon River ran the bellows for the forges. There are iron cauldrons (used, among other things, as heating braziers), abundant quantities of arrowheads, and various decorative metal objects. Of particular interest are a substantial number of wheel bushings for carts, some of which must have been quite sizeable and presumably were used both for the transport of goods and at times to move gers without their being dismantled. There was some local production of ceramics for ordinary daily use, although the higher quality ceramics attested in many fragments were imported from China. Local industry produced glass beads for jewelry and other decorative purposes; their forms are of a type that was widespread across all of the Mongol Empire. Spindle whorls tell us that yarn was being produced--presumably in the first instance from the wool of the Mongols’ own flocks. We know that rich silk fabrics were highly valued by the Mongol elite; some fragments of imported Chinese silk have been found. While there was limited production of grain in the surrounding region, it seems likely that the demand for grain required much of it to be imported from China. The archaeologists have discovered at least one small millstone. For all the fact that the written sources emphasize the significant role of Muslim merchants connecting Karakorum with Central Asia, most of the coins which have been discovered are of Chinese origin.

As a Catholic monk, Rubruck was particularly interested in the religious life of the town. He provides us some interesting material on Mongolian indigenous religion (shamanism) and notes the presence of Muslims and the “idolators” (Buddhists). Most of his attention is directed though to the Nestorian Christians. While he was pleased to find Christians present, he was distressed by the fact that they represented a sect deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. We know from Rubruck and other sources that the Mongol rulers were quite eclectic and often very open-minded in their religious views. A number of the women married to the Chingizids were Nestorians, including the mother of the future Qubilai Khan.

One of the focal points of the excavations at Karakorum has been the palace of Ögedei and his successors. Rubruck described the royal compound as

a great palace [compound — orda], situated next to the city walls, enclosed within a high wall like those which enclose monks' priories among us. Here is a great palace, where he has his drinkings twice a year: once about Easter, when he passes there, and once in summer, when he goes back [westward]. And the latter is the greater [feast], for then come to his court all the nobles, even though distant two months journey; and then he makes them largess of robes and presents, and shows his great glory. There are there many buildings as long as barns, in which are stored his provisions and his treasures.

The Franciscan goes on to describe in some detail the wondrous silver fountain built for the Khan by a captive Parisian goldsmith, from which spouted fermented mare’s milk and other drinks.

The palace was used for ceremonial purposes but probably not actually lived in by the Khan (most likely he lived in a ger on the grounds, where a circular platform has been found). It occupied a sizeable area of nearly 2500 square meters, with substantial columns supporting what was probably a two- or three-story Chinese-style structure with a tiered roof, analogous to the buildings in the winter palace of the Bogdo Khan, theocratic ruler of Mongolia at the beginning of the twentieth century. There are remnants of ceramic roof tiles and finials similar to what we find in Chinese buildings of various periods. The khan’s palace compound seems to have been one of the earliest examples of what comes to be standard in Chinese design with the placement of separate pavilions on connected platforms in enclosed courtyards. An entrance gate to the palace compound also probably resembled familiar forms that can be seen much later in the Bogdo Khan’s palace. Beyond some glazed ceramic floor tiles and indications of where the raised throne platform would have stood within the palace, we have little other material evidence about its interior decoration. Fragments of glazed ceramic sculpture have also been found. A stone tortoise, which would have served as the base for a stele carved with an inscription, stood next to the palace; another such tortoise was to be found just outside each gate into the town.

By the time Marco Polo reached China in the early 1370s, Khubilai Khan had made Beijing the Empire’s capital, replacing Karakorum. There is no reason to think Marco visited the former capital, but he mentions it and indicates (probably with some exaggeration) that it was surrounded by an earthen wall some three miles in circumference. He also reports on the civil war in the early part of Qubilai Khan’s reign in which the Khan had besieged the city. Apparently it survived that siege intact, only to suffer from fire at the very end of the 13th century during civil disturbances. It was completely destroyed in 1388 by a Ming army pursuing the remnants of the Mongol forces whom they had expelled from China.

Thus, by 1585, when the very important Erdeni Tzu Buddhist monastery was built adjoining the southern edge of the one-time capital of much of Eurasia, Karakorum was only a dim memory. Thanks to the monastery and the favorable geographical location though, the area continued to be important in the political and religious life of Mongolia until the vicious destruction of the monastery in the 1930s by the anti-religious Communist regime. The site of Karakorum was first excavated in the late 1940s by a Soviet-Mongol team. Further excavations have been undertaken more recently, and, with the end of religious persecution in post-Communist Mongolia, the Erdeni Tzu Monastery is being restored.

— Daniel C. Waugh

References :

• Ata-Malik Juvaini, Genghis Khan: The History of the World-Conqueror. Tr. and ed. by J.A. Boyle with an introduction by David O. Morgan (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997; first ed. 1958).
• Marco Polo, The Travels. Tr. with an introduction by Ronald Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1958), pp. 92, 315-317.
• William of Rubruck, in Christopher Dawson, Mission to Asia (Toronto etc.: University of Toronto Press, 1980), and, in a different translation, on-line at Silk Road Seattle.
• S. V. Kiselev et al., Drevnemongol’skie goroda [Ancient Mongolian Cities] (Moscow: Nauka, 1965). The largest part of this important volume is devoted to the Soviet-Mongolian excavations of Karakorum in 1948-49. It includes an overview of the city’s history, details about the excavation of the palace and the commercial/craft quarters, the buddhist frescoes, coins, metalwork, ceramics, etc.

© 2004 Daniel C. Waugh
Photographs taken at Karakorum/Erdeni Tzu © 1979 Marina Tolmacheva