Erdene Zuu Monastery
Interesting facts
- According to legend, when Dzungar soldiers entered in 1731, the guardian deity's statue drove them out and the stone lions at the gate roared, sending them fleeing to the Orkhon.
- Hearing that story, the Yongzheng Emperor is said to have granted the Orkhon River a princely title and an annual allowance of 300 taels of silver.
- The famous wall of 108 stupas took about seven decades to build, begun in the 1730s and completed only in 1806.
- The Bodhi Stupa of 1799 was filled with more than 100,000 small Buddha images, over 2,500 clay votive stupas and the ashes of the founder, Abtai Khan.
- The name Erdene Zuu, roughly "Precious Lord", comes from a Buddha statue holding relics of Shakyamuni sent by the Third Dalai Lama.
- Craftsmen were brought from Hohhot, in today's Inner Mongolia, so the first temples followed a Hohhot model with strong Chinese influence.
- The three main temples, raised on white platforms and facing east, represent three stages of the Buddha's life: youth, first teaching and old age.
- The Lavrin temple, rebuilt in 1785, is the complex's only building in purely Tibetan style and is its working temple today.
- A round open space about 45 metres across in the centre marks, by tradition, the spot where Abtai Khan's own ger once stood.
- In 1882 the Eighth Bogd Gegen threatened to move to Erdene Zuu unless the Qing emperor cleared Chinese shops from the centre of Urga.
Why it is worth it
On the open steppe of the Orkhon Valley, a long white wall studded with small stupas encloses a vast square of grassland in which a handful of temples stand far apart, their green-tiled Chinese-style roofs bright against the hills. Erdene Zuu is probably the oldest surviving Buddhist monastery in Mongolia, and it occupies one of the most historic places in the country: beside it lie the ruins of Karakorum, the thirteenth-century capital of the Mongol Empire.
The monastery was founded in 1585 by Abtai Sain Khan, ruler of the Khalkha Mongols, after his meeting with the Third Dalai Lama and the adoption of Tibetan Buddhism as the state religion; his grandson Zanabazar would become the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, head of Mongolian Buddhism. The builders reused stones from Karakorum's ruins. The surrounding wall was conceived as a Buddhist rosary of 108 stupas, the sacred number, though the plan was probably never fully completed in its first form. The monastery was damaged in 1688 during the wars between the Dzungars and the Khalkha. According to local tradition, in 1745 a monk named Bunia tried several times, without success, to fly with a parachute-like device of his own invention.
In 1939 the communist leader Khorloogiin Choibalsan ordered the monastery destroyed as part of a purge that wiped out hundreds of monasteries and killed more than ten thousand monks across Mongolia. Three temples and the outer wall with its stupas survived. A few years later, under pressure from Stalin, the site was preserved as a showpiece for foreign visitors, and in 1947 the temples became museums. After 1990 the monastery was returned to the lamas, and today it is again an active Gelug monastery as well as a museum, with painted halls containing statues of the Buddhas and protective deities. It is part of the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. On a hill outside the walls stands a stone phallus that, by local tradition, keeps the monks' desires in check.
Getting there
Erdene Zuu stands at the edge of the town of Kharkhorin in Övörkhangai Province. Arvaikheer, the provincial centre, is about 105 km away, and Arvaikheer Airport (AVK) is about 106 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Erdene Zuu Monastery is probably the earliest surviving Buddhist monastery in Mongolia. Built in 1585, it is located in Kharkhorin, Övörkhangai Province and is now included within the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape World Heritage Site. The monastery is affiliated with the Gelug sect of Tibetan Buddhism.
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