Ulaanbaatar is Earth's coldest capital by yearly average
Mongolia's capital holds about 1.79 million people at roughly 1,300 metres on the Tuul River and records the lowest average annual temperature among world capitals. As Örgöö (Urga) it seated the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu. Soviet flats replaced many ger districts from the 1950s; 1990 protests helped end one-party rule.
People camped in this valley long before any monastery. Stone tools on the surrounding mountains range from about 300,000 years old to the late Ice Age, when hunters took mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, and Xiongnu royal tombs lie nearby. Toghrul of the Keraites, the Nestorian Christian ruler whom Marco Polo identified with Prester John, reportedly kept a palace in the forest by the Tuul and banned hunting on the sacred Bogd Khan mountain.
The city itself began in 1639 as Örgöö, a palace-yurt monastery built for Zanabazar, the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, at a lake about 230 km southwest of today's site. For more than a century it travelled, relocating 29 times along the Selenge, Orkhon and Tuul rivers and even retreating into Inner Mongolia during the Dzungar wars. In 1778 it settled for good where the Selbe meets the Tuul, beneath Bogd Khan mountain and on the caravan road from Beijing to Kyakhta. The Scottish traveller John Bell described it in 1721 as several thousand tents that were moved from time to time, busy with Chinese and Russian merchants, and by 1778 it may have housed ten thousand monks.
When the Qing dynasty fell in 1911, the 8th Jebtsundamba became the Bogd Khan of an independent state, and the town was renamed Capital Khüree. On 29 October 1924 the new People's Republic chose a fresh name. Delegates preferred Bator-khoto, a veiled nod to Genghis Khan, but the Comintern envoy T. R. Ryskulov insisted on Ulan Bator, "Red Hero," arguing that the conqueror did not suit a revolutionary nation.
Today about 1.79 million people live in a valley 1,300 metres up, making it the coldest capital on Earth by yearly average. It is administered separately from the surrounding Töv Province and holds nearly half the country's population. Rapid migration since 1990 filled the ger districts, where burning coal has made the city among the world's most polluted and driven up pneumonia among children.
Source: Ulaanbaatar
