Khar Bukhyn Balgas

Khar Bukhyn Balgas stands beside the Khar Bukh River in the steppe near Dashinchilen. A seventeenth-century Buddhist monastery occupied the remains of an older walled settlement. Its surviving stone buildings used basalt, sandstone and shale; the enclosing quadrangular wall had gates on its four sides. The site preserves a substantial built religious centre within the pastoral country of central Mongolia.

Birch-bark manuscripts recovered here give a more detailed view of its intellectual setting. Buddhist writings in Mongolian and Tibetan include prayers and ritual texts, while legal manuscripts preserve the so-called Eighteen Steppe Laws, associated with the years 1580–1620. Religious learning and the regulation of property, obligations and social relations thus left material traces in the same archaeological complex. The ruins should not be understood only as an abandoned fort: their early modern occupation belongs to the growth of Mongolian Buddhism and the written culture shared by monasteries and the steppe's political communities.