Burkhan Khaldun
— the mountain a country swears by.
Not only on a wall.
“The sacred peak at the headwaters of the Onon and Kherlen, in the Khentii range east of Ulaanbaatar. UNESCO calls it a cultural landscape; Mongolians call it the mountain that watches. The slopes are off-limits to most outsiders. Ovoos, cairns of stone and blue khadag, mark the approach. Snow lingers above the treeline into June.
Burkhan Khaldun, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Burkhan Khaldun rises to roughly 2,362 metres in the Khentii mountains of northeastern Mongolia, about 200 kilometres northeast of Ulaanbaatar. The peak sits inside the Khan Khentii Strictly Protected Area and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2015. Three rivers, the Onon, the Kherlen, and the Tuul, gather their headwaters on its slopes. The Secret History of the Mongols names it as the mountain Chinggis Khaan swore by, and tradition places his birth and burial in the surrounding country.
Access to the inner sacred zone is restricted by Mongolian state decree, and only men of Mongolian origin traditionally climb to the summit during state ceremonies held under presidential order, most recently revived in 1995 after the socialist period. Outside ceremony, the slopes are largely empty. The Khentii range is roadless for long stretches; the nearest settlement, Mongonmorit, lies a full day's drive on tracks rather than highway. The silence is the silence of a country with two people per square kilometre and a mountain that watches over them.
The state worship ceremony was reinstated by presidential decree in 1995 and is held on schedules tied to the lunar calendar, usually in the summer months when the high passes are open and the rivers run clear from snowmelt. Through winter the Khentii lies under deep snow and the worship rites cannot be performed on the mountain itself; offerings move to ovoos closer to Ulaanbaatar. The cycle has run, in some form, since before the rise of Chinggis Khaan in 1206, when his oath on this peak began a thirteenth-century empire.