Buddhist Art and Architecture in Mongolia

Mongolian Buddhist art and architecture were largely unknown in Western academic literature before the opening of Mongolia and Russia in 1990 and of China in the 1980s, followed by the organization of exhibitions of their arts abroad. This article maps out major resources on Mongolian Buddhist art and architecture, here understood as the art and architecture of the Mongolian populations who live not only in Mongolia (known as “Outer Mongolia” before 1911, also referred to as Northern, or Khalkha Mongolia) itself but also in China (mostly in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, or southern Mongolia) and in Russia (Republics of Buryatia and Kalmykia). The study of Mongolian Buddhist art and architecture is still at an incipient stage and reflects the compartmentalization between the Mongols of China and those of Mongolia and Russia, though exchanges between researchers are developing. Comparatively few artifacts have survived the migrations, nomadizations, and, above all, the destructions after the fall of the Mongol Empire in the late 14th century and the religious persecution and destruction of material culture of the 20th-century Communist regimes of Russia, Mongolia (1936–1938), and China (during the Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976). Old photographs and textual descriptions of buildings and artifacts are therefore important to complement our knowledge of this field. Mongolian culture has been qualified as “osmotic,” receiving, borrowing, absorbing, and acculturating foreign influences with great receptivity. But Mongols did not borrow randomly: they were eclectic in their choices, according to their own cultural norms and aspirations. This is obvious when dealing with art and architecture, where borrowings are sometimes so well integrated that they were forgotten, and nationalists now claim Mongols are themselves at the origin of some forms and motifs. Since the 1990s, interest in Mongolian material heritage has led to the development of projects of cooperation between Mongolia and foreign partners in the fields of archaeology, art history, survey and restoration of monasteries, and establishment of new museums. The volume of publications, especially of catalogues of private and public collections of Mongolian art, has recently increased, but large collections, such as those kept in Russia, have yet to be published, and many Buddhist statues and paintings still labeled as “Sino-Tibetan” in Western museums should probably be attributed to Mongolia.