The Search for the Lost City

Is this the right way? The Lonely Planet Guide says that this place is hard to get to. It is the ancient ruined city of Khar Bulgas. "Do you think Butar knows where it is?" John asked.

"Butar knows where everything is," I reminded him. We'd met other travellers who were disappointed with their drivers. "He took us 300 km in a circle," one French woman remarked about her driver. "He was hopelessly lost." But Butar never got lost. Off we bounced onto a barely visable dirt track toward a wavy line of heat on the horizon.

The city grew slowly in front of us; rising up like a distant watery mirage. This is the city form the time when the name Mongolia was first recorded. John had seen a documentary on it years ago. "I think this is the same place," he said as he flipped through the gude book.

Khar Bulgas was founded in 751 AD as the capital of Uighur Khanate which ruled Mongolia from 745 to 854. The Uighurs were a Turick people influenced by Christianity and whose scriptures tell of how they ' transformed this country of barbarous customs, full of fumes of blood, into a land were people live on vegetables'. None of this of course John remembered from the History Channel. In fact, he wasn't even sure these were the same ruins he had seen. The only way to find out was to have Butar turn off our paved road and head across the flat plains to find it.

The outer walls, a Buddist stuppa and a piece of a castle are all that remain of this lost city. We walked along the top of the city wall getting views of the plains on all sides and could see the remains of the elaborate irrigiation system which brought water to the city from several kilometers away. From our vantage point, this looked like an ideal spot for agriculture. The city fell when the Uighurs were defeated by the nomadic Kyrghz who had little need for vegetables.

When we left Khar Bulgas I wondered how much more of the city would fall to the elements of time and nature. An eagle had built a nest on top of the mud wall and a flock of sheep and goats were grazing on the edge of what remained of the stuppa. When we pulled away in our van, the city slipped back into the horizon as if it no longer existed.