Choijin Lama Temple Museum

Perfectly preserved Buddhist monastery from 1904, saved by the Soviets who turned it into a museum

The Choijin Lama Temple stands in the middle of the city — surrounded now by glass office towers — as a remarkably complete snapshot of early 20th-century Mongolian Buddhist art and architecture. Five separate temple buildings house the collection: main hall, prayer room, and three smaller chapels, each filled with statues, ceremonial masks (tsam), thangka paintings, and ritual objects that would have been destroyed at any other monastery.

The collection includes papier-mâché figures used in religious mystery plays, elaborate bronze sculptures of wrathful deities, and an extraordinary set of silk thangkas from Tibet. The museum labels are in Mongolian and Russian with minimal English translation, but the visual richness requires no explanation. Admission is modest. The temple complex is a five-minute walk south of Sükhbaatar Square, making it an easy addition to any walking tour of central UB.

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A story
The monastery was built between 1904 and 1908 as the private temple of the Choijin Lama — the state oracle of Mongolia and brother of the 8th Bogd Khan. When the Soviets destroyed Mongolia's Buddhist monasteries in 1937, they closed this one too — but converted it into a museum rather than demolishing it. This accidental act of preservation (probably intended as anti-religious propaganda) left the temple's entire contents intact: statues, thangkas, ceremonial objects, masks. It is now the finest collection of traditional Buddhist art in Mongolia, kept largely as it was when the monks were expelled.

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