Others live just outside the city’s center in yurts - known locally as gers - without sewers, running water or, in most cases, electricity. Michael Kohn and William Mellor wrote in the Washington Post: “Many of Ulaanbaatar’s 1.3 million inhabitants live in crumbling concrete apartment buildings from the Soviet era. Some suburban communities are made up completely of gers, and according to one survey, 35 percent of the residents of the city live in tents. The suburbs spread out for a long distance from the city center. In the peripheral zones and suburbs they live in fenced-off gers (tents) and permanent homes made of concrete, cinder blocks and railroad ties. People in the central city live in drab apartments.

In the winter Ulaan Baatar is often engulfed in smog - produced by large coal-fired power plants and tens of thousands of household stoves - that gets trapped by temperature inversions. Harsh conditions in the steppes have forced thousand of people to move to Ulaan Baatar. An average of 236 days of the year are sunny and blue skies and sunshine make even the coldest temperatures seem pleasant. It is the world’s coldest capital, even colder than Moscow and can be surprisingly cool even in August - which can be a good thing. The weather is probably the biggest issue. There are Stalin-era buildings built with Soviet help and new buildings financed with Korean, Chinese and Japanese aid money. Teenagers danced with glow-sticks, and herders on horseback took to the pavements to avoid traffic and talk on their mobile phones.” Sam Knight wrote in the Times of London, “Across Ulaanbaatar.the sound of the lama’s conch competed with Russian pop music. There is a lot of died hair, hip hop fashions among young people as well as men in business suits and people playing Korean smartphone games. Its residents are surprisingly urbanized.

Ulaan Baatar means 'Red Hero,' the name given it in 1924 and a reference to the great Mongolian liberator Suhee Baatar.

About 1.4 million people (almost half the country's population) make their home here, almost double what there were 15 years ago. Around the city are for four sacred mountains: Tsetseegun Mountain to the south, Songino Mountain to the west, Bayanzurkh Mountain to the east and Chingeleti Mountain to the north. The capital and only major city in Mongolia, it is situated at an elevation of 1,350 meter and spreads out over a wide area in a valley the Tuul River and among the foothills of the Bogd mountains. Ulaan Baatar is a flat, windy city made up of rows of Russian-built buildings, large open spaces, wide, dusty boulevards, ger suburbs and construction projects.

Shellshock live ruler elevation