Historic Photo: Outside the Yellow Palace, Mongolia, 1913.
This is what Mongolia's capital looked like over a century ago.
I’m always amazed by high-resolution color photos that look as if they’re taken by modern digital cameras but which turn out to be very old. This photo was taken outside the Yellow Palace, the government complex in the Mongolian city of Ulaanbataar, the capital. The large structure at center is called the Maidar Temple, which was built beginning in 1833. The building to the right of that, of which only the top is visible, is the Abtai Khan ger temple which began construction in 1585. Yes, that’s a Buddhist monk on the street. The photo was taken in summer 1913 by French photographer Stéphane Passet as part of a unified project called “The Archives of the Planet.” That was an effort to capture human cultures around the world for posterity and cultural understanding, and was financed principally by French banker Albert Kahn. The Yellow Palace specifically was at that time the residence of Bogd Khan, who ruled Mongolia from 1911 until his death in 1924.
This photo is not colorized. It was taken in natural color via the “Autochrome” process, developed by the Lumière brothers, also from France, in 1903. Though laborious and requiring much longer exposure times than traditional cameras, as you can see from this photo the color results could be striking, every bit the equal of digital age high-resolution photography. Thus, although it’s from roughly the same era, this photo is far ahead of the “Photochrom” pictures that I’m fond of running in this series. This really is what that street looked like on a July afternoon 113 years ago. Almost no Westerners reached what was then called Outer Mongolia, which broke off from China proper about the time of China’s 1911 revolution. Thus, Mongolia was a frontier within Asia, a mysterious sparsely-populated land dotted with quaint villages and Buddhist monasteries like this one. Almost no one who didn’t already live there ever got to see a scene like this. And you couldn’t see it now: the Yellow Palace was torn down in the 1930s, replaced by some of Ulaanbataar’s very bland government buildings.
