Bogd Khaan Palace Museum: The Bogd Khaan’s “zoo”

Art & Culture
munkhzul@montsame.gov.mn
2021-02-10 14:22:56

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. Aside from issuing various decrees on protecting the environment, the 8th Bogd Jebtsundamba Khutuktu was known to take great interest in natural sciences, establishing a certain type of zoo that had never been established before in Mongolia.

 

The Bogd Khaan was an individual that had a hobby of collecting all types of peculiar items. This could be seen from how he commissioned a collection of taxidermy animals from Hamburg, Germany in 1901. Consisting of over 200 animals that lived in the Americas, Africa, South East Asia, and Antarctica, the collection could even be considered as the first ever collection specializing in animals for Mongolia.


 While most of the taxidermy animals are kept at the Winter Palace of the Bogd Khaan Palace Museum, this particular taxidermy giraffe is kept in the museum’s collection.

  

 

There are several notes about how there were various animals starting from an Altai leopard, a Himalayan bear, an Indian snake, and monkeys of different sizes to a Scottish pony, an Indian elephant, a Mongolian gazelle, ibex, and wolf as well as an exotic tiger were peacefully grazing in the Bogd Khaan’s zoo.