By Julian Dierkes
I’ve been keeping lists of things that are arriving to/disappearing from central Ulaanbaatar: August 2011 | | October 2011 | June 2013 | October 2013 | May 2014 | November 2014| May 2015 | December 2015 | May 2016 | |June 2017 | October 2017 | August 2018 | December 2018 | April 2019 | June 2019 | December 2019 | August 2022 | November 2022 | May 2023 | August 2023 | June-July 2024 | April 2025. More informal versions of these observations also appear in the /ulaanbaatar/change/ category. I’ve also collected observations about change in the countryside. Bulgan added her observations in Spring 2022.
I’ve copied previous lists here and am adding to them. New items since previous posts appear in italics. Since this list has been growing, I’m also beginning to delete some items that I’ve had on the list for some time. Strikethrough means that these items will be off the next list.
This list was cruelly interrupted by something that was new to the world in 2020, a global pandemic and thus restrictions on travel. After not being able to visit for 32 months, I finally made it back in August 2022.
What has arrived?
- drive-home service for drivers who have been drinking. You call the service, they drop off a driver who drives you home in your car and is then picked up again. Given – fortunately – much stricter enforcement of drunk driving laws, a great service!
airport road is getting ever fancier, now there’s a giant overpass just before crossing the Tuul on the way into town. Lots of fancy on/off-ramps popping up everywhere on roads.- fully electric cars, charging stations, green license plates for electric cars, Tesla
street art (several years now, but I hadn’t noted this before) and newly commissioned public art. Seeing more tags though. On buildings and in pedestrian tunnels. One particularly common one in one part of town: ‘to be or not to be’. Deep!- several new parks: North of Winter Palace, Southeast corner of Sukhbaatar Sq, also astroturf on Sukhbaatar Square (summer 2022) seemingly quite popular as picnic spot, park in Yarmag. The park behind Government House is open to the public again.
- As a specific park: the redesign of the Children’s Park seems to represent commitment to preservation of that open space and greater incorporation into urban centre. The new park opened on July 4.
- Not just parks but also nearby urban recreation, such as municipal nature reserves and hiking.
- Oat milk and lactose-free milk. Of course, good health reasons for both, but still a little odd in the land of meat and dairy.
Eye makeup with small glittering tears in the corner of an eye. Note that I am not much of a fashion correspondent, but I remember seeing this first in Japan in the early 1990s when it was called ピカピカ, I think. Cat eyes have also arrived.- Coffee choices. Not just Korean chains, but more local choices appearing.
- Taste for spicy foods. Surely this has arrived via Korean food, but quite the contrast to years ago when spices seemed entirely absent.
- Solar panels on commercial buildings, also on balconies, in downtown core
- The development of Mongolian brand consumer products, especially food products has been happening for years and I can’t pinpoint the moment they started appearing on grocery shelves in big numbers. While I still find New Zealand butter in Mongolia strange, most of the dairy shelf is now made in Mongolia, for example.
- So many renovated sidewalks with paving stones, benches, and planters.
- Yoshinoya – 吉野家. How obvious are beef bowls for the Mongolian market, but their appearance is sudden to me.
- Shisha bars. I had seen these before, but neglected to note that down.
- Convenience stores have become a very common sight in downtown Ulaanbaatar but also beyond. Currently, this is a duopoly of CU and GS25. Note that small grocery stores have disappeared from town with the rise of these convenience stores.
- байхгүй (“we don’t have that”) has become a frequent response of waiters in restaurants referring to items listed on the menu, but not actually offered.
- Some new buildings appear to be considering the public space that they’re providing, for example through setbacks from the street and parks in those setbacks. One example would be large office building/mall on the way into town from Zaisan on the right before Peace Bridge with its broad sidewalk, plantings.
- In addition to the Northwest of town and the area around the power plants which have been somewhat industrial, Yarmag seems to be turning into an industrial zone in parts as well, with the surroundings of the old airport seeing some warehouse developments.
- In terms of city planning, many of the very large developments in Yarmag and elsewhere seem to be stand-alone neighbourhoods, rather than forming a part of a larger district. Note that they all seem to have a large supermarket as an anchor.
- Visible Korean influences continuing to grow.
- Imagery of Mongolian People’s Republic appearing as pop cultural reference point. Not sure whether that signals nostalgia for state-socialist days (Ostalgie).
- Blue license plates for government cars. [More on license plates]
- Men carrying umbrellas as protection from the sun.
- Big bus procurement scandal in 2023-24, but some very modern buses around town and major busstop construction projects.
- Google Maps now offers transit connections as well as traffic updates. The former easier for me to use than local alternatives, as I’m familiar with Google Maps interface. Makes public transit that much more usable for visitors even before the Metro is “completed”.
- On the drive west out of town, I passed through the underpass for the railroad for the first sign. Always such a bottleneck for traffic previously, amazing to avoid via an underpass.
- MIAT now (Apr 2025) makes an announcement in German on the Frankfurt flight. In 2026 that announcement has disappeared and only about 20-25 passengers stayed in Ulaanbaatar while vast majority were transfer passengers bound for Seoul and Tokyo. Flight thus felt significantly less Mongolian, somehow.
- Beach flags as advertisement
- Big streets into the city now all treelined (1b tree subotnik!), those drives will look quite different in some years
- A good portion of the trash cans in the downtown core seem to have been removed
- Have I not mentioned Ramen before?
- Traffic light LED strips in the sidewalk at some Peace Ave intersections
- Apartment blocks and shopping now stretch several blocks from the Yarmag road toward the mountain.
- Missing persons notice taped to traffic light, designed very much like flyers in N America
- Another (purported) Hilton Hotel. Yes, you might ask, “whatever happened to the Hilton Hotel just south of the Star Apartments?” Well, it’s a bank now. This new presumed Hilton (though alternatively a Konrad Hotel) is currently a construction carcas across from the Central Post Office. I note that the “original” Hilton remained standing as a carcas for many years.
- Eagle cries animating intersection in front of Chinggis Museum. Is this Physical: Asian Museums?
- Surprising retail categories
View this post on Instagram
- New architectural styles
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- Rental scooters have been around Ulaanbaatar for years, but the fight against them being thrown away after use continues.
Ulaanbaatar version of attempt to combat rental scooters thrown about everywhere in cities… Note: no scooters here, but perhaps not the season for scooting, yet.
— Mongolia Focus (@mongoliafocus.bsky.social) April 2, 2026 at 3:07 AM
- The Chinggis Museum is playing the sound of eagles screeching at its entrance, audible across the intersection
View this post on Instagram
- Food trucks have largely replaced corner kiosks
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What has disappeared
for-pay scales (actually, they seem to be hanging on)- Victims of Political Persecution Memorial Museum. Promised floor dedicated to museum in newly-constructed large building on site does not appear to exist!
- private fences encroaching on public land/sidewalks
- It seems like (Korean) convenience store chains are replacing the small grocery stores that were ubiquitous in the downtown core. Not gone yet, but waning.
- Urban heritage core. One building at a time, heritage buildings in the centre of town are being torn down, largely replaced by generic glass-and-steel towers.
- Airplane turn-arounds. For the first few years, I often connected through Bejing and China Air pilots had the habit of taking a look at Ulaanbaatar and turning back around. Seemed like 1 of 3 flights. Reason: high side winds. I haven’t been travelling through authoritarian China for many years, but it seems like the new airport suffers less from dangerous winds and even from the fog that was rumoured to be common.
- Corner kiosks (see food trucks and convenience stores above)
- Traffic circles, at least the big one where the road to/from the old airport meets the road to/from the new airport. Ulaanbaatar drivers could not handle the organized anarchy of the traffic circle?
- Views of the mountains from downtown.
View this post on Instagram
What will appear in the future
navigation systems. Google now offers in-town traffic updates. Countryside systems still limited.- mental maps shifting to street names/addresses instead of landmarks
- subway (really, I wish they had selected light rail instead, but who knows whether either will come)
- urban renewal and historical restorations embracing district north of government house (National University of Mongolia, German embassy, etc.), but perhaps it will be too late for that
- Combined Heat and Power Plant #5 (yeah, right!)
- hipsters discovering УАЗ (minivan and jeep), but also Porters, perhaps as platform for mobile raves?
- giant hole blown into Bogd Khaan mountain to “drain” polluted air out of the valley (that actually is a proposal, but it will not appear! There also seems to be a proposal to blast away mountains on either end of the valley to let bad air escape!)
- some kind of traffic routing system with overhead displays
- Mongolia-themed bicycle stands, for example roof structure of a ger as a steel structure
- vending machines
- Chinese cars. I saw more of these in 2025, esp. the green license plate electric cars, but still not a very large number.
- Misters at outdoor restaurants. Very attractive feature in cities like Almaty and Bishkek when it gets hot.
- In the very long term, current young people (starting from 2000s birth cohorts) will think of themselves as the Prius generation, analogous to German Generation Golf.
- Given that the drive into Ulaanbaatar may now take longer than the flight to Ulaanbaatar, airport hotels must be on their way. Seems like others have noticed a need for this as well, esp. since MIAT seems to be doing a brisk transit business in light of many airlines not flying over Russia anymore and direct flights Europe to Asia thus having become very long.
- Some years ago the neoclassical Museum of Natural History was torn down to be replaced by the Chinggis Khaan Museum (I’m still boycotting). Construction has started for the Museum of Natural History next to Ikh Tenger presidential compound on the other side of the Tuul. Seems unlikely that any tourist will go all that way, what with Ulaanbaatar traffic being the way it is.
- The aerial tramway. So Paris! Yes, I have seen posts to carry the cable as well as the Yarmag terminus station as visual evidence of actual construction!
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What will disappear in the medium-term future
I’m going out on a predictive limb here… 2-3 years is what I mean by “medium-term future”.
Actually, since I had been predicting this as “near future” change for some years now, I guess I was wrong with all these predictions, and have changed the listing to medium-term future. As of 2026, none of these predictions have come true. Especially the car ride hand and half-step on stairs seem to have a lot of staying power. Might have to move these to the long-term category.
- stretched-out hand to signal for a car ride
- that awkward extra half-step on most stairs
- whitening make-up.
What will disappear in the long-term future
I mean beyond 7 years or so. None of these seems to be coming true quite yet, so I’ve changed the name of this category from medium-term to long-term.
- new (to Mongolia) cars that are right-hand drive
- the neo-classical Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, with its Stalinist (if that’s an architectural style) spire [Tough call to make as the MFA building is now dwarfed by its own annex]
- deels in the city [actually, they seem to be making a bit of a fashion comeback among young people]
- some of the downtown university campuses
- buildings of 4 floors or less in the urban core
- Russian minivans (УАЗ452)
- the Winter Palace. It won’t disappear entirely, but it is more-and-more surrounded by a very urban and very tall landscape making it look somewhat forlorn, a fate it shares with many other buildings
- heritage buildings
- street vendors with their little cardboard boxes of tissues, lighters, soda, perhaps rounded out by pine nuts or other offerings
- that colour in staircases and hallways of apartment and public buildings
- streetsweepers
