Beatles Monument in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

The Beatles Monument stands on Beatles Square in central Ulaanbaatar, opposite the State Department Store. Singer G. Gankhuu started the project, fans paid for it, and B. Denzen designed the bronze relief, erected in 2008. It recalls young Mongolians who sang Beatles songs in stairwells when Western music was banned.

Who paid for a Beatles monument in Mongolia

The idea came from G. Gankhuu, singer of the Mongolian band Shar Airag. Money came from donations, and the Mongolian Wikipedia article lists some of the donors: Prime Minister S. Bayar, former Ulaanbaatar mayor E. Bat-Uul, TV host N. Gankhuyag and composer B. Dolgion. The same article puts the budget at about 100 million tögrög. B. Denzen made the design and the relief was cast in bronze. It went up in the autumn of 2008, and an English-language report from 2017 says it was unveiled on John Lennon's birthday, which would be 9 October.

The site was chosen on purpose. Western pop was banned in socialist Mongolia, and this part of the city, with its Soviet-era apartment blocks, is where young people gathered to talk about and listen to that music.

Two sides, two stories

The monument has two faces. On the south side the four Beatles stand in bronze relief, and Paul McCartney is barefoot, the way he walks on the Abbey Road cover. On the north side a young man sits on a flight of stairs playing a guitar.

He stands in for a real habit. In the 1970s Ulaanbaatar teenagers met in apartment stairwells to sing Beatles songs they had learned from records smuggled in from Eastern Europe. The outline of the whole piece is shaped like an apple, a nod to the Beatles' label, Apple Records.

If you only photograph the band, you miss the half that makes this monument Mongolian.

2008, not the early 1990s

A 2020 Koryo Tours blog post dates the monument to the early 1990s, just after Mongolia's democratic turn. That's wrong. Mongolian press, the Mongolian Wikipedia and Koryo's own 2017 guide all give 2008. The mix-up is easy to see: the monument is about the years before 1990, not the year it was built.

The night the bulldozers came

On the evening of 2 August 2017 the square was fenced off and bulldozers moved in. Residents had heard rumours of construction on the land for years. A crowd gathered around the monument, local businesses backed them, and the work stopped. A lawyer for Mongolia's National Construction Association denied there had ever been a plan to remove the statue and said the project was about a pedestrian zone with an underground shopping mall. A later Koryo post says officials called it maintenance and the square was restored.

The monument is still there. OpenStreetMap mappers last confirmed it on site in August 2025.

For another Beatles tribute in Central Asia, see the Beatles monument in Almaty, or browse the full list of memorials.