The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Kerulen

a river in the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) and China. Length, 1,264 km (1,090 km in the MPR); basin area, 116,400 sq km.

The Kerulen has its sources on the southeastern slopes of the Henteyn Mountains; in its upper reaches it flows through a narrow wooded mountain valley, sometimes in canyons. In its middle and lower course it flows through a broad, terraced valley. The river bed has a great many islands, oxbow lakes, and swampy sections. The Kerulen empties into Lake Hulun (Dalai Nor). Its upper terraces are occupied by arid steppe; its lower terraces, by meadows and tugai (bottomland with forest and scrub). The river’s water capacity decreases along its course because of evaporation and the diversion of the water for irrigation. The high-water period occurs during the summer, and every year there are several flash floods caused by rains. The river is icebound from November through April, and in many places it freezes over completely. The river is abundant in fish (taimen, carp, and catfish). The city of Choibalsan (MPR) is located on the Kerulen.

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References in periodicals archive

Here the Kerulen River, not deep but cold and very swift with the quick loss of altitude, made a great bend toward the east.

That night we camped east of Choybalsan, the only town of any size in the eastern part of Mongolia, and the next day headed north and east across the plateaus above the Kerulen river plain, over empty grassland without gers or horses.

The track bore east over the Plateau, and below, great curves of the Kerulen appeared.

On a high bank along a deep bend in the river, Bold and Tseveen located their old camp of a few years ago, when they had recorded their first sighting of the white-naped along the Kerulen. Bold produced a set of small red cups and a bottle of arak, as we listened to the murmur of the river, and the wail of lapwings and the cry of crakes and the primordial wood-block rattle of the demoiselles.

We were breaking camp when two white-naped cranes flew in from the east, low against the valley rim, and, setting their wings, glided down toward the lake edge beyond the ruined temple not far from where, the previous afternoon, we had seen a pair with a gold chick - our first evidence of breeding Grus vipio on the Kerulen. Concerned (if these cranes were those we'd seen a day earlier) as to why they might have left their chick, I walked west to the ruin and on past the north end of the lake, circling a bed of yellow blossoms at the marsh edge.

Just as I'd concluded that this must be so - that the first known nesting of the white-naped in the Kerulen had ended in tragedy - a young crane emerged from the farther reeds and crossed quickly to the break in the reed wall into which the adult birds, still calling now and then, had disappeared.

Alighting upon the Daurian Steppe: a Mongolian journey in search of the white-naped crane