A team comprised of Chinese state-owned companies has won a design and planning contract for a new city in Mongolia, close to the town of Kharkhorum in the Orkhon Valley, a Unesco World Heritage site 360km west of Mongolia’s current capital of Ulaanbaatar.

The winning group consists of China Road And Bridge Corporation, China Construction Engineering Design and Research Institute, and China Communications Highway Planning And Design Institute.

The team is led by Song Xiaolong, China State Construction Engineering Corporatio’s head architect, who has said the new capital will be “green, cultural, resilient and happy”.

The design competition for New Kharkhorum City attracted 428 teams from 54 countries.

Mongolia’s capital of Ulaanbaatar is deemed to be overpopulated, with a new city needed to diversify economic and environmental challenges.

The original competition brief notes that half of Mongolia’s population lives in Ulaanbaatar, and the proliferation of people and resources have made the capital a “disaster risk”.

Kharkhorum was the capital of the Northern Yuan dynasty between the 14 and 15th Centuries as well as the capital of the Mongol Empire between 1235 and 1260.