Architecture of Mongolia
The Xiongnu confederation ruled present-day Mongolia from the third century BCE through the first century CE, living in portable, round tents on carts and round yurts. The Xiongnu aristocracy lived in small palaces, and their villages were protected by huge walls. S. I. Rudenko also mentions capital construction built of logs. Archaeological excavations indicate that the Xiongnu had towns; their chief city was Luut Hot (Dragon City).
Turkic migration
The population ancestral to the Turks is thought to have included the Xiongnu of Mongolia or along the upper Yenisei in Siberia (the area of the contemporary Tuvan language), known from historical sources. The Han chronicle of the Xiongnu, included in the "Records of the Grand Historian" of the second century BCE, traces a legendary history of them back a thousand years before the Han to a legendary ancestor, Chunwei, a supposed descendant of the Chinese rulers of the Xia dynasty (c. 2070 – c. 1600 BCE). Chunwei lived among the "Mountain Barbarians" Xianyun or Hunzhu. Xianyun and Hunzhu's names may connect them to the Turkic people, who later were said to have been iron-workers and to have kept a national shrine in a mountain cave in Mongolia.