Back in 2008, while traveling in the Karakol region of Kyrgyzstan, I visited the Altyn Arashan hot springs (as described here), but I didn’t think anything about the place-name other than that it was a golden (altïn) something. Years later, while reading Juha Janhunen’s recently-published presentation Mongolian, I was surprised to find the meaning of the word, and it took a long path to Kyrgyzstan.
While speaking of Mongolian’s historical tendency to avoid r- at the beginning of a word by prepending an a-, Janhunen mentions Khalkha Mongolian arshaan ‘hot spring’, where this process has taken place. The Mongolian word in fact originated in Sanskrit raṣāyana, a term of Indian traditional medicine.
Kyrgyzstan has historically had some Mongolian-speaking population, especially in this particular area. The Mongols also brought this word for ‘hot spring’ to Buryatia and Tuva. Some Indian loanwords in Mongolian came through Central Asian Iranian and Uyghur mediation, while others came through Tibetan mediation, though unfortunately I don’t have the references at home to determine by which route arshaan came.
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