Mongolia

• 1. Introduction

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  Mongolia is the most sparsely populated sovereign state on Earth, setting aside the partially unrecognized Western Sahara. Inside its borders live 3.5 million people across an area of more than 1.5 million square kilometers. That makes it the 18th-largest country in the world, and the second-largest landlocked one after Kazakhstan. It is also the largest landlocked country that does not border an inland sea. Russia presses on its northern frontier and China on its southern. Between them stretches grassy steppe, mountains in the north and west, and the Gobi Desert to the south. Roughly half the population crowds into a single city, Ulaanbaatar. Yet about 30% of Mongolians still live as nomads or semi-nomads, and horse culture remains woven into daily life. How did a place this empty once command the largest contiguous land empire in history? Why do nearly a third of its people still follow the herds? And what turned a land of Buddhist monks into a Soviet satellite, then a democracy? The answers run from cave paintings tens of thousands of years old to a rail line opened in 2022.

• 2. Land Of Empires

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  In 1206, a chieftain named Temujin took the title Genghis Khan after uniting the Mongol tribes between Manchuria and the Altai Mountains. His military campaigns, renowned for their brutality and ferocity, swept through much of Asia. The empire he forged eventually stretched from present-day Poland to Korea, and from parts of Siberia to the Gulf of Oman and Vietnam. At its height it covered some 33 million square kilometers, about 22% of Earth's land area. Its population passed 100 million, roughly a quarter of all people alive at the time. The peace it imposed, the Pax Mongolica, eased trade across the continent. Long before Genghis Khan, the steppe had bred confederation after confederation. The Xiongnu, brought together by Modu Shanyu in 209 BC, grew into such a threat that the Qin dynasty built the Great Wall of China against them. Marshal Meng Tian guarded it with up to almost 300,000 soldiers. The Xiongnu gave way to the Xianbei, then the Rouran Khaganate, the first to use Khagan as an imperial title. After Genghis Khan died, his empire split into four khanates. His grandson Kublai Khan conquered China proper, founded the Yuan dynasty, and set his capital in present-day Beijing. When the Ming dynasty overthrew the Yuan in 1368, the Mongol court fled north, and Ming armies sacked the Mongol capital Karakorum.

• 3. The Coming Of Buddhism

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  In 1578, Altan Khan of the Tumed met with the Dalai Lama and ordered the introduction of Tibetan Buddhism to Mongolia. It was the second time the faith had reached the country. Abtai Khan of the Khalkha then converted and founded the Erdene Zuu monastery in 1585. His grandson Zanabazar became the first Jebtsundamba Khutughtu in 1640. Following their leaders, the entire Mongolian population embraced Buddhism. Each family kept scriptures and Buddha statues on an altar at the north side of their yurt. Mongolian nobles donated land, money, and herders to the monasteries, and those monasteries gathered immense temporal power alongside spiritual authority. By 1911 there were 700 large and small monasteries in Outer Mongolia. Their 115,000 monks made up 21% of the population. Apart from the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, 13 other reincarnating high lamas, called seal-holding saints, lived in Outer Mongolia. The faith would later pay a terrible price. By the end of the 1930s almost all of those monasteries had been looted or razed, and the number of Buddhist monks dropped from 100,000 in 1924 to 110 by 1990.

• 4. From Manchu Rule To Soviet Orbit

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  By 1691 all of present-day Mongolia had come under Manchu rule, the Khalkha having submitted after most Inner Mongolian tribes joined the Qing in 1636. The Manchu forbade mass Chinese immigration, which let the Mongols keep their culture. They installed ambans, Manchu high officials, in Khuree, Uliastai, and Khovd. Over the 19th century, feudal lords sought representation while neglecting their subjects, and usurious Chinese traders plus taxes collected in silver drove the nomads into poverty. With the fall of the Qing in 1911, Mongolia under the Bogd Khaan declared independence. The Republic of China, under President Yuan Shikai, claimed the country as its own. The path to real freedom ran through war. In 1919, Chinese troops led by warlord Xu Shuzheng occupied Mongolia. Then the White Russian Baron Ungern led his troops in, defeating the Chinese forces in Niislel Khuree in early February 1921. To remove Ungern, Bolshevik Russia backed a communist Mongolian government and army. Mongolia declared independence again on the 11th of July 1921, and aligned closely with the Soviet Union for the next seven decades. In 1924, after the Bogd Khaan died of laryngeal cancer, the Mongolian People's Republic was established.

• 5. Terror And Survival

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  In 1928, Khorloogiin Choibalsan rose to power, and the bloodletting that followed reshaped the country. He forced the collectivization of livestock, began destroying the Buddhist monasteries, and carried out Stalinist purges that murdered numerous monks and other leaders. The purges that began in 1937 killed more than 30,000 people. An estimated 17,000 monks were among the dead, according to official figures. Leaders who refused Stalin's demands for Red Terror were executed, including Peljidiin Genden and Anandyn Amar. Choibalsan himself died suspiciously in the Soviet Union in 1952. The Comintern leader Bohumir Smeral captured the cold logic of the era when he said, People of Mongolia are not important, the land is important. Mongolian land is larger than England, France and Germany. War pressed in from outside as well. After Japan invaded neighboring Manchuria in 1931, Mongolia faced a new threat. During the Soviet-Japanese Border War of 1939, the Soviet Union defended Mongolia, and Mongol forces fought at the Battles of Khalkhin Gol. They fought again during the Soviet-Japanese War in August 1945. At the Yalta Conference that February, the Soviets had set Outer Mongolian independence as a condition of joining the Pacific War, and a referendum on the 20th of October 1945 recorded 100% support for independence.

• 6. A Peaceful Revolution

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  In January 1990, Mongolians undertook a peaceful Democratic Revolution as the Soviet bloc unraveled. They won a multi-party system and the start of a market economy. The old Marxist-Leninist Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party transformed into the social democratic Mongolian People's Party. A new constitution arrived in 1992, and the words People's Republic were dropped from the country's name. Since the adoption of that constitution on the 13th of February 1992, the official name of the state has simply been Mongolia. The change was not smooth. Through the early 1990s the country battled high inflation and food shortages. Non-communist parties scored their first election wins in 1993 and 1996. The fall of communism in 1991 also restored public religious practice, and Tibetan Buddhism rose again to become the most widely practiced faith. Other religions spread too. According to the Christian missionary group Barnabas Fund, the number of Christians grew from just four in 1989 to around 40,000. The highest-ranking lama of Buddhism in Mongolia has stood vacant since the 9th Jebtsundamba died in 2012, with the search for a successor complicated by Beijing's desire to assert control over Tibetan Buddhism.

• 7. The Mineral Frontier

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  Minerals represent more than 80% of Mongolia's exports, a share expected to eventually rise to 95%. Copper, coal, molybdenum, tin, tungsten, and gold have turned mining into a driver of the economy, accounting for 21.8% of GDP. The country also produces one-fifth of the world's raw cashmere. In 2009 the government struck a deal with Rio Tinto and Ivanhoe Mines to develop the Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold deposit, then the biggest foreign-investment project in the country. The mine now plans to reach an output of 500,000 tons of copper per year. Lawmakers have long eyed the Tavan Tolgoi area, the world's largest untapped coal deposit, holding more than six billion tonnes of reserves. In September 2022, Mongolia built and launched a 233-kilometer direct rail link to China, aiming to become its leading supplier of high-quality coal. Strong Chinese demand pushed real GDP up by 7% in 2023 on record coal production. China takes 78% of Mongolia's exports, far above Switzerland at 15% and Singapore at 3%. That dependence shapes everything from the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline to Mongolia's effort to stay out of the US-China confrontation. The third neighbor policy, pursued since the early 1990s, seeks deeper ties beyond Russia and China, a goal then-Vice President Joe Biden endorsed when he visited in 2011.

• 8. Steppe And Sky

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  Mongolia is known as the Land of the Eternal Blue Sky, with over 250 sunny days a year. It is high, cold, and windy, with an extreme continental climate of long winters and short summers. January averages can drop as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius, and Ulaanbaatar ranks as the world's coldest capital city. The far north of Bulgan Province, near the Russian border, averages 600 millimeters of annual precipitation, more than Beijing or Berlin, while the Gobi receives as little as 100 millimeters. The Gobi itself is a Mongol term for a desert steppe, arid rangeland with enough vegetation to support camels but not marmots. Its dryness comes from the rain shadow of the Himalayas. Before those mountains rose 10 million years ago, Mongolia was a flourishing habitat, and sea turtle and mollusk fossils still turn up there alongside the famous dinosaur finds. Culture here grows from the land. The traditional dwelling is the ger, which the artist N. Chultem called the basis of Mongolian architecture. The main national festival, Naadam, runs three days each July around the Three Manly Games of archery, horse-racing, and wrestling. Mongolian wrestling is the most popular sport of all, and historians claim Mongol-style wrestling began some seven thousand years ago. The sumo wrestler Dolgorsurengiin Dagvadorj won 25 top division championships, and in January 2015 Monkhbatyn Davaajargal took his 33rd, the most in the history of sumo.