Mongolia is a vast, landlocked country in East Asia, wedged between Russia and China, a land of endless grasslands, deserts, and mountains under a famously wide sky. One of the most sparsely populated nations on Earth, it preserves a living tradition of nomadic herding stretching back millennia. From this thinly peopled steppe came Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, which in the thirteenth century became the largest contiguous land empire in history.
The Mongolian steppe was home to nomadic horse peoples for thousands of years, but its great moment came when Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes in the early thirteenth century and launched conquests that built the largest contiguous empire the world has ever seen, stretching from Korea to Eastern Europe. His grandson Kublai Khan ruled China as the Yuan dynasty. After the empire fragmented, Mongolia came under Chinese rule, won independence in the early twentieth century with Soviet help, spent decades as a communist state, and embraced democracy in 1990.
According to the medieval Secret History of the Mongols, the people descend from a union at the beginning of time between a blue-grey wolf and a fallow deer, whose offspring became the ancestors of the Mongol clans, the line that led eventually to Genghis Khan. This origin story is a treasured part of Mongolian identity and folklore. As a literal account of descent it belongs to legend rather than history, even as it preserves the deep self-understanding of a nomadic people.
Mongolia is a huge country of open spaces and dramatic extremes. Rolling steppe grasslands cover much of the land, giving way to the great Gobi Desert in the south and to forested mountains in the north and west. With a harsh continental climate of bitterly cold winters and short, warm summers, and almost no part of the country near a sea, it is a place of vast horizons and severe weather. This open landscape has shaped a culture built around horses, herds, and movement.
The flag of Mongolia has three vertical bands, red on the outer edges and blue in the centre, with a golden national emblem, the Soyombo, on the hoist-side red band. The blue represents the eternal blue sky revered by Mongolians, and the red the prosperity and freedom of the nation. The Soyombo is an intricate symbol made up of geometric shapes and elements, including fire, sun, and moon, each carrying its own meaning in a powerful emblem of independence.
The majority of Mongolians follow Tibetan Buddhism, which spread across the country from the sixteenth century and built great monasteries, though much of this religious life was destroyed under communist rule and has revived since 1990. Underlying and intertwined with Buddhism is an ancient tradition of shamanism, honouring the spirits of the sky, the land, and the ancestors, which remains a living part of Mongolian belief. A Kazakh minority in the west is Muslim.
Mongolian cuisine reflects the nomadic, pastoral way of life, centred on meat and dairy with few vegetables, food suited to a harsh climate and a mobile herding culture. Mutton and beef are staples, often boiled, and steamed meat-filled dumplings called buuz are a favourite. Dairy products in many forms, from cheeses to the mildly alcoholic fermented mare's milk known as airag, are central to the diet, especially in summer when the herds give plentiful milk.
Agriculture in Mongolia is dominated by livestock herding rather than crops, a continuation of the ancient nomadic tradition. Vast herds of sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and camels roam the steppe, and the country is one of the world's major producers of cashmere, the fine wool combed from its goats. Crop farming is limited by the cold, dry climate, concentrated on wheat and fodder in the north. Herding remains central to both the economy and the national identity.
Genghis Khan's unification of the Mongols and the explosion of the Mongol Empire across Eurasia rank among the most consequential events in world history, reshaping the map of the medieval world. The empire spread trade, ideas, and devastation alike. After centuries of decline and foreign rule, Mongolia became the world's second communist country in the 1920s, and in 1990 it made a peaceful transition to democracy, reclaiming pride in its imperial past.
Mongolia has a population of only around 3.4 million people spread across an enormous territory, making it the most sparsely populated sovereign country in the world. The great majority are ethnic Mongols, with a Kazakh minority in the west. A large and growing share now live in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, the coldest national capital on Earth, while many others continue a traditional herding life on the steppe, living in the round felt tents known as gers.
