Mongolia

The Mongolian steppe bred a succession of nomadic empires — the Xiongnu, the Turks, the Uyghurs — before Temüjin united the warring tribes and was proclaimed Genghis Khan in 1206. Within a lifetime the Mongols built the largest contiguous land empire in history, from Korea to Hungary; his grandson Kublai Khan ruled China as the Yuan dynasty. The empire fragmented within a few generations, and Mongolia turned inward, adopting Tibetan Buddhism from the sixteenth century.

The Manchu Qing dynasty absorbed Mongolia in the late seventeenth century and held it for around two hundred years. When the Qing fell in 1911, Mongolia declared autonomy under a Buddhist theocrat, the Bogd Khan. A 1921 revolution backed by Soviet Russia led to the Mongolian People's Republic in 1924, the world's second communist state. The 1930s brought Stalinist purges that killed tens of thousands, most of them monks, and destroyed almost every monastery.

Mongolia spent the Cold War as a loyal Soviet satellite. A peaceful democratic revolution in 1990 ended one-party rule, and a new constitution followed in 1992. Since then the country has been a functioning, if turbulent, democracy, its economy transformed — and made volatile — by huge foreign-invested mines such as the Oyu Tolgoi copper deposit and the Tavan Tolgoi coalfield, whose exports go overwhelmingly to China.

Mobile pastoralism is the cultural core, even for city Mongolians. The round felt-and-lattice ger, the horse — children ride before they can properly walk — and the "five snouts" of horse, cattle, camel, sheep, and goat shape a way of life built on movement and on hospitality to any traveller who arrives at the door. The summer Naadam festival stages the "three manly games" of wrestling, horse racing, and archery.

Music carries the landscape: the morin khuur, a two-stringed fiddle topped with a carved horse's head, and khöömei, the overtone or throat singing that produces two notes at once. Tibetan Buddhism has revived strongly since 1990, practised alongside older shamanism — the stone ovoo cairns hung with blue silk scarves at passes and hilltops are offerings to local spirits.

Ger etiquette still matters: enter with the left foot, never step on the threshold, accept food or drink with the right hand, and move clockwise inside. Genghis Khan, denounced under communism, is now the national symbol, his name and image on the airport, the currency, the vodka, and a colossal steel statue east of the capital.

Mongolia has about 3.5 million people, and roughly half of them live in Ulaanbaatar, which has swollen with unplanned ger districts as herders move to the city — a shift that, with coal stoves for heating, gives the capital some of the worst winter air pollution in the world. The other half of the population is scattered across the countryside in family herding camps that move with the seasons.

The economy runs on mining, which dominates exports and government revenue and has built much of modern Ulaanbaatar, alongside cashmere, tourism, and the herding that still supports a large share of households. A severe dzud winter — deep cold over an icy ground animals cannot dig through — can kill millions of livestock and push families off the land.

The result is a country pulled two ways: a young, online, urban generation in the capital, and a pastoral tradition in the countryside that is thinning but far from gone. Mongolian wrestlers have become stars of Japanese sumo, a source of national pride.

Mongolian food is built on meat and dairy, with few vegetables in the traditional diet. Mutton and beef are the everyday meats, boiled or made into buuz (steamed dumplings) and khuushuur (fried meat pastries), which are eaten by the dozen at Naadam. For feasts, khorkhog and boodog cook meat with fire-heated stones, sometimes inside the animal's own skin. Tsuivan, fried flat noodles with meat, is a common one-pot meal.

Dairy — the "white foods" — is central in summer: clotted cream (öröm) on bread, dried curd (aaruul) that keeps for months, and airag, mildly alcoholic fermented mare's milk drunk by the bowl. Tea is suutei tsai, brewed with milk and salt.

City menus now include Russian, Korean, and international dishes, and Ulaanbaatar has a growing café and restaurant scene, but out in the countryside the diet remains meat, flour, and milk, generously shared.

The Gobi Desert in the south is the classic circuit: the towering Khongoryn Els "singing dunes", the red Flaming Cliffs of Bayanzag where the first dinosaur eggs were found, and the ice-filled gorge of Yolyn Am. Central Mongolia holds the Orkhon Valley, a UNESCO cultural landscape, with the ruins of the imperial capital Karakorum, the Erdene Zuu monastery beside it, and the Orkhon waterfall.

In the north, deep-blue Lake Khövsgöl sits in larch forest near the reindeer-herding Tsaatan people. The western Altai offers the Kazakh eagle hunters of Bayan-Ölgii, the glaciated Tavan Bogd peaks, and ancient rock art. Near Ulaanbaatar, Gorkhi-Terelj National Park has granite formations and easy riding and hiking, and the giant stainless-steel equestrian statue of Genghis Khan stands on the steppe to the east.

Ulaanbaatar itself has Sükhbaatar Square, the Gandan monastery with its towering gilded Buddha, the National Museum of Mongolia, and the Bogd Khan's winter palace.