Genghis Khan’s homeland is still nearly a third nomadic
Mongolia, landlocked between Russia and China, covers 1,564,116 square kilometres—eighteenth-largest country and second-largest landlocked state after Kazakhstan. About thirty percent of residents remain nomadic or semi-nomadic, with horse culture still central, and its 3.5 million people make it the most thinly settled sovereign state on Earth.
Grassy steppe fills much of the country; ranges rise in the west and north, and the Gobi Desert stretches across the south. Roughly half the population lives in Ulaanbaatar, the capital. Mahayana Buddhism claims 51.7 percent of people and the irreligious 40.6, while Islam, at 3.2 percent, is concentrated among Kazakhs. About 5 percent belong to minorities such as Kazakhs and Tuvans, mostly in the west. Membership of the World Trade Organization dates from 1997.
Ochre paintings of mammoths, camels and ostriches in Khoit Tsenkher Cave, some 20,000 years old, have earned it the label Lascaux of Mongolia. Farming villages such as Norovlin and Tamsagbulag flourished around 5500–3500 BC, before horse-riding herders took over; the Afanasevo culture had wheeled carts before 2200 BC. A blond Scythian warrior roughly 2,500 years old was found mummified in the Altai. Modu Shanyu forged the Xiongnu confederation in 209 BC, a threat that pushed Qin China to build the Great Wall, and the Rouran were the first to call their ruler Khagan.
Temüjin, son of the Khamag Mongol chief Yesügei, united the tribes between Manchuria and the Altai and took the title Genghis Khan in 1206. His successors ruled roughly 33 million square kilometres, about 22 percent of Earth’s land, from Poland to Korea. Kublai Khan founded the Yuan dynasty with its capital at modern Beijing, but the Ming expelled it in 1368 and later sacked Karakorum.
Tibetan Buddhism arrived in the 16th century and the Qing annexed the land in the 17th; by the early 1900s nearly one-third of adult men were monks. Independence was declared in 1911 after the Qing collapse and secured in 1921, and a Soviet-aligned People’s Republic followed in 1924. A peaceful 1990 revolution brought multiparty politics and the 1992 constitution, which fixed the name Mongol Uls.
Source: Mongolia
