Long before there was a Mongol nation, the vast steppes of Central and East Asia were the domain of successive confederations of nomadic horsemen, masters of the bow and of a life on the move. The first great documented steppe power was that of the Xiongnu, who around 209 BC, under their leader Modu Chanyu, forged a tribal empire that stretched across present-day Mongolia and northern China. Their constant pressure on the Chinese Qin and Han dynasties was one of the reasons behind the building and extension of the Great Wall. For centuries, Chinese and nomads fought and traded along that shifting frontier between the settled world and the world of the yurt.
The break-up of the Xiongnu was followed by other peoples: the Xianbei, the Rouran and, above all, the Turks (Göktürks), who in the 6th century founded the First and Second Turkic Khaganates, empires that for the first time left written records in their own language. The famous Orkhon inscriptions, carved in stone around 732 in honour of Prince Kül Tegin and his brother, Khagan Bilge, still stand in the Orkhon River valley and are the oldest written record of a Turkic language. In them, the rulers warned their people about the dangers of leaving the steppe and being seduced by the riches of China.
In the 8th century, power passed to the Uyghurs, who between 744 and 840 ruled a khaganate with its capital at Ordu-Baliq (Karabalgasun), also in the Orkhon valley, and who adopted Manichaeism as their state religion. Their fall, brought about by the Kyrgyz, scattered the Uyghurs westwards. Over the following centuries, the mosaic of steppe tribes —Mongols, Tatars, Keraites, Naimans, Merkits— lived fragmented and in constant war with one another. From that universe of rival clans, hardened by the extreme climate and the struggle for pasture, the man who would unite them all under a single banner was to be born.
Around 1162, on the banks of the Onon River in today's Khentii province, a boy named Temüjin was born, the son of a clan chief murdered by the Tatars when the boy was still young. His childhood was one of poverty, captivity and flight, but also of exceptional political and military skill. Over three decades he defeated or won over the rival tribes of the steppe —Keraites, Naimans, Merkits, Tatars— through a mix of alliances, marriages, punished betrayals and a loyalty based on merit rather than blood. In 1206, a great kurultai, or assembly of chiefs, gathered at the headwaters of the Onon River proclaimed him Genghis Khan, "universal ruler", sealing the birth of the unified Mongol nation.
Genghis Khan reorganised his people into a disciplined army divided into decimal units (arban, zuun, mянган, tumen), issued a code of laws called the Yassa, adopted the Uyghur script for Mongolian and created a system of relay stations and couriers, the yam, which allowed orders to travel at astonishing speed across thousands of kilometres. With that war machine he launched an unprecedented expansion: he subdued the Tanguts of Western Xia and the Jin of northern China, and in 1219 turned west, destroying the Khwarazmian Empire in Central Asia. The combination of mounted archers, mobility, military intelligence and calculated terror made the Mongol armies almost unbeatable.
Genghis Khan died in 1227, but his sons and grandsons carried on the expansion until they had forged the largest contiguous land empire in history: at its peak, towards the end of the 13th century, it is estimated to have covered around 24 million square kilometres, from Korea and the China Sea to the steppes of Hungary and the gates of Vienna, and from Siberia to Persia and Mesopotamia. Under the reign of his son and successor Ögedei, the empire acquired a fixed capital: Karakorum, founded around 1235 in the Orkhon valley, became the political centre of a world that spanned almost all of Eurasia. That "Mongol peace" (Pax Mongolica) revived the Silk Road and allowed travellers such as Marco Polo or the friar William of Rubruck to cross the continent.
The death of each great khan opened a struggle for succession, and the immense empire soon split into several autonomous khanates: the Golden Horde on the Russian steppes, the Ilkhanate in Persia, the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia and the khanate of the Great Khan in the east. Genghis's grandson, Kublai Khan, came out on top in that dispute and moved the centre of gravity of power from the Mongolian steppe to China. In 1271 he proclaimed a new Chinese-style dynasty, the Yuan dynasty, and in 1279, after defeating the last of the Southern Song, he became the first foreign emperor to rule all of China.
Kublai founded a new capital, Dadu —today's Beijing— and relegated Karakorum to a secondary role. His court, described in amazement by Marco Polo, blended Mongol nomadic tradition with Chinese administrative sophistication. The Yuan empire promoted trade, the circulation of paper money, the arts and religious tolerance, and for the first time put China in direct and fluid contact with Persia and Europe. However, the Mongols remained a ruling minority over a huge Chinese population, which they kept in a subordinate social position, fuelling lasting resentment.
Yuan rule lasted less than a century. Internal strife, floods on the Yellow River, epidemics and an economy in crisis unleashed popular rebellions. In 1368, the peasant revolt led by Zhu Yuanzhang drove the Mongols out of China and founded the Ming dynasty. The court of the last Yuan emperor withdrew to the northern steppes, giving rise to the period known as the Northern Yuan. Back in their homeland, without the plunder or the power of imperial times, the Mongols split once again into rival tribes that clashed for centuries, among the Khalkha groups of the north, the Oirats of the west and the southern or Inner Mongols.
Although the Mongols had already come into contact with Tibetan Buddhism in Kublai Khan's time, the mass conversion of the people only came in the 16th century. In 1578, the powerful leader Altan Khan, of the Tümed Mongols, met the head of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism and granted him the title of Dalai Lama —"ocean of wisdom"—, a Mongolian name that has since distinguished the highest leaders of Tibetan Buddhism. In return, the new faith spread rapidly across the steppes, displacing the old shamanism and deeply transforming Mongolia's culture, art and daily life. Hundreds of monasteries were built and became centres of learning, art and power, and a huge share of the men took monastic vows.
The towering figure of that Buddhist revival was Zanabazar (1635-1723), recognised as a child as the reincarnation of a great master and proclaimed the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, the highest spiritual authority of Buddhism in Khalkha Mongolia, a position equivalent to a "living Buddha". Zanabazar was much more than a religious leader: he was a genius of the Mongol Renaissance, an extraordinary sculptor whose gilded bronze figures are considered masterpieces of Asian Buddhist art, as well as an architect, painter and linguist. Around 1686 he created the Soyombo script to transcribe sacred texts, and from it came the Soyombo symbol, the national emblem that has appeared on Mongolia's flag since the early 20th century.
The lineage of the Jebtsundamba Khutuktus thus became a spiritual and also political power of the first order in Outer Mongolia. Its most important monasteries —Erdene Zuu, next to the ruins of Karakorum; Amarbayasgalant, in the north; and the great centre of Ikh Khüree, the seed of the future Ulaanbaatar— were the hubs around which the country's life was organised over the following centuries. That deep-rooted Buddhism would later explain why the purges of the 20th century were especially ruthless towards the monasteries and the monks.
While Mongolia was fragmenting, a new power was rising in China: the Manchus, who founded the Qing dynasty in 1644. Throughout the 17th century, the various Mongol princes fell into their orbit. The northern Khalkha, under pressure from the Oirats of Dzungaria, submitted to the protection of the Qing emperor at the Dolonnor assembly in 1691, and over time all of Outer Mongolia was absorbed into the Manchu empire as an autonomous but supervised periphery. For more than two centuries, the Qing dynasty ruled Mongolia through the local nobility and the Buddhist hierarchy, imposing tax and service burdens, controlling trade and discouraging Mongol political unity.
The collapse of the Qing empire opened the door to independence. When the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 ended the monarchy in China, the Mongol princes and lamas proclaimed the independence of Outer Mongolia on 29 December 1911 and enthroned the eighth Jebtsundamba Khutuktu as theocratic ruler with the title of Bogd Khan, "holy ruler". So was born the Bogd Khanate, a Buddhist monarchy that sought the backing of Tsarist Russia against Chinese claims. But the new state's position was fragile: in 1919 Chinese troops reoccupied the capital, and shortly afterwards the Russian adventurer Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, the "Mad Baron", took it by force in 1921 amid the chaos of the Russian Civil War.
From that crossroads came the revolution that would define Mongolia's 20th century. A group of young revolutionaries, among them Damdin Sükhbaatar, organised the Mongolian People's Party and a partisan army with the support of the Soviet Red Army. In July 1921, Sükhbaatar's forces, together with Soviet troops, liberated the capital, later renamed Ulaanbaatar ("red hero") in his honour. The Bogd Khan was kept on as a symbolic monarch with reduced powers until his death in 1924. That same year, with the theocratic ruler gone, the Mongolian People's Republic was proclaimed, the world's second socialist state after the Soviet Union.
For almost seven decades, Mongolia was the Soviet Union's most loyal satellite, so closely aligned with Moscow that it was sometimes called "the sixteenth Soviet republic". Under the leadership of the People's Revolutionary Party, the country adopted the Soviet model: a planned economy, collectivisation of livestock, mass literacy, the replacement of the traditional Mongolian script with the Cyrillic alphabet and a state atheism that clashed head-on with the Buddhist church, which in the early 20th century accounted for a huge share of the country's male population and wealth.
The darkest episode of that period was the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, carried out under the command of leader Khorloogiin Choibalsan and with the direct guidance of the Soviet secret police. This subject calls for restraint: between 1937 and 1939, in barely a year and a half, state terror fell upon the monasteries, the old nobility, intellectuals and the party's own cadres accused of conspiracy. According to historical records, more than 18,000 lamas were executed and some 746 monasteries were destroyed or closed; the monastic community, which in September 1937 numbered around 80,000 monks, had been reduced to fewer than five hundred by the end of 1938. The total death toll of the repression in those years is usually estimated at between 20,000 and more than 30,000 people, a colossal figure for a country that then had fewer than a million inhabitants. That trauma, silenced for decades, could only be investigated and commemorated after the fall of the regime.
Beyond the horror of the purges, socialist Mongolia also went through processes of modernisation: cities, schools, hospitals and an industrial and railway network were built with Soviet help, and the country took part in the communist bloc as a member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. In 1939, Soviet and Mongolian troops defeated the Japanese at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol, on the eastern border, a decisive clash that removed the threat of invasion. Throughout the Cold War, Mongolia remained wedged between the two great communist powers, the USSR and China, and depended entirely on Moscow's economic support.
When perestroika shook the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, its echoes reached Ulaanbaatar. In early 1990, a series of peaceful demonstrations, hunger strikes and calls for reform —led by young intellectuals and with hardly any violence— forced the resignation of the old communist leadership and opened up the system. That democratic revolution, remarkable for being bloodless, led to the first free elections and to a new Constitution adopted in 1992, which enshrined parliamentary democracy, a multi-party system, a market economy and individual freedoms. Almost overnight, Mongolia became one of the most stable democracies in Central Asia.
The transition was not easy. The end of Soviet subsidies plunged the economy into a deep crisis throughout the 1990s, with shortages, unemployment and a harsh process of privatisation. With the new century, the way out came from its natural resources: Mongolia's subsoil holds huge reserves of copper, gold, coal and other minerals. Giant projects such as the Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold mine, in the Gobi, and the Tavan Tolgoi coal deposits made mining the engine of the economy and attracted heavy foreign investment, above all from neighbouring China, which became the main buyer of Mongolian raw materials.
21st-century Mongolia lives with the tensions of that rapid change. The mining boom brought growth but also dependence on international prices, inequality and environmental problems, while the extreme climate —the harsh winters known as dzud— keeps hitting nomadic herders and pushes thousands of families towards Ulaanbaatar, a capital that today is home to almost half the country's population and suffers from severe air pollution. Even so, Mongolia upholds its democracy, proudly reclaims Genghis Khan as a national emblem after decades of Soviet censorship, revives Buddhism and the traditions that were persecuted, and keeps alive, on its endless steppes, one of the last great nomadic cultures on the planet.
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Ulaanbaatar is a capital with a surprising origin: it started out as a travelling monastery. In 1639 Örgöö was founded as the seat of the young Zanabazar, the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, a monastic camp that for more than a century and a half moved dozens of times across the steppe, following the pastures and political convenience. Only towards the end of the 18th century did it settle permanently at its current site, in the Tuul River valley, at the foot of the sacred mountain Bogd Khan Uul. Known then as Ikh Khüree or Niislel Khüree ("the great monastery", "the capital camp"), it was for centuries the country's religious and commercial centre.
After the 1921 revolution and the death of the Bogd Khan, the city was renamed Ulaanbaatar in 1924, which in Mongolian means "red hero", in tribute to the revolutionary leader Damdin Sükhbaatar. As capital of the People's Republic, it was remade along Soviet lines, with large buildings, monumental squares and neighbourhoods of apartment blocks.
Mongolia is one of the least densely populated countries in the world, and that uniqueness shows in its capital: Ulaanbaatar is now home to about half the national population, while mile after mile of empty steppe surrounds it on every side. The city offers a fierce contrast between glass towers and modern shopping centres, a legacy of the mining boom, and the huge outlying ger districts (gers being the traditional yurts), where herding families who leave the countryside settle, often driven out by catastrophic winters.
That fast and chaotic growth comes at a high cost: during the long, freezing winter, the burning of coal to heat the yurts makes Ulaanbaatar one of the capitals with the worst air quality on the planet. Even so, the city is the country's political, economic and cultural centre, seat of the State Great Khural (the parliament) and the essential starting point for almost every trip through Mongolia.
Ulaanbaatar's main spiritual treasure is the Gandantegchinlen monastery, better known as Gandan, one of the few that partly survived the purges of the 1930s and is now fully active again, with its monks, its prayer wheels and the colossal golden statue of Migjid Janraisig, more than twenty metres tall, rebuilt after the fall of communism. In the city centre lies Sükhbaatar Square (renamed Genghis Khan Square for a time), overlooked by the Government Palace and a large monument to the conqueror.
The capital is also home to the country's great museums: the National Museum of Mongolia, which covers history from prehistoric times to the present, and the Zanabazar Museum of Fine Arts, which displays the delicate bronze sculptures of the 17th-century master. On the outskirts stands the Winter Palace of the Bogd Khan, the last theocratic monarch, now a museum. All of this makes Ulaanbaatar the essential gateway to understanding Mongolia's past.
Just a couple of hours from the capital lies Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, one of Mongolia's most accessible and most visited landscapes: alpine meadows, forests, rivers and oddly shaped rock formations such as the famous Turtle Rock, dotted with ger camps where travellers get their first taste of nomadic life. It's the classic nature getaway for anyone who arrives in Ulaanbaatar with little time.
On the way to Terelj, at Tsonjin Boldog, stands one of the most striking monuments in the country: the Genghis Khan Equestrian Statue, a stainless steel figure about forty metres high, unveiled in 2008, showing the conqueror on horseback looking east. It's the largest equestrian statue in the world and a symbol of Mongolia's renewed pride in its founder after decades of enforced silence during the Soviet period.
Close to the capital, Khustai National Park (Khustain Nuruu) is home to one of Mongolia's great conservation stories: the reintroduction of the takhi, or Przewalski's horse, the only truly wild horse left in the world, never domesticated by humans. This subspecies became extinct in the wild in the mid-20th century and survived only thanks to animals kept in a few zoos.
From the 1990s onwards, an international programme brought these horses back to the hills of Khustai, where today they roam in free herds that can be seen grazing, especially at dusk, alongside deer, gazelles and marmots. The park has become a symbol of the recovery of Mongolia's steppe wildlife and a very popular day trip from Ulaanbaatar.
For Mongolians, Khentii Province in the northeast of Mongolia is sacred land: it was here, on the banks of the Onon River, that Temüjin, the boy who would become Genghis Khan, was born around 1162. This region of forested mountains and rivers, which gives its name to the Khentii range, was the setting for his hard childhood, his rise to power and the unification of the tribes. Many of the episodes told in The Secret History of the Mongols, the great 13th-century chronicle, take place in this landscape.
At the heart of Khentii rises the Burkhan Khaldun massif, Mongolia's most revered mountain. According to tradition, the young Genghis Khan took refuge there from his enemies, and he worshipped the mountain all his life. Tradition also holds that after his death in 1227 the conqueror was buried somewhere secret in this region, in a tomb that has never been found, carefully hidden as custom required. In 2015 the mountain and its surroundings were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site as a sacred landscape, bearing witness to the mountain worship and Mongolian shamanism that live on alongside Buddhism.
Unlike most of the country, Orkhon Province and its capital, Erdenet, are a modern creation. The city was founded in 1974 around a huge copper and molybdenum deposit, worked by a joint Mongolian-Soviet company. Within a few years Erdenet went from nothing to become Mongolia's second most populous city. Most of its residents were workers who came from all over the country, and during the socialist period it also had a large Soviet community.
The Erdenet mine became one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the world and a key part of the national economy. For decades it supplied a very large share of the country's exports and state revenue. The city stands for the bet on mining that has set Mongolia's economic course from the Soviet period to the present day, together with the big Gobi projects that came later, such as Oyu Tolgoi.
The Gobi Desert, which stretches across southern Mongolia and northern China, is one of the great deserts of the planet, but it defies the classic image of a sea of sand: most of it is a vast, arid gravel steppe, with mountain ranges, canyons, sparse grassland and only a few belts of dunes. It's a cold desert of extreme temperatures, which in winter can drop far below zero. This harsh environment is home to unusual, well-adapted wildlife: the wild Bactrian camel, the Asiatic wild ass (khulan), gazelles, ibex and even the elusive Gobi bear (mazaalai), one of the most endangered animals in the world.
Much of the Mongolian Gobi is protected by Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park ("the three beauties of the Gobi"), one of the largest in the country. For travellers, it's the star region of the south: you spend days crossing it in 4x4 vehicles, sleeping in ger camps and sharing the life of the herding and camel-breeding families who live in this immense, almost empty landscape.
The main logistics base for exploring the Gobi is Dalanzadgad, capital of Ömnögovi province (aimag), the southernmost in Mongolia. It's one of the few towns in the south with its own airport and regular flights to Ulaanbaatar, which makes it the usual gateway for anyone who'd rather avoid the long, dusty overland journeys from the capital.
Tours to the Gobi's great attractions set off from Dalanzadgad: the Yolyn Am canyons, the Khongoryn Els dunes and the Bayanzag cliffs. Ömnögovi province is currently enjoying a strong economic boost thanks to mining, as it is home to the gigantic Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold deposits and the Tavan Tolgoi coal mines, engines of Mongolia's 21st-century economy.
In the middle of the desert, among the mountains of Gobi Gurvansaikhan, lies Yolyn Am, a narrow, deep gorge whose name means "the lammergeier's mouth" or "valley of the vultures", after the large birds that nest on its walls. Its great oddity is the climate: despite the scorching summer heat of the surrounding desert, the shady floor of the canyon holds a frozen river, a thick layer of ice that in some years lasts through much of the warm season.
Walking through the narrow gorge, with cliffs closing in overhead and ice crunching underfoot while the sun beats down outside, is one of the most memorable experiences in the Gobi. The area is part of Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park and is home to ibex, argali and many birds of prey.
When the Gobi does show off its dunes, it does so on a grand scale. Khongoryn Els, also called Duut Mankhan or "singing dunes", form a sea of sand more than a hundred kilometres long whose highest crests rise above 200 and even 300 metres. They get their nickname from the deep sound, almost a roar, that the grains of sand make when they slide down the slopes en masse, pushed by the wind.
The classic ritual is to climb, with some effort, to the crest at sunset, when the sand turns golden and reddish, to take in the contrast between the desert, the Gobi Altai mountains in the background and the green oases at the foot of the dunes. The whole landscape is often explored on the back of a Bactrian camel, the two-humped camel typical of Central Asia, raised by the nomadic families of the area.
One of the most famous places in the Gobi is Bayanzag, known in English as the Flaming Cliffs: red sandstone walls that, in the light of sunset, seem to burn in shades of orange and scarlet above the steppe. But its fame isn't only about looks. In 1922 and 1923, the American expedition led by palaeontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, of the American Museum of Natural History, made a groundbreaking find here: the first nests of fossilised dinosaur eggs ever recognised by science.
Since then, the Mongolian Gobi has become one of the richest palaeontological sites in the world, with spectacular finds of dinosaurs such as Velociraptor, Protoceratops and Oviraptor, many of them exceptionally well preserved. Bayanzag and the neighbouring deserts remain a place of pilgrimage for palaeontology lovers and a symbol of the remote past held in the sands of the Gobi.
The Orkhon River valley, in central Mongolia, is one of the most history-laden places in all of Inner Asia. For more than two thousand years, its fertile grasslands and waters were the seat of power for the successive nomadic powers of the steppe: the Xiongnu, the Turks and the Uyghurs ruled here, and centuries later the Mongols would set up their imperial capital here too. It's no coincidence: whoever controlled the Orkhon symbolically controlled the centre of the steppe world.
Because of its exceptional value, UNESCO declared the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape a World Heritage Site in 2004. The site takes in the ruins of several ancient capitals, monuments, monasteries and the grasslands where nomadic herders still graze their flocks just as their ancestors did. The famous Orkhon inscriptions, from the 8th century, are among the oldest written records of the Turkic languages.
Around 1235, the Great Khan Ögedei, son and successor of Genghis Khan, ordered a permanent capital for the empire to be built in the Orkhon Valley: Karakorum. For a few decades, that steppe city was the political centre of an empire stretching across almost all of Eurasia. Embassies, tribute and craftsmen arrived from all over the known world, and Buddhists, Muslims, Nestorian Christians and shamanists lived side by side in its streets. The Flemish friar William of Rubruck, who visited around 1254, left a memorable description, including the famous tree-shaped silver fountain that poured out different drinks, the work of the Parisian goldsmith Guillaume Boucher.
Karakorum's splendour was short-lived. When Kublai Khan moved the capital to Dadu (Beijing) after conquering China, the city lost its importance, and with the fall of the Yuan dynasty and the wars that followed it was eventually ruined and abandoned. Today little more than archaeological remains are left of the great imperial centre, next to the town of Kharkhorin, but its name still evokes the height of Mongol power.
On the ruins of Karakorum, and using its very stones, Prince Abtai Sain Khan had the Erdene Zuu monastery ("a hundred treasures") built in 1585. It is the oldest surviving monastery in Mongolia. It was enclosed by an imposing square wall lined with 108 stupas, a sacred number in Buddhism, and at its peak, between the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was a great centre of religion and learning, it held dozens of temples and around a thousand monks.
Erdene Zuu suffered badly in the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s: most of its temples were destroyed and many of its monks were executed or scattered. It survived only as a museum during the communist period, and only with democracy did it regain part of its religious life. Today, with its white stupas set against the steppe, it is one of the most visited and photographed sites in Mongolia, a symbol of the resilience of Mongolian Buddhism.
Beyond its ruins and monasteries, the Orkhon Valley is today one of the best places in the country to experience traditional nomadic life. Its wide green grasslands are dotted with ger camps, herds of horses, sheep, goats and yaks, and herding families who welcome travellers to share airag (fermented mare's milk) and the customs of the steppe. It's a classic region to explore on horseback, the means of transport that shaped Mongolian history.
One of its natural highlights is the Orkhon waterfall, also called Ulaan Tsutgalan, a drop of about twenty metres formed by ancient volcanic eruptions and the work of the river, plunging into a basalt canyon in the middle of the grassland. With its setting of meadows, forest and water, the area is a favourite for hiking and horse riding.
Northern Mongolia is a world apart from the steppes and deserts of the south: here the landscape is covered in larch and pine forest, the Siberian taiga reaching down from Russia, with mountains, fast-flowing rivers and freshwater lakes. It's a wetter, colder region with a long herding tradition, and also home to peoples who keep very old ways of life, tied more to the forest than to the open steppe.
These northern lands, in Khentii province and the surrounding area, are where Mongolian history has its roots: it was here, on the banks of the Onon and Kherlen rivers, that the young Temüjin, the future Genghis Khan, was born and grew up. Being so close to Siberia has always shaped life and trade in the region, and during the Soviet period it strengthened ties with the neighbouring Soviet Union.
The natural jewel of the north is Lake Khövsgöl, nicknamed the "blue lake" or the "pearl of Mongolia". It's a huge, deep freshwater lake of extraordinary clarity, close to the Russian border and framed by forests and mountains. It's one of the oldest and cleanest lakes in the world, a younger sibling of neighbouring Lake Baikal in Siberia, with which it shares a drainage basin, and it holds a very significant share of the country's fresh water.
Ger camps are set up along its shores, and the region offers a wild, natural atmosphere very different from the Gobi: hiking, horse riding and kayaking in summer, while in the freezing winter the surface freezes over completely, so solidly that crossings have even been made over the ice. It's also home to communities of Darkhad herders and to the Tsaatan, the reindeer herders.
In the far north, in the mountain taiga near Lake Khövsgöl and around the remote village of Tsagaan Nuur, lives one of the most remarkable peoples in Asia: the Tsaatan, or Dukha, Mongolia's last reindeer herders. They are a very small community of Turkic origin and shamanist tradition who live in bark and canvas tipis high in the mountains and build their whole life around the reindeer, which gives them milk, transport and companionship, and which they don't slaughter except when they have to.
Their way of life, adapted to extreme cold and to seasonal migration through the taiga, is now threatened by social change, hunting restrictions and tourism. Visiting them means getting to Tsagaan Nuur and then riding for hours into the forest, one of the most demanding and remote journeys the country has to offer, and a window onto an ancient nomadic culture holding out on the edge of disappearance.
Tucked away in a northern valley in Selenge province stands Amarbayasgalant, considered one of the most beautiful and harmonious Buddhist monasteries in Mongolia. It was built between 1727 and 1736 on the orders of the Qing emperor Yongzheng to honour Zanabazar, the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu and father of the Mongolian Buddhist revival, whose remains were laid to rest there. Its architecture, in a striking Manchu-Chinese style and highly symmetrical, sets it apart from the country's other monasteries.
Like almost all of Mongolia's great religious centres, Amarbayasgalant suffered in the purges of the late 1930s, when many of its temples and monks disappeared. Unlike others, though, a large part of the complex survived, and after the fall of communism it was restored and returned to monastic life. Today, away from the busiest routes, it offers one of the most peaceful and authentic settings of Mongolian Buddhism.
Western Mongolia, and Bayan-Ölgii province in particular, is a region culturally distinct from the rest of the country. Created as an aimag in 1940, with its capital in the town of Ölgii, it is overwhelmingly populated by Kazakhs, a Turkic, Muslim people from Central Asia who keep their own language, religion, music and customs. Here you hear Kazakh more than Mongolian, you see mosques, and people follow traditions found nowhere else in the country, which makes a trip to the west doubly exotic.
This distinct identity makes Bayan-Ölgii one of the most fascinating areas for travellers interested in culture. The province keeps a strong nomadic, herding character, with families moving their flocks between the valleys and mountains of the Altai, and a Kazakh textile craft of colourful embroidery and wall hangings that is famous across the country.
The most famous tradition of western Mongolia is hunting with golden eagles, an age-old practice of the Kazakhs of the Altai mountains. The berkutchi, or eagle hunters, capture and train these huge raptors to hunt foxes, hares and even wolves in winter, in a relationship of deep respect and companionship between hunter, horse and bird, which is usually released back into the wild after several years. It's one of the most spectacular forms of falconry in the world, passed down from generation to generation.
The tradition is celebrated every autumn at the Golden Eagle Festival, which brings dozens of hunters in their finest dress, with their eagles, to Bayan-Ölgii for contests of skill, horse races and equestrian games. The festival has become one of the country's big tourist draws and has helped revive and keep alive a practice that, by most estimates, has a large share of the world's remaining eagle hunters concentrated in this region.
In Mongolia's far west, where the borders with Russia and China meet, rise the Altai mountains, the highest range in the country. Here you'll find Altai Tavan Bogd National Park ("the five saints"), which protects the massif of the same name, crowned by Khüiten Peak, Mongolia's highest point at about 4.374 metres, covered in permanent snow and large glaciers such as the Potanin.
The park is a first-class mountain destination, with demanding treks, turquoise alpine lakes such as Khoton and Khurgan, and wildlife that includes the rare snow leopard, argali and ibex. The area also holds an extremely valuable archaeological heritage: thousands of petroglyphs carved into the rock over millennia (the Petroglyphic Complexes of the Mongolian Altai are on UNESCO's World Heritage List), as well as kurgans and stone stelae left by the ancient peoples of the steppe.
Hardly anything that happened to Mongolia happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
