In the forests of Mongolia's far north, almost on the border with Siberia, lives one of the most extraordinary peoples on the planet: the Tsaatan, the reindeer herders. There are only a few hundred of them, grouped into a few dozen families, who live in wood-and-canvas tipis in the taiga mountains and organise their entire lives around their reindeer, which give them milk, transport, companionship and their place in the world. They don't raise cattle, sheep or horses like the rest of Mongolia: they raise reindeer, and that difference makes them a unique people, one of the last of their kind left on Earth.
The village of Tsagaan Nuur, on the shore of a 'white lake' lost in the north, is the gateway to that world. It is the last settlement with a road, where the Mongolia of tracks and 4x4s ends and the Mongolia of horses and forests begins. From here, after registering with the authorities, travellers ride into the taiga for hours, crossing rivers and peat bogs, until they reach the Tsaatan camps, where time seems to stand still. Visiting them is not a day trip but a true expedition, physically and logistically demanding, and precisely for that reason one of the most profound experiences Mongolia has to offer.
This guide explains who the Tsaatan are and why their way of life is so unusual and so threatened, how to reach them in stages (a flight to Mörön, a day on the track to Tsagaan Nuur, hours on horseback into the taiga), when to go, what to bring and, above all, how to visit them respectfully and responsibly, so that tourism helps this fragile community instead of harming it. Reaching the reindeer herders takes effort, but it gives you the privilege of glimpsing an ancient culture that clings, against all odds, to its way of life.
The Tsaatan —which in Mongolian means 'those who have reindeer'— call themselves Dukha, and they are a people of Turkic origin from the Tuva region, in what is now Russian Siberia, related to the Tuvans and speaking a language distinct from Mongolian. Their bond with reindeer is ancient: there are rock carvings of reindeer thousands of years old in the region. For centuries, the Dukha moved freely with their herds between Tuva and northern Mongolia. Everything changed in the 20th century: in 1944, when Tuva was absorbed by the Soviet Union, the border closed, and the Tsaatan left on the Mongolian side were forced to settle permanently in Mongolia, cut off from their homeland. The socialist regime tried to settle and integrate them, with mixed results. With the fall of communism in the 1990s and the economic crisis that followed, the community went into sharp decline: reindeer numbers collapsed and many families left the taiga. Today only 200-300 Tsaatan remain, struggling to preserve their language, their shamanism and their life with reindeer in the face of modernity, climate change and tourism itself. Our history page covers in depth the origins, the drama of the 20th century and the present of this people.
Read the full history ↓The forested north next to Siberia: Lake Khövsgöl, the crystal-clear 'blue lake', the taiga of the Tsaatan and their reindeer, and Amarbayasgalant, one of the most beautiful monasteries in the country, which partly survived the purges.
Read the history of The north and Lake Khövsgöl →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In a country where the whole culture revolves around the horse and the so-called 'five snouts' —horse, cow, sheep, goat and camel—, the Tsaatan are the great exception: they raise reindeer. Their Mongolian name, tsaatan, means exactly 'those who have reindeer', but they call themselves Dukha. They are a tiny people, barely 200 or 300 individuals spread across a few dozen families, who live in the taiga forests of Mongolia's far north, near the border with the Russian republic of Tuva, and who organise their entire existence around their reindeer herds.
The Dukha are not Mongols by origin: they are a Turkic people, related to the Tuvans of Siberia, and they speak their own language, Dukha, which is different from Mongolian and close to Tuvan. Their bond with the reindeer is ancient; the region has rock carvings of reindeer thousands of years old, evidence of a reindeer-herding culture that once stretched across the whole boreal belt of Asia. Today the Tsaatan are one of the last peoples in the world keeping that way of life alive, along with a handful of groups in Siberia and northern Scandinavia.
Their life is shaped by the reindeer and by the seasons. They live in wooden tipis covered with canvas —the ortz, very similar to the tipis of the Siberian peoples and very different from the round Mongolian ger—, and they move camp several times a year, following the lichen pastures the reindeer feed on and seeking the cool of higher ground in summer to escape the insects. The reindeer gives them milk, which they turn into cheese and yoghurt; they ride it and use it as a pack animal to get around the forest; they use its antlers for handicrafts. But unlike other herders, they do not live by slaughtering their animals, but by keeping the herd healthy and large, and they share an almost family-like bond with it. Every reindeer has a name and a personality.
For centuries, the Dukha moved with their reindeer across a vast forested region straddling what is now Russia and Mongolia, with no borders to stop them. Their homeland is Tuva, a mountainous, forested region north of present-day Mongolia. Everything changed in the turbulent 20th century, when the great powers drew lines on the map that cut the life of this small people in two.
Tuva, after a brief period as a nominally independent state within the Soviet orbit, was finally absorbed by the Soviet Union in 1944. With that annexation, the border between Tuva and Mongolia was closed and militarised, and the Dukha who happened to be on the Mongolian side at that moment were trapped there, cut off for good from their relatives, their pastures and their homeland. Overnight, a nomadic people who had always ignored borders found themselves confined to one side of an impassable line. Those who stayed in Mongolia are the ancestors of today's Tsaatan.
The new Mongolian state, communist and allied with Moscow, did not quite know what to do with them. For decades, the authorities tried to integrate them and make them settle: they were granted Mongolian citizenship late, resettled for periods of time, and there were attempts to collectivise their reindeer and turn them into workers on state farms or in the lake fisheries. Some of those policies clashed head-on with their way of life in the taiga. The Tsaatan resisted as best they could, swinging between life in the forest with their reindeer and official attempts to tie them down in villages like Tsagaan Nuur, the 'white lake' that became their point of contact with the rest of the country.
The fall of communism in Mongolia, in the early 1990s, brought freedom but also a very harsh economic crisis that hit the most fragile peoples especially hard. When the socialist state that, for better or worse, had kept certain services going disappeared, many Tsaatan families were left out in the cold. The number of reindeer, already reduced, plummeted: from thousands of head it fell to a few hundred, and with them the very basis of the people's survival collapsed. Many families, in desperation, left the taiga and moved down to Tsagaan Nuur or other villages, where they often fell into poverty and marginalisation.
During those years, there were real fears that the Tsaatan might simply disappear as a people with their own identity. But they held on. The new century brought aid programmes —from the state, from organisations and from tourism itself— to restore the health of the herds, introducing new reindeer to refresh the bloodlines, along with veterinary care and some financial support. Reindeer numbers slowly began to recover, and many families returned to the taiga. Today the reindeer population has bounced back from its lowest point, although the people remain tiny and vulnerable.
The current threats are many and complex. Climate change is altering the cycles of the taiga and the health of the lichens the reindeer depend on. Mining and the restrictions of protected areas sometimes limit their traditional movements. School, healthcare and the opportunities of the modern world draw young people towards the cities, and with each generation there is a risk that the Dukha language, shamanism and the knowledge of the taiga will be lost. And tourism, on which they now partly depend, is a double-edged sword: well managed, it brings income that lets families stay with their reindeer; badly managed, it turns them into an attraction and wears away their way of life.
Despite everything, the Tsaatan keep one of the most genuine and living spiritual traditions in Central Asia: shamanism. In their worldview, the world is full of spirits —of the mountains, rivers, trees, animals and ancestors— with whom balance must be kept, and the shaman is the person able to communicate with them. Going into a trance with the help of the drum, the shaman travels to the spirit world to heal illnesses, protect the reindeer herd, guide the community's decisions or restore broken harmony. It is an ancient faith, millennia older than Buddhism, which the Tsaatan passed down from generation to generation even during the religious persecution of the communist period.
That spirituality runs through every aspect of life in the taiga: sacred places where no one sets foot, trees hung with offerings, ritual respect for animals and nature. For travellers who make it to the camps, getting a glimpse of it is a privilege, always with the utmost respect and without turning it into a show. Tsaatan shamanism is not for sale, and the ceremonies are not a tourist performance: they are the way this people understands and inhabits the world.
The future of the Tsaatan is uncertain, like that of so many small cultures facing modernity. Everything depends on a delicate balance: that the reindeer herds stay healthy, that young people find reasons not to leave the taiga altogether, that tourism gives more than it takes, and that their right to live their own way in the northern forests is respected. Visiting the Tsaatan mindfully —paying fairly, buying their handicrafts, respecting their customs and not treating them as a backdrop— is, today, one of the ways to help this extraordinary people, who live with reindeer at the edge of Mongolia, carry on existing. They are, perhaps, the last of their kind, and the world would be poorer without them.
