Asia Oriental
Steppe · Nomadic · Sky
Mongolia is the world's least densely populated sovereign country — it has the size of Western Europe but fewer than 3.5 million people, roughly two per square kilometre.
Más allá de la capital, las principales ciudades son Erdenet, Darkhan — cada una un centro de cultura regional, economía e historia. Ulaanbaatar expanded from a nomadic moveable capital (it changed location 28 times before settling permanently in 1778) into a fixed city of 1.5 million people — nearly half the country's population — whose Soviet-era apartment blocks are surrounded by ger (yurt) districts where nomadic families who have migrated to the city maintain circular felt homes in urban lots without running water or central heating.
El idioma oficial es mongol, que refleja el patrimonio cultural del país y lo conecta con una amplia comunidad internacional. Internacionalmente, Mongolia se contacta mediante el código +976. Mongolians maintain a nomadic pastoral heritage as a living practice — 30% of the population still lives as nomadic herders with their 56 million livestock (almost 20 per person) moving across pastureland with the seasons — while the Genghis Khan (Chinggis Khan) cult functions as a national founding mythology, his portrait on currency and his name on the airport of the country whose ancestor his empire was.
Mongolia comparte sus fronteras con Rusia, China. El tráfico rodado circula por la derecha, en consonancia con la convención de
La vida económica y cotidiana se rige por la zona horaria de UTC+07:00, alineando el país con sus vecinos regionales.
Tsuivan — stir-fried homemade noodles with mutton or beef and vegetables — is Mongolia's daily comfort food, while boodog (whole goat or marmot cooked from the inside by placing hot stones within the carcass and sealing it) is the most dramatic traditional preparation, produced at celebrations and eaten outdoors as a meal whose preparation takes several hours of communal labour.
The Three Manly Games of Naadam — horse racing (by child jockeys on multi-kilometre courses), wrestling (Mongolian Bökh, where the loser is the first to touch the ground with any body part other than feet and hands), and archery (using a composite bow whose design has not changed in 700 years) — are celebrated at the July national festival as the athletic expressions of Mongol identity.
The Gobi Desert covers southern Mongolia in a landscape of vast stony plains (not the sandy dunes of popular imagination — 90% of the Gobi is rock, not sand) where Bactrian camels, Gobi bears (the world's rarest bear), and snow leopards survive in extreme temperature ranges (from -40°C in winter to +45°C in summer) that make the Gobi one of the world's harshest inhabited environments.