Mongolia

The homeland of the largest contiguous land empire in history, now a democracy of three million people between two giants. Nomadic confederations on the steppe threatened settled China for two thousand years, and Temujin unified them in 1206 as Genghis Khan; within two generations Mongol armies had taken China, Persia, Central Asia and the Rus principalities, and the empire stretched from Korea to Hungary. It worked partly through terror and partly through administration - religious toleration, a relay postal system, and safe trade routes that moved goods, ideas and eventually plague across Eurasia. The empire fragmented, the Yuan dynasty fell in 1368, and Mongolia came under Qing rule for two centuries. Independence was declared in 1911 and secured with Soviet help in 1921, making Mongolia the second communist country in the world; purges in the 1930s killed tens of thousands, mostly Buddhist monks, and destroyed almost all the monasteries. Democracy arrived peacefully in 1990. Mining now dominates the economy. Around a quarter of the population is still nomadic or semi-nomadic. Ulaanbaatar is the coldest capital city in the world. The country has about 3.5 million people in over 1.5 million square kilometres, the least densely populated sovereign state on earth. Mongolian is written in Cyrillic, with the traditional vertical script being revived. The Gobi covers the south. Half the population lives in the capital. Throat singing and the Naadam festival of wrestling, archery and horse racing are recognised by Unesco. Horses substantially outnumber people, and livestock outnumber them many times over.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history