Mongolia

Mongolia is a vast landlocked country in East Asia, wedged between Russia and China on the Mongolian Plateau. Ulaanbaatar is the capital and home to roughly half of the people. Mongolian is the official language, mostly written in Cyrillic since the 1940s, with a small revival of the historic script since 1990.

Nomadic empires such as the Xiongnu, the Turkic khaganates and the Uyghurs ruled the steppe for centuries. In 1206 Temüjin took the title Genghis Khan and founded the Mongol Empire, and his grandson Kublai Khan conquered China and founded the Yuan dynasty. After the Yuan fell, the Mongols returned home as the Northern Yuan, and Tibetan Buddhism spread in the 16th century. In the 17th century Mongolia came under the Manchu Qing dynasty, and by the early 20th century about a third of adult men were Buddhist monks.

After the Qing collapsed in 1911, Mongolia declared independence under the Bogd Khaan and won real independence from China in 1921 with Soviet help. The Mongolian People's Republic was founded in 1924. Mongolian troops fought Japan at Khalkhin Gol in 1939. A peaceful democratic revolution in 1990 ended one-party rule, and the 1992 constitution created a semi-presidential republic with a directly elected president and a 126-seat parliament, the State Great Khural.

The land spans 1,564,116 km² (603,909 sq mi) of steppe, northern and western mountains and the Gobi Desert in the south, known for dinosaur fossils. Herding has long been the base of the economy, and Mongolia produces about a fifth of the world's raw cashmere. Copper, coal, gold and other minerals now drive growth, led by the Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold mine developed with Rio Tinto. About 30% of people still live as nomads or semi-nomads, and horses remain central to rural life.