Ulaanbaatar carries the state, the steppe carries the country

On the map Mongolia sits between Russia and China and is made mostly of distance. Look for the land itself and you find steppe, desert and mountains. The state that holds this together sits in Ulaanbaatar, and almost only there.

3,568,978 people live on 1,564,110 square kilometres. This is not a blank sheet. It is a country whose ordinary household was long the herd, and whose exception was supposed to remain the city. The exception has become the capital. Anyone who needs papers, a university or a winter away from the pasture comes to Ulaanbaatar. The steppe remains the area of the country. The city remains its administration.

The pasture is the country, the city is the state

The Gobi lies in the south, the Altai in the west, open steppe in the middle, forest and mountains toward Siberia in the north. Herds move between them. Horse, sheep, goat, cattle and camel are not postcard motifs. They are why a household does not have to stay in one fixed place. A state still needs fixed places: a parliament, an archive, a hospital that can be reached in winter. Pasture explains the area. It does not explain the office.

Ulaanbaatar stands on the Tuul, not at the geometric centre of the territory, but where modern administration grew. Around the permanent buildings are quarters of gers. People move to the capital and bring the dwelling of the steppe with them. One street scene holds what pulls the country apart: the state wants concentration, the way of living stays mobile. Read Mongolia only as emptiness and you miss that street, where both truths apply at once.

Between two neighbours who are not peers

The only land neighbours are Russia to the north and China to the south. Mongolia has no access to the sea and no third neighbour that could balance the weight. Railway, power line and export route all have to reckon with this pair. Independence is therefore not a ceremony. It is the decision to keep a law of one's own between two much larger countries, with a capital and a border of one's own.

Mongolia shares a long border with China, and a history that is not the same as that of Inner Mongolia beyond the line. The state in Ulaanbaatar is not a province of a neighbour. It has its own constitution and its own foreign policy, precisely because the neighbours are large enough to treat it as a gap. Read the map only by the area of the giants and you see a corridor. Read it by law and you see a state.

The steppe does not need a centre. The state does, and its name is Ulaanbaatar.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

One language in two scripts, a currency of its own

Mongolian is the official language. In administration it is usually written in Cyrillic, the legacy of the decades when the state was tightly bound to the Soviet Union. Beside it the country keeps the traditional vertical script, the older form of the same language. Two scripts are not ornament. They keep open the question of which modernity counts when people read: the one in which the offices long worked, or the one written before that time.

The currency is the tugrik, the word for round. The Bank of Mongolia issues it, not either neighbour. For a landlocked state that is not a side issue. Whoever mints the coin sets the unit in which the herd, the rent in Ulaanbaatar and the tax of the state share one name. The steppe can live without a capital. Without a currency of its own, the state would struggle to show that it is more than other people's gap.

Mongolia is easy to draw as a gap between two giants. More precisely it is a pasture with one city that has to hold the state, because no further centre takes that on. Ulaanbaatar is not the whole country. Without Ulaanbaatar the country would be hard to keep as a state.