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MONGOLIA

[internet resources]

Map of Mongolia

 

Quick Facts:

Official Name: Mongolia
Local Name: Mongol Uls
Population: 2,832,224 (July 2006 est.)
Capital City: Ulaanbaatar
Languages: Khalkha Mongol, Turkic, Russian
Official Currency: togrog/tugrik
Ethnic Groups: Mongol (mostly Khalkha), Turkic (mostly Kazakh), other (including Chinese and Russian)
Religions : Buddhist Lamaist, Shamanist, Christian, Muslim

Mongolian FlagFlag

Three equal, vertical bands of red (hoist side), blue, and red; centered on the hoist-side red band in yellow is the national emblem ("soyombo" - a columnar arrangement of abstract and geometric representation for fire, sun, moon, earth, water, and the yin-yang symbol)

The Mongols gained fame in the 13th century when under Chinggis Khan they conquered a huge Eurasian empire. After his death the empire was divided into several powerful Mongol states, but these broke apart in the 14th century. The Mongols eventually retired to their original steppe homelands and later came under Chinese rule. Mongolia won its independence in 1921 with Soviet backing. A Communist regime was installed in 1924. The ex-Communist Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) won elections in 1990 and 1992, but was defeated by the Democratic Union Coalition (DUC) in the 1996 parliamentary election. Since then, parliamentary elections returned the MPRP overwhelmingly to power in 2000 and produced a coalition government in 2004.

Almost every aspect of Mongolian society has been shaped by pastoral nomadism, an ecological adaptation that makes it possible to support more people in the Mongolian environment than would be true under any other mode of subsistence. Pastoralism is a complex and sophisticated adaptation to environments marked by extreme variability in temperature and precipitation, on time scales ranging from days to decades.

Pastoralism permits societies to exploit the variable and patchy resources of the steppe. The key to pastoralism is mobility, which permits temporary exploitation of resources that are not sufficient to sustain a human and herbivore population for an entire year. Pastoralism may be combined with agriculture if a stable resource base, such as an oasis, permits, or agriculture may serve, as in central Mongolia, only to supplement herding and may be practiced only to the extent that labor is available.

A host of features of nomadic life reflect the demands and costs of mobility and of dependence on herds of animals to convert the energy stored in grasses to the milk and meat that feed the human population. Such societies commonly develop a conscious and explicit nomadic ethos, which values mobility and the ability to cope with problems by moving away from threats or toward resources and which disparages permanent settlement, cultivation of the earth, and accumulation of objects.

Societies based on pastoral nomadism do not exist in isolation, and nomads commonly live in symbiotic relationships with settled agriculturalists, exchanging animal products for grain, textiles, and manufactured goods. Both the nomads and the agriculturalists can, if necessary, survive without the goods provided by the other, but under most circumstances both benefit from exchange. Mongols typically dressed in sheepskin tunics covered with Chinese silk; drank tea from China; consumed a certain amount of millet, barley, and wheat flour; and used cooking pots and steel tools produced by non-nomadic smiths, some of whom were Mongols and some Turkic speakers or Chinese. However, the scattered nature of the population and the necessity of moving trade goods long distances by camel caravan limited the quantity of bulky goods available to nomads.

Information and maps above taken from Library of Congress Country Studies and the CIA World Fact Book. Unless otherwise specified, images sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

Mongolia Internet Resources

This page contains convenient starting points for exploring web sites related to Mongolia. To make this page easier to load and use, we generally have limited the list to those sites which contain substantial collections of links to information on these subjects. The views reflected on any web site linked below do not necessarily reflect the views of the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center. We provide these links as a service to the public.