Many states in the world are deprived of territory: millions of people huddle on a tiny piece of land, deprived of the necessary amount of agricultural land, and often even living space. There are reverse extremes: in Canada, Australia and Russia there are huge wild wastelands, where you walk hundreds of kilometers without meeting a single soul.
Among such desert places - Mongolia.
With an area of 1.5 million square kilometers, only 3.27 million people live here. Comparing with other countries with a much smaller territory, you can see that in tiny Lebanon, not exceeding the size of one district of the Moscow region, more than 4,100,000 people live - like herring in a barrel!
This country is different - in terms of desert and sparsely populated, it is able to compete with African Namibia and Mauritania, cold Canada with Iceland and distant Australia.
Half of the Mongols live in the capital city and the immediate vicinity. There are no other large settlements here - no city reaches one hundred thousand inhabitants. A kind of mix of Russia (everything is concentrated in our capital) and the USA (a country of thousands of small towns).
Why is it empty?
These great wastelands are not inhabited for a well-respected reason - most of the country's territory can not be called suitable for human life. The reason is simple – a third of the country is a high-altitude plateau, a kind of table with a height of 900 to 1500 meters. This plain, raised above sea level, is blown by winds along and across.
In the west there are high rocky mountains, and in the south comes into its own a desert called the Gobi. Mongolia is landlocked and a hell of a distance from it. Therefore, the climate here is sharply continental (just like in Moscow, only even steeper): in summer the scorching heat does not allow you to breathe, and in winter the butt freezes to the pants and the temperature often drops to minus forty.
So Ulaanbaatar is officially recognized as the coldest capital in the world – if, of course, we take into account only the winter temperature.
The population is quite homogeneous, prevails with a large margin from the others - 95%. Another 4% are different Turks, first vassal to the Mongol khans, and then assimilated. Finally, purely symbolically, there are former owners – the Chinese,whose autonomy the country was before 1911, and the Russians.
From 1920 to 1991, the state of Genghis Khan's heirs was in close, almost vassal relations with the Soviet Union. This country was the second after Tuva that entered the war with Hitler after his attack on the USSR. And Mongolian stamps were a desirable prey for any Soviet philatelic boy.
These relations could not but leave a mark in the history and life of the state and society. Mongolia is fluent in Russian, the alphabet is built on the Cyrillic alphabet, although slightly different. There are "Ө, ө" and "Ү, ү" - in sound they are similar to the usual "O" and "U", and in writing they resemble the symbols of the Greek alphabet.
Land of contrasts
Half of the population is located in the capital, and the second - in small villages, and this is not the only antithesis. More than a third of the locals still live in a traditional dwelling - a yurt. There are large municipalities where capital housing is absent as a class, while in the capital life is concentrated in microdistricts, painfully similar to Maryina Roshcha or the conditional Mitino-Butovo with endless five-story buildings, twelve-story candle towers and more recent architecture of the post-Soviet period.
But the yurt can be found in the city - in the courtyard of an apartment building, for example. There is no need to talk about comfort and convenience, especially in winter, but the Mongols live – and keep the traditions of their ancestors.
