(written May 1998)

Ulaanbaatar ("UB" to most Westerners) looks exactly like the kind of place that nomads would build with Soviet help. The capital of Mongolia stands garrison-like, artificially imposed on the Central Asian steppe. It is devoid of soul, and the inevitable entombed bodies of Mongolia’s 1921 Communist revolution, enshrined on the main square, add only Soviet kitsch to what is essentially a grim, Cold War-era city. This is the modern capital of an ancient country struggling along on its own again for the first time in over 600 years.

And yet UB represents at least an attempt at modernity for the scattered people of Mongolia. My May 1998 visit to UB and the surrounding countryside in relation to the U.S. Secretary of State’s visit there was my first glimpse of Mongolia, and a very quick one at that. I have never researched the history or development of Mongolia. However, anecdotally I learned from Mongolians and Westerners living there that Ulaanbataar – "Red Hero" in the Mongolian tongue – was little more than the largest permanent settlement around before the Soviets arrived. Most of UB’s buildings were thrown up in the 1940s and 1950s with Soviet assistance, and they stamp the capital with its stale Soviet flavor.

Power stations, paved roads, and a telecom infrastructure were all built under Soviet sponsorship. Culturally, the old Mongolian script has largely disappeared, and Mongolian is now written using the Cyrillic alphabet as in Russia. Much of the population can communicate in Russian as well, particularly in Red Hero. As dated as UB looks, however, it certainly made a leap of development during the Cold War years.

Roughly half of Mongolia’s 2.5 million people still lead nomadic lives on the vast Central Asian steppe. With only four people per square mile, I am fairly certain it has the world’s lowest population density. With chances so slim of bumping into other people, I doubt if the Mongolian language is well developed in terms of greetings. The circular, sheepskin-shrouded, tent-like structure herding families still live in is called a "ger" (pronounced "gair"). Gers can be taken down in 30 minutes in order to follow the herd to greener pastures, although today the truck has replaced the work-yak in transporting the ger from place to place. I am told that gasoline is available at some pretty unexpected depots. Mongolian herders tend yaks, goats, sheep, horses, and cows. The Mongolian horseman with a long stick and a lasso-like loop at the end is still a common sight on the steppe.

I’ve said a few, not too complimentary words about UB. But how do I begin to describe the magnificent, unsullied steppe? On the one free day of my trip, I made the five-hour one-way journey by 4WD out to Karakorum, the ancient capital of Mongolia at the time of Chinggis Khan (Genghis being an improper spelling and pronunciation, I learned). Eventually his grandson Kublai conquered China and made my lovely home Beijing his capital (up to that time Beijing had been a fairly unimportant town of regional importance only).

As it turned out, the drive there – although long! – turned out to be the most memorable part of the trip. On this drive, Mongolia revealed a bit of its true self. Only ten minutes from the center of UB, broad rolling grasslands already start to lead out to blue skies, marked by deceiving distances and miles and miles of scattered herders and their charges. Infrequent collections of gers line the one straight road in truck-stop fashion, selling cigarettes, gasoline and the unadorned, unappetizing Mongolian staples of tough mutton, bread and vodka. Thank god for the veggie samosas and rice we brought from UB.

As we moved far out of town, cows often gathered inexplicably in the road and only moved off at the sound of our vehicle’s horn. White swans floated in the transient, pristine ponds created by melting snow and groundwater. Delicate cranes – always travelling in pairs – dotted the countryside as well. Our driver Gancogt periodically stopped our Land Cruiser and peered through binoculars for wolves. It seemed his greatest dream was to shoot one and bring it back to UB, and he kept a gun at the ready in the car. He also scanned the roadsides intently for evidence of wild mushrooms. Fresh vegetables and fruit are still of very limited availability in Mongolia, and "mushrooming" in the countryside is a favorite pasttime.

My companions and I had the benefit of a clear, sunny day, and the drive will be remembered for its beauty – as well as its length and bumps. If you’ve ever been to Montana or the Dakotas – which I haven’t, I’m afraid – you probably have a good idea of what Mongolia looks like topographically. However, signs of development are nearly non-existent off the main road, such as power lines and fences marking land ownership. I am unclear about how land is distributed for the herders’ seasonal use, or if there is a system at all, but perhaps that is why Mongolia has such a war-like history. The other night I saw a new, Chinese-produced movie on the legends surrounding Chinggis Khan and his mother. While the movie was a typically Chinese, over-dramatic epic production, it at least drove home the point that before Chinggis united the various Mongolian tribes into a formidable confederation, they were constantly at war with each other over herds and desirable pasturelands.

Arrival at Karakorum was a bit of a letdown, however. Nothing remains of the 13^th-century capital except a few markers. After the capital was moved to Beijing, the town of Karakorum – doubtless never anything more than a huge collection of gers and herds anyway – declined. It re-emerged later as a religious center with great Tibetan Buddhist influence, and to this day its 16^th-century Lama Buddhist temple remains an active monastery. We toured the vast, white-walled temple grounds with a local guide and her 13-year-old son. The boy was clever and used to foreigners, not shy at all and very charming. He was the kind of boy that Indiana Jones would have hooked up with for a rollicking adventure in the movies, and by the end of the tour, he had reaped a pair of sunglasses from one of us and a promise of a new fishing rod by mail.

I’ve been in Asia now for nearly three full years, and by this time you can imagine how many temples I’ve visited. I won’t describe this temple in detail, except for a few unique characteristics. First, its location on the steppe covering several acres between endless grasslands and blue sky lent it a natural sense of awe.

Second, of its three Lamaist temples, only one is active. We were allowed to enter that temple as well, and after getting accustomed to the smell of the spiritual yak-butter sculptures mixed with incense, we walked in clockwise fashion around the interior of the small space, just as the monks do during part of their rituals. The temple is extremely colorful, but dominated by yellows and reds. Massive prayer books in the Tibetan script lie carefully stacked together. Imposing statues of the Buddha dominate all proceedings, and sculptural representations of scenes from Buddhist mythology were on display throughout. Three monks quietly sat in the center of the room before the Buddha as we walked their path. The life of a monk out on the Central Asian steppe could not be further from my own.

After Karakorum, Beijing was the capital of the Mongol-ruled Yuan Dynasty from 1271-1368. Eventually the overstretched power of the Khans weakened, and Kublai’s successor was not up to the task of keeping the empire together. A peasant rebellion threw the Mongols out and established the Ming Dynasty in China. The rest of the Mongol empire stretching into Eastern Euope crumbled in record time as well. Mongolia fell under Chinese rule for several centuries until the 1911 overthrow of the Qing Dynasty by Sun Yat Sen. Mongolia, with Russian support, declared its independence, and in 1921 established a Communist state. From 1921 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mongolia remained in the Soviet orbit, and only became a truly independent country – for the first time since 1368 – in 1990 when it held its first free, democratic elections. The United States established diplomatic relations with Mongolia only in 1987.

Mongolia is a country that took maximum advantage of the one moment in history when it had the technological upper hand over the rest of the world by virtue of its skilled archers and cavalry in the 12^th and 13^th centuries. The Khans built the largest empire the world has ever seen, stretching from Beijing in the East to Vienna in the West and great swathes north and south of everything in between. The likeness of Chinggis Khan is everywhere to this day, even on the label of a Mongolian-German joint-venture beer called Khan Brau. I think Hitler would have met his match in the murderous Chinggis.

My brief glimpse of the Mongolians left me with an impression of a people that are mere inheritors of a great legacy, footnotes to the history of military triumphs written by the khans’ hordes. All that remains of Mongolia’s former greatness are the "three manly sports" of horseback riding, archery and wrestling. Thrown out by the Mings, Chinese settled civilization swept forward in the sciences and the arts while Mongolia’s tribes fragmented and foundered for centuries. Succeeding generations have added little of note to Mongolia’s story.

This contrast starkly underlines the strategic advantage that settled, agrarian societies have over nomadic societies. In order for knowledge to grow and technology to advance, a society must have permanent centers of learning and research. Dependent either on the availability of good pastureland or on the infrastructure of the settled peoples they had conquered, Mongolian society failed to keep pace with other settled peoples.

Today, Mongolia is one of many countries in the former Soviet orbit struggling to reform its planned economy and to establish new democratic institutions to give its people a greater say in how things should be run. Landlocked Mongolia, however, must reform without the advantages enjoyed by its Eastern European cousins – access to trade with the European Union and greater attention of the United States and NATO countries. Since 1990, however, there have been three Secretary of State visits, and the First Lady even visited in 1994. This kind of attention is an important signal to the Mongolians that they are not trying to reform in a vacuum – in this case a vacuum trapped between the giants Russia and China, who exercise great influence because they remain Mongolia’s two biggest trading partners.