We started our journey in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital, whose identify interprets to “Pink Hero.”
It’s a becoming introduction to a rustic whose historical past has swung dramatically between empire, revolution and democracy.
Our first cease was the Chinggis Khaan Nationwide Museum, the place it’s unimaginable to not respect the size of what started on these steppes. Within the early thirteenth century, Chinggis Khaan — higher identified within the West as Genghis Khan — united the competing Mongol tribes and cast the most important contiguous land empire in historical past.
Greater than 800 years later, Chinggis Khaan stays central to Mongolia’s nationwide id. His identify is all over the place — on monuments, forex and the worldwide airport. Right here, he’s remembered not merely as a conqueror, however because the founding father of the Mongolian nation.
However Ulaanbaatar’s identify tells a really completely different story.
Mongolia declared independence from China’s collapsing Qing dynasty in 1911, however its sovereignty remained unsettled for one more decade.
In 1921, Mongolian revolutionaries, backed by the Soviet Pink Military, drove out Chinese language troops and White Russian forces. Three years later, the Mongolian Individuals’s Republic was established, making it the world’s second communist state and successfully a Soviet satellite tv for pc for almost seven a long time.
That relationship got here at an infinite value.
We visited a number of Buddhist temples, peaceable locations stuffed with monks, worshippers and the scent of incense. It’s troublesome to reconcile that tranquility with what occurred right here lower than a century in the past.
Throughout Mongolia’s Nice Purge from 1937 to 1939, tens of 1000’s of Buddhist monks, authorities officers, intellectuals and suspected political opponents have been executed or imprisoned. Lots of of monasteries have been destroyed, almost erasing a spiritual custom that had formed Mongolian society for hundreds of years.
Then, in 1990, Mongolia modified course as soon as once more.
Impressed by democratic actions sweeping throughout the collapsing communist world, Mongolians staged peaceable mass demonstrations that ended one-party rule. The nation held its first multiparty elections later that 12 months and shortly adopted a democratic structure and market financial system.
The consequence is likely one of the world’s most exceptional political tales: a functioning democracy located between two authoritarian giants, Russia and China.
