A collection of news, photos, and information from Mongolia. This blog uses a queue and updates three times a day. I try to properly credit all photos. If I have the credit on one of yours wrong, or you don't want it posted here, let me know and I will fix it immediately. You can use the "Ask Me Anything" link even if you don't have a tumblr account.
Anu, a Mongolian snow leopard, and her three cubs in 2015, 2016, and early 2017. (The third cub’s eyes are barely visible at the lower right of the last picture). The cubs are now fully grown and snow leopard scientists and fans are hoping Anu will have another littler this winter.
In September, snow leopards were officially changed from Endangered (less than 2500 left alive) to Vulnerable (2500 to 10000 left alive), which is cautiously good news. Snow Leopards were first categorized as Endangered in 1972.
November 6th, the Mongolian and Greek governments began a program to share Greece’s greenhouse technology and experience with Mongolia. (Apparently Greece is good at greenhouses; I didn’t know that.)
Mongolia’s average temperature is below freezing, so growing crops is pretty difficult, and most plant foods have to be imported from warmer countries. Greenhouses could make it possible to grow crops in the country and improve food pricing and availability, but it is difficult to make greenhouses work in the extreme climate.
Photo: building with greenhouse design by Mongolian architect Zolboo Baatarzevseg.
Left: Tugs-Amgalan Batjargal, Miss Earth Mongolia 2017, shows off traditional Mongolian clothing with a tall hat at the Miss Earth Beauty Pageant. Right: Empress Chabi wears her tall hat in a thirteenth century portrait. Some historians think fairy-tale European “princess hats” were inspired by these.
Baigalmaa Norjmaa is an utterly fearless and badass Mongol adventurer. She’s climbed most of Mongolia’s highest mountains (and Kilimanjaro). She is a mountain biker and a sky runner (racing on foot around the tops of mountains).
On November 5th, Baikal set off from Ulaanbaatar, leading a group of four humans and ten camels. They are traveling to London, 12000 kilometers away. On camels.
You can follow their progress on facebook here: Steppes To The West
Turgen Mountain, in the Altai mountain range, Uvs aimag, Mongolia. The water is colored turquoise by tiny grains of granite ground off the sides of the mountain by the ice.
The Ulzii (endless knot) is a symbol used to decorate just about everything in Mongolia, especially doorways. It represents eternity, eternal love, and happiness.
Saiga antelope (бөхөн) have goofy melty faces. Their muppet noses filter out dust so they can handle desert life in Mongolia and Kazakhstan.
I wrote about the mysterious deaths of half the world’s бөхөн population last winter, but luckily the small group living in Mongolia was unaffected. This year so far about 900 have died in Mongolia as well, but at least now we have a pretty good guess as to the cause: Ovine rinderpest, an African disease that infects goats and sheep. Mongolia had its first major cases last year, prompting scientists to check бөхөн corpses, which also tested positive for the disease.
Mongolia has started a vaccination program for livestock, which should help meltyface muppet deer too.
Two Mongolian teams (nicknamed Tserendash (left) and Erdene (right)) qualified for the 2017 International Snow Sculpture Championships. Erdene won third place. Both teams tied for the “Artist Selection” award, voted on by all the snow sculptors themselves.
Photos from the Genghis Khan Ice Marathon, a 26-mile run over the frozen Tuul river in Terelj National Park in Mongolia. The 2017 marathon is this weekend.
hi, I'm part Mongolian in the diaspora in the US right now and am having some trouble learning the history of my people. is it okay to talk to you privately? it's really difficult learning our history because of how it's been skewed by white imperialists and Chinese and Russian governments attempting to rewrite our history.
It is okay to talk to me privately, but sadly I don’t think I can help you much with this. I really wish I could, but I’m not an expert in Mongolian history. I’m not even Mongolian, so I didn’t learn Mongolian history in school or anything. I’ll help as much as I can, but I don’t think that’s very much.
I also would suggest asking @minimongol if you haven’t yet. She’s Mongolian, very smart, and usually happy to answer questions. Everyone interested in Mongolia should follow her.
Also, Tsaagan Sar, which is coming up in about a month, is celebrated with one’s extended family. If anyone in your extended family, even distant relatives, is celebrating it, they would probably be very happy to have you join them, eat lots of delicious dumplings, and talk about your family’s history.
I do have a couple book suggestions for you, though, if that sort of thing is helpful to you at all.
Genghis Khan And the Making of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford. Written by a white guy, but his three main sources are a Mongol text (The Secret History of the Mongols), a Persian text, and an Arabic text, and the book is well-regarded in Mongolia. Covers Genghis Khan’s life, the way trade routes set up by the Mongols brought Asian and Middle Eastern knowledge and technology to Europe and gave Europe the Renaissance, and when and why Europeans started portraying the Mongols as “savages.”
Weatherford also wrote two other books, which I haven’t read myself and don’t know if Mongolians like them, but they’re probably pretty similar: The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How Genghis Khan’s Daughters Saved His Empire, and Genghis Khan and the Quest for God: How the World’s Greatest Conqueror Gave Us Religious Freedom.
If you read some Mongolian, there’s also a seventeen-volume comic book adaptation of Genghis Khan’s life (just called Чингис хаан) based on Secret History of the Mongols that is a lot of fun, but hard to get outside Mongolia.
A weirder suggestion: Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia by Manduhai Buyandelger. This isn’t a history book, it’s a study by a Mongolian anthropologist, so it is dense and difficult to read in places. She was studying the ways one group of rural northern Mongolians dealt with losing their own histories and living in an uncertain present after the end of communism by turning to newly-legal shamanic traditions to rebuild connections with the past and their own ancestors.
(I’m not saying that what you specifically need to do is talk to a Mongolian shaman about your ancestors, of course, just that you might be interested to read about how one small group of Mongols struggled with lost history. If you’re interested in Mongolian shamanism, you should follow @drumandmirror and @ongod-tengertei on tumblr.)
You might also like the poetry of Gombojav Mend-Oyoo. He was born during Mongolia’s Communist period, and has spoken in interviews about secretly practicing mongol bichig (instead of cyrillic) by writing in dust and snow, and publishing in underground poetry movements kept secret from the government. He sees his calling as a poet as trying to restore the lost wisdom of the past to modern Mongolians. Most of his poetry is very beautiful or nostalgic descriptions of nomadic life and the Mongolian countryside. Golden Hill is his book with the most historical content available in English, I think.
Trailer for The Eagle Huntress, a documentary about Aishol-pan, a 13 year old Kazakh girl living in Mongolia. Her father is considered one of the best eagle hunters in Mongolia, and after Aishol-pan demonstrates skill at working with his eagle, they decide she should catch an eagle of her own and become an eagle hunter in her own right, even though eagle-hunting is traditionally a men-only activity in Mongolia. It looks beautiful!
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