Mongolia, in the steppes of Genghis khan, a mythical land. Green, ochre and white … green like the vast sea of grass of the steppes , ochre like the sand dunes of the fabled gobi desert, and white like the traditional gers,… Mongolia: the horse king country, where snow covered mountains mingle with the desert, … Mongolia: land of nomadism, Mongols or Kazakhs, shepherds of the wind, .. Mongolia, the very name evokes images of Genghis khan's Golden Horde galloping through endiless steppes, nomadic warriors who inspired an admirable awe. The epic tales of the Mongol Empire reached the West in the writings of intrepid travelers, such as the great Venetian merchant Marco Polo and the Franciscan monk Guillaume de Rubruck and still the Mongol dream feed the Western imagination. Present-day Mongolia, shut in by the Russian bear and the Chinese dragon is only a small part of the Great Mongol Empire of the 13th and 14th centuries which stretched from the Danube to the Yellow River, the largest continuous empire in the History of the world. Of the 4 millions Mongols , only a little more than 2 million people live in the Mongolian People's republic, the rest live in Russia and in China, inner Mongolia, (an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China largely settled by ethic Chinese)
The Mongolian People's Republic or Mongolia or Khalkha, a sovereign nation, founded in 1921 but emerging only recently from the Soviet Union influence is locked between the Great Wall in the south and lake Baikal in the North, and it is larger than Britian, France, Germany and Italy to gether.