In Mongolia, there's always the wind.
The people move constantly, and the air moves constantly.
When you're crossing the steppe,
you can go for hours or sometimes days without seeing a human habitation.
But you always look for the animals, because once you see the animals,
you know there are going to be people somewhere close by.
There will be herders.
In Mongolia, you don't have to ask permission, you just come.
As you approach the ger, you stop your horse or your vehicle
a little bit far from the house, from the ger.
Just so that they have a little more time to prepare for you,
and you walk up slowly.
You go and sit on the west side of the ger.
The ger is filled with everything the family owns.
And it has a strong smell of wool and mutton meat and fermented horse milk.
I take it, Mongolia, as one giant national park.
It's one of the only countries left in the world
where you can leave the city,
and within half an hour, you are in the countryside
and you can hike anywhere you want, you can camp anywhere you want.
You can live anywhere you want,
because the land belongs to the government.
This is one of the last pristine
untouched steppe ecosystems left on Earth.
It's one of the few places in the world
where the nomadic lifestyle
still reigns and you know,
nearly 30% of Mongolians live pastoral livelihoods.
The foundation of the Mongolian economy
is the pastoral nomadic lifestyle.
And that's what Mongolians are as an identity: we are nomadic people.
The rich traditional culture is still something that people come from
all over the world to witness.
We had a consultant, actually he was from Canada, that came in,
was doing some work.
And I think he had read up about Asian countries and saving face
and not being confrontational.
And you know, the clichés, if you will,
about what it means to engage with an Asian country.
And my senior Mongolian on the USAID staff, she told me, she said,
Jonathan, you have to tell this guy, we are not Asian.
That we're something different.
Mongolia today seems to me a very modern society on the surface.
But just below the surface, there is a feeling of great antiquity
and a tremendous respect for the history and the traditional culture.
Our history, we are portrayed as warriors,
we are portrayed as people who conquered vast lands.
We were the exception to the norms.
The name of Mongols came in the 13th century with Chinggis Khaan.
But after that time, it has been 800 years and we have been up and down,
and we were part of Manchu Qing dynasty,
and then we have been 70 years in Communism.
And generally in Communism,
they negate the achievement in the 13th century,
and saying the name of Chinggis Khaan was taboo.
You know, personally in my life,
Chinggis Khaan didn't matter 'til 1990.
Because it was prohibited to talk about him.
So it was prohibited to teach about him at school.
But in literature class, my teacher Davaanyam
just talked about Chinggis Khaan like he was a fairytale hero.
Turned out he was a law-giver, he was a religious tolerance giver,
and he was the guy who unified Mongolia.
Mostly when we think of Genghis Khan,
or Chinggis Khaan as the Mongolians say,
we think of a conqueror, a man on a horse.
But the circumstances of his life were very unusual.
He was born in a time of great turmoil and chaos on the steppe.
When he was eight years old,
his father took him to live with another family.
It was very common in Mongolia to marry off a son
by taking him to live with the girl's family for several years,
until he grew up.
Then on the way back, Chinggis Khaan's father stopped in a camp
and he was poisoned.
So in the spring, when the ancestral ceremonies came,
they did not invite his mother, mother Hoelun, to the ceremony.
Her husband had died and they no longer
considered her a member of the tribe.
And the old women announced before they left,
"Leave these women and these children here."
It was a death sentence.
Somehow they survived, but they were outcasts
in this isolated family with very few friends.
He had to teach himself how to hunt, he had to teach himself
how to live on the mountain.
He had to teach himself how to grow into a man.
When he was 16 years old, the girl that he had met when he was eight,
Börte, she came to live with him.
You can imagine what it's like at 16 to fall in love.
You can imagine, especially after a harsh life of being an exile,
of having nothing.
It was happiness, the first happiness he had probably known in his life.
And then they heard hoofs hitting the earth.
And they knew horses were coming.
And if there are horses coming, there are men coming.
Mother Hoelun had been kidnapped herself.
She did not know who the men were who were coming,
but she knew why they were coming.
They had heard there was a girl in this camp.
Mother Hoelun knew if she left that girl,
she could save her own children.
Chinggis Khaan was still a boy.
He obeyed his mother and he rode off with her to the mountains.
But they would leave Börte behind.
Chinggis Khaan decided his life was not worth living
if he had to live without Börte.
Somehow, he would get her back.
He gathered some friends and they rode out in search of Börte.
They found her, they found the Merkit camp.
They came in at night, it was a full moon.
And Chinggis Khaan was calling out her name, "Börte, Börte, Börte."
And she heard him and she was on a cart being driven away.
She heard the voice, she jumped off the cart and she ran to him
and she reached up to grab the horse.
It was the middle of a battle and he thought she was a soldier.
He almost struck her.
And then he saw it was Börte.
He jumped off the horse.
The raid was over.
She was the only thing he wanted.
And there in the moonlight, he held her.
After Temüjin rescued Börte, he was in a set of social relations
that he had never had before.
Suddenly, he was a part of the steppe life.
He had obligations to some other people.
He had, also, enemies who would come for him again at some point.
He began to fight war after war after war, small battles, big battles,
but he realized there was no end to these wars.
Every year you would fight again, go in, raid.
Next year, they would come and raid you.
Slowly but surely, Chinggis Khaan
came to understand how steppe warfare worked.
But he was determined to change it.
He realized, in order to stop the fighting,
in order to prevent it from reoccurring the next year,
he had to kill the leaders every time.
And as he killed them, then he gathered their followers into his own.
And finally, in the year 1206,
he was ready to proclaim a nation, his own nation.
And he called it the Mongols.
But then after that, it's a little unclear what's going to happen.
You've united the people, you're a nomadic people, you move around.
How are you going to keep the people happy?
The Mongols already had a long steppe tradition of raiding.
And so they began to raid the people around them.
After a series of raids, and in 1209,
Chinggis Khaan decided to make the first invasion,
not just to be a raid, but to make a longer invasion.
And he invaded the Tangut people, one of the nations of Northern China.
So now for the first time Chinggis Khaan
was beginning to get some foreign followers,
but this was by compulsion, by force.
But also at the same moment, the first people came voluntarily to him.
Those were the Uighur people
and the Uighur people were Muslims at this time,
as they are today.
And the Muslim people then sent a delegation to Chinggis Khaan
to ask him to come and free them.
Chinggis Khaan had never had an invitation like this,
but he decided to do it.
Now he had new subjects.
He had subjects who lived in oases, who lived in small towns.
They weren't tribal people and he needed a new law to protect them.
And that was the law of religious freedom.
He had this law read in every village and every city and every community,
that every person had the right to choose the religion
of his or her choice.
We remember the conquest, and the conquest was harsh
and it was brutal and it was bloody, but no empire survives on war.
War is only one phase.
Empire survives when the people prosper in some way from it.
Chinggis Khaan's empire was an empire of commerce.
All of a sudden, people in every part of the world were beginning
to get foods, medicines, textiles from other parts of the world.
Books, paper started moving around.
Knowledge about gunpowder moved around.
Almanacs spread from China to Europe.
Christian doctrine spread back to China.
He was also the first to give us an international law.
First with the law of religious freedom,
but also the law against the kidnapping of women.
His mother had been kidnapped.
His wife had been kidnapped.
He recognized that, next to religion,
kidnapping of women was often the most important reason
that men fought one another.
He also passed a law to protect all envoys, all ambassadors.
This time, usually the way you declared war on another nation
was to kill the ambassador.
That was the beginning of it.
Chinggis Khaan said, no,
every ambassador must be protected with your life.
So he created this vision of diplomatic immunity.
So he united the world in trade, he created the first international law,
and to me these are the two greatest achievements of Chinggis Khaan.
Two years before Chinggis Khaan founded his Mongol nation,
he ordered his people to learn to read and write.
From his daughters, we do know that they could read and write.
And one of them became something of a scholar,
and the Chinese envoy described her as reading all the time.
There from the very beginning of Mongolian history,
we see that the women were better educated than the men,
and that has lasted for more than 800 years.
Even today, women are more likely to go to the university.
They're more likely to have advanced degrees than the men.
Mongolian women are more educated than Mongolian men,
because of that after revolution,
lot of family lets the girl to the university, not the boy.
Because in the countryside, for example,
our nomadic population is considering that boys,
they should stay at home and look after livestock.
Well, poor girls, they should be at least educated.
So they're sending them to universities.
So there's some kind of education gap.
And that creates problems for many well-educated Mongolians,
that they cannot find partners who are equal to them
or adequate in their view for marriage.
It's a social problem today.
Status of women in Mongolian history is higher than anywhere in the world.
During the great Mongol Empire, in the politics or in the everyday life,
women's involvement was very important,
and very powerful women we had in our history.
And that continued.
Especially in nomadic society,
woman's role is immensely important in nomadic life.
Chinggis Khaan was a man of the steppe.
He came out of a nomadic tribe.
They were accustomed to herding animals and to hunting animals.
And he applied the Mongolian system of hunting to conquering nations.
So the Mongols moved in a huge formation,
which he called the left wing and the right wing.
That helped to drive everything before him.
It drove any animals who were out there,
any people who were out there, it would push them forward.
And so word would come about the Mongols coming.
And because they were spread out so far,
it was very hard to know how many,
and it just seemed immense.
The people would begin to flee to the city.
That's exactly what he wanted.
It brought panic.
It brought disease.
They began to eat up the food, drink up the water.
So the city was already weakened
and confused by the time Chinggis Khaan's army actually attacked.
Chinggis Khaan had to adapt many new tactics and new strategies,
because he was facing things that steppe people never faced.
One was cities and walls.
Chinggis Khaan had never seen a wall, except those made out of wool.
But he was so resourceful.
He recognized, his soldiers couldn't bring down a wall.
But there was a small river that fed the town.
He diverted the river in order to break down the walls.
Over and over, the Mongols would divert rivers,
all the way up to the conquest of Baghdad.
They would use the rivers as their greatest ally to bring down the walls.
In this way, the Mongols were able to win city after city after city.
And finally, in 1215, he defeated the Jin dynasty.
He took over the city of what is now Beijing.
Chinggis Khaan continued to conquer for the rest of his life.
He became then the greatest conqueror in the history of the world.
There's no one, no one who comes close.
If we look at Alexander the Great,
maybe he conquered one third of what Chinggis Khaan conquered.
And the day Alexander the Great died, his entire empire died with him,
as his generals carved it up.
Chinggis Khaan conquered and his empire lived for 150 years.
His empire eventually stretched from Korea
all the way to the edge of Poland.
It stretched from the Arctic
in the north to the Indus river in India in the south.
After the death of Chinggis Khaan in 1227,
the Mongolian Empire continued to grow for two more generations.
He had put in motion something that could not be stopped.
And it continued to grow right on through the time of his grandson,
Kublai Khan, or Khubilai Khan.
Kublai Khan became the first emperor of China under the Yuan dynasty,
the Mongol dynasty.
By 1368, the whole dynasty collapsed and the Mongols returned to Mongolia.
To them it was almost like, well, they had made camp in China for 150 years.
They just packed up and went home, back to their nomadic lifestyle.
We were able to keep our language and culture
because of the fact that we just were independent, sovereign,
ger-to-ger countries for hundreds of years.
Right after the fall of the Mongol Empire, nobody could bother them.
And we were completely independent and completely efficient on our own.
The Mongolians are some of the most hospitable people in the world,
but always the first thing you hear is the barking dog.
Mongolian dogs are shaggy.
They look more like lions than like dogs.
And so the first thing you always yell in Mongolia,
it's not Hello, I'm coming, may I come in.
It's "nokhoi hori oo," hold the dogs, hold the dogs.
Bankhar is one of the first domesticated dog.
Which is way before Chinggis Khaan, because it's 15,000 years ago.
These days, very few Bankhars are left.
The dog's main purpose is to protect livestock from natural predators,
for example, grey wolf or snow leopard,
red fox, or some species of eagles, too.
They're the identity of who Mongolians are.
They're a spirit of who Mongolians should be and who they used to be.
The Mongols have been nomads
for as long as we've known about them in history.
And of course as people moving around all the time,
they're not building cities, they're not building walls,
and they're not doing the kind of craftwork
that people in sedentary civilizations do.
So they have a whole different approach to the arts.
If you go to nomadic lifestyle, you will see that Mongolians like to sing.
That's the only entertainment they have.
They have to entertain each other.
Couple of people living together, nothing around,
no theaters around, no movie theaters around.
They have to entertain each other.
So they sing to each other.
They appreciate each other singing.
Long song in Mongolia, they call urtiin duu.
It is really important for Mongolians,
because they have a religious aspect to it.
And they have a lot of traditional elements to it.
And the lyrics are all really poetry,
but because they elongate the vowels, they call it long song.
For Mongolians, music is not music in our Western concept,
but in Mongolia it's really the sound.
So they go out and process these sounds.
But the place where they process the sound is with the animals,
and the perception of the space, how it's echoing.
So these are not really singers, but they're herders.
From 1696 onward, Mongolia then belonged to the Manchu Empire,
as a part of China.
The early 20th century, the Manchu Empire began to fall apart.
Mongolia took that opportunity to revolt and to leave China.
Different people were rising up.
There were foreigners occupying many parts of the country.
Around 1921, a group of mercenaries invaded Mongolia,
led by a European aristocrat named Baron von Ungern.
A guy from Europe, who some people think was a lunatic,
but basically was in Mongolia for a while,
sort of announcing the return of Chinggis Khaan, almost.
He was a weird mystic, but extraordinarily brutal.
Mongolia was teetering and looking for friends.
They contacted the Americans, they contact the British,
who wants to help us?
The Mongolians were on their own.
And Mongolia decided to go to Russia,
the newly formed Bolshevik government, for help.
And Stalin said, Oh yeah, sure, fine.
We'll make you part of the Soviet Union.
And they were like, no, no, no, no, no.
We have to be an independent autonomous area.
So then they sent in the military and got rid of Baron von Ungern.
At that time, they had very little infrastructure and they began
to form a military, and they named the leader of that military
a guy named Sükhbaatar.
Sükhbaatar was a patron of the Russians.
When he came in, the political system gradually changed
into a full Communist system.
He died early.
So did many of the leaders, die early,
some of them under suspicious circumstances.
The person who was left standing was Marshal Choibalsan.
Choibalsan did what the Russians told him to do.
He suppressed the Buddhist faith.
He initiated a purge, in which monasteries were burned.
Buddhist lamas, Buddhist priests were killed,
thousands and thousands of them.
Just for being a Buddhist lama,
just for being Chinggis Khaan's descendants,
just for being a herder, sometimes.
When World War II came, the demands on the herders became extreme.
Animals were confiscated left and right for the war effort.
Mongolia donated every bit of our animals, every bit of our resources,
and blood, and people, and monasteries, and gold, and silver,
and animals, horses, everything to World War II.
When World War II ended, things did not improve.
Choibalsan then turned to
consolidating the herders into rural communes.
They were more or less completely governed by Russia through this time.
But eventually, the Soviets just one day, they just pulled out.
They could no longer financially maintain the infrastructure
and maintain the governance in Mongolia.
They were at the tail end of the Soviet Empire.
And when that empire collapsed, they faced economic calamity as well.
All of the support, all of the economic support
that they had received from Russia, was immediately cut.
There was no police, no fire, no infrastructure at all.
It was a very, very poor, difficult time.
And this was the time of the Democratic Revolution.
In December of 1989, a group of young people gathered
and they began to demand democracy.
No one quite knew what to do, nothing like this had ever happened.
And they went then to Sükhbaatar Square, the main square,
and the revolution just grew.
More and more people came.
It was totally peaceful.
And they decided to make Mongolia a democracy, with the parliament,
basically sort of like England.
And that created the modern day political structure.
One of the first things the people did was they sang a song
and prayed to Chinggis Khaan for ignoring him,
prayed to him for forgiveness,
for everything that they had done wrong in the 20th century.
In today's Mongolia, you can see the name of Chinggis Khaan everywhere.
But during Communist time, nobody was allowed to say Chinggis Khaan's name.
So that's some kind of influence the Soviets done, they damaged morally us.
And they just eliminated our history.
That's the influence of Soviets, and that's also the problem
that we forgot our past.
After Communism failed, suddenly we needed ideas,
ideologies and inspirations and role models.
And those new time role models were not ready yet.
But then people started having inspirations
from the old time role models.
So the first role model comes: Chinggis Khaan.
He gives inspiration to every range of people.
During that Chinggis Khaan time, we sang urtiin duu, long song.
And this song is, I think, the first step to be as opera singers.
In the 20th century, the Russians, of course, brought in Socialism,
but they brought in many of the Western arts.
And because the Mongolians could already sing so well,
and they had these kind of talents, came an emphasis then on the Soviets
of creating what they called modern Socialist culture,
but it was very much rooted in Western culture.
So, opera singing, dramatic arts, dance, ballet.
We are Mongolians.
So, we people: wild country, wild horse.
And the people, we born here, and we born to sing, we're born to dance.
My time was, we graduated in Russia. We studied in Russia.
In Moscow, Kiev, and Saint Petersburg.
This time, new generation,
we have own ballet dancers.
We have own opera singers.
The major export of Mongolia really is their culture,
the literature, the music and the art.
It's all world class.
What Mongolia today is, in 21st century,
a lot of things because of the legacies
of the Mongolian-Russia involvement.
Depending on which generation you ask, I think, in Mongolia,
you might hear different perspectives.
My father used to tell me, Oyungerel,
why don't you listen to the government and just obey and don't oppose it.
So I would always say, I don't want unfree society for my children.
I'm doing it for my children.
So there's a real gap between the generation that's still in control
of Mongolia and the up and coming generation
which has a very different worldview.
The urbanization here in Mongolia is happening too fast.
I left Mongolia in 2009 to study abroad.
When I came back after six years,
I couldn't recognize the southern part or the area of Ulaanbaatar.
It was so different.
And I felt like I was in a foreign land.
But the familiar look was still there in the ger district.
The divide between the rich and the poor has widened.
It just only goes to show that it is happening too fast.
There's one major city in Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, the capital.
A lot of the country's development and half the citizens live in UB here.
Population of Mongolia is 3 million
and half of the population is living in the city.
The last 30 years, there have been about 600,000 herders
moved to Ulaanbaatar,
and Ulaanbaatar's population expanded very fast.
In 1990s there were so many harsh dzud winters happening.
And then thousands of families lost their only source of income.
Before you went to bed, you had more than 1,000 livestock.
But in the morning, when you wake up, you lost all of them.
They have only one choice: to come back to Ulaanbaatar to find a job,
to find a new income.
The downtown is reasonably small,
where people live in tall buildings
and they have all the electricity they need.
And they have running water and hot water and heat and elevators
and internet and everything.
But surrounding them, almost 1 million people, living in gers.
Heating with coal or whatever they can find to burn,
or with no running water.
They have to haul it.
No paved streets.
The ger is very efficient shelter in terms of mobility.
But in terms of energy efficiency, it's not very efficient,
especially during the winter.
So the biggest issue Mongolians have now, it's not Chinese.
It's not the Russian legacy.
It's not North Korea.
It's not poverty.
It's the Mongolians, now learning to live as a community.
Following same rules in big cities,
like you'd be really respecting and being nice to one another.
I think the transition from being a herder to live in an urban area
is very hard.
Nomadic people come to Ulaanbaatar and behave like nomads.
People from the countryside,
they tend to not know how to function in society.
They also have a hard time engaging with people.
All of a sudden, this great nation of Mongolians,
who are known for being really great, hospitable people,
are now these grumpy, angry people in the city.
I grew up in countryside, walking every directions,
riding every directions, really without thinking about traffic
or without thinking about other people.
Because of this nomadic mindset, I didn't know traffic rules.
Traffic is like, yeah, it's too much.
So it's a very strange paradox, you know.
Being very polite country person; at the same time,
being treated as a rude person in Ulaanbaatar,
because I didn't know Ulaanbaatar rules.
Here at a ger district family's ger.
We just met a single mom, who also has a daughter with three children,
who's also a single mom, and none of them are employed.
The only source of income they have is the child money,
which is around $8 a month, which is given from the government.
The yard that the ger is located in is not their own.
They're taking care of this land for the owner,
who's recently moved into an apartment.
So, they don't get paid to take care of the yard,
but in the winter they're given coal to keep themselves warm.
The most economically viable source of energy for most Mongolians is coal.
Whether it's burning in the power plant
or whether it's powering people's coal stoves here in the ger areas,
Soviet-era stoves in many cases, and they burn very cheap,
low-quality coal, and that's a problem.
There's an inversion effect in this valley where Ulaanbaatar sits,
and that traps all of this coal smoke that accumulates.
In the winter here, it's like being in the middle of a forest fire.
It's worse than that, because it's coal.
It's these very fine, small particles.
In the summertime, it really clears up significantly,
and a lot of people forget about it.
There's a study that found children living in the city center
here have roughly half the lung function of children growing up
in the countryside.
So there's a massive public health impact here.
The number of hospital visits in the winter time skyrockets.
The citizens of Ulaanbaatar recognize the danger of the pollution.
Just two years ago, I think,
one of the big television broadcasted a documentary about the air pollution,
and that winter is the first demonstration against the pollution.
It has the slogan, which is written: Let's destroy the pollution.
I have friends who work in the development sector
who talk about air pollution, which is connected to ger district,
but they've never been to the ger district.
I want to change these apartment people's behavior
toward the ger district people.
I want these people to understand each other and embrace their struggle.
Democracy in Mongolia is just 28 years old.
And when the democracy is that young,
people are just trying to discover and really explore or just play with it.
And that's what's happening here in Mongolia.
The youth, when we talk about what's going to happen
in next 50 to 100 years,
I think it's brighter.
People my age in Mongolia, we are quite idealistic
in terms of how we see the future of Mongolia
or how we could contribute to the development of Mongolia.
Especially the youth is filled with ambitions and aspirations
and dreams to change the world, change the country.
Like, if you see the young kids around here,
none of them would know any words in Russian.
They don't dress like Russian kids.
And most of them dress like South Koreans or like Americans, mostly.
In a period of rapid change,
it brings up interesting cultural kinds of things.
It brings up upheavals of all kinds.
And I think in Mongolia it's played out through music,
because it draws on different strands.
You have the three, you know:
classical music mediated through the Soviet Union;
modern, contemporary pop music, if you will, rock music;
and then this Mongolian tradition.
And it's sort of this interplay that is taking place right now
that at that particular level, I think,
This is a very awkward time for youth of Mongolia.
The past and the modern times are colliding in one person.
When you look at the IV drip packet,
and you see the face behind the IV drip packet, and it's all distorted.
What distorts that is our modern way of living,
like Facebook, Twitter, and alcohol.
I see vodka bottles.
So, the people who became homeless and who were picking up garbage
or people who came from the countryside,
who came to the city and then they lost their ways
and became dependent on alcohol and became homeless vagrants.
For nomadic lifestyle we tend to take our time, take our pace.
And we're changing that with something that is really quick and fast,
and that's really hard on Mongolians.
We are moving away from our traditional life
and going into a more Western style of lifestyle.
That's what I want to portray.
In return, that lifestyle does not help Mongolians at all.
Horse is essential animal for nomads.
But if you go to the countryside in Mongolia now,
you will not see that man riding horse,
but you see the man riding some motorcycle imported from China.
The horse is losing its practical values.
And when it loses practical values, we lose its byproducts.
And then things will be lost and forgotten.
I would like to modernize them, how to make it these traditional values
and integrate it into modern ones.
We will not live like the nomads in the 13th century or 14th century,
but we would like to take some elements from them.
The minimalism, anti-consumerism.
Our ancestors respected the nature, and that idea has been forgotten.
We have lots of lessons to tell to the world,
and also lots of lessons to learn from the world.
We will probably need lots of wisdoms from past,
especially from Chinggis Khaan.
That's why he's very connected to us now,
because we are doing this transformation.
If you live a nomadic life, you see the life differently.
You will respect the limitations we have.
We have to leave something to next generation.
We are not the last generation on the Earth.
That's some kind of nomadic way of thinking
that had been in our country for more than 2000 years.