Mongolia

Mongolia is a country in Asia.

It has no sea. Russia is to the north, and China is to the south. Wide, grassy plains stretch far away. The capital city is Ulaanbaatar.

Mongolia is a big, landlocked country in north-central Asia, with Russia to the north and China to the south. It is about 2,392 kilometers from west to east, and its land area is roughly as big as the countries of western and central Europe put together.

Most of Mongolia is a high plateau. Grassy steppe covers much of it, with forested mountains and lakes in the west and north and the Gobi in the south. About 3.6 million people lived in Mongolia in 2025. The capital, Ulaanbaatar, is in the north-central part of the country.

Britannica describes Mongolia as roughly oval, 1,486 miles (2,392 km) from west to east and at most 782 miles (1,259 km) from north to south, lying deep in the interior of eastern Asia between Russia and China. It is largely a plateau averaging about 5,180 ft (1,580 m), and at its nearest point it is some 700 km from the sea.

Some three-fourths of the country is pastureland supporting immense herds; the rest is divided roughly equally between forest and barren desert, with only a tiny fraction under crops. The World Bank estimated the population at 3,568,978 in 2025, on 1,564,116 square kilometers, one of the lowest average densities in the world. Ulaanbaatar, on the Tuul River at about 1,350 m, holds some two-fifths of the population.

Ulaanbaatar is the biggest city.

It has tall glass towers. Round gers stand around its edges. Far away, an old valley was the home of a great empire's capital.

Ulaanbaatar, the capital, lies on the banks of the Tuul River. In 1921 the old town had about 60,000 people and was made mostly of monasteries, a few timber buildings and clusters of gers. Today it is a modern city of more than a million people, with wide avenues and high-rise towers, surrounded by districts where many families live in gers.

About 360 kilometers southwest of Ulaanbaatar is the Orkhon Valley, a World Heritage Site. Here stood Kharakhorum, the capital of the Mongol Empire, set up in 1220, and Erdene Zuu, the earliest surviving Mongol Buddhist monastery.

Ulaanbaatar, known to Europeans as Urga, settled on its present site in 1778 and was renamed Ulaanbaatar, 'Red Hero', in 1924. Britannica describes its transformation from a 'city of felt' into a metropolis of broad avenues and high-rise towers, while by the late 20th century a large majority of residents lived in outlying ger districts. Darkhan (founded 1961) and Erdenet, which grew up in the 1970s around a copper mine, are planned industrial towns.

UNESCO inscribed the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape in 2004: 121,967 ha of grassland along the Orkhon River, first settled about 62,000-58,000 years ago and occupied in turn by the Huns, Turkic peoples, Uighurs, Kidans and Mongols. It contains Turkic memorial sites of the 6th-7th centuries, the Uighur capital Khar Balgas (8th-9th centuries) and Kharakhorum, the Mongol imperial capital established in 1220, as well as Erdene Zuu, the earliest surviving Mongol Buddhist monastery. In the Altai, UNESCO's Petroglyphic Complexes (2011) record about 12,000 years of rock art.

Most of Mongolia is grassy steppe.

In the west are tall, snowy mountains. In the south is the Gobi, a dry, stony desert with some sand dunes. Winters are very cold, and many days are sunny.

Mongolia has three big mountain chains: the Altai in the west, the Khangai in the middle and the Khentii in the northeast. The highest point, Khüiten Peak in the Altai, is 4,374 meters high, and the Altai is the only range in Mongolia with glaciers today. Grasslands called steppes cover more than three-quarters of the country, and in the south the Gobi is a rocky desert with gravel plains and some sand dunes.

Mongolia is far from any ocean, so its weather is extreme. Around Ulaanbaatar, January averages about -22 °C and July about 17 °C. Mongolia also gets lots of sunshine: about 220 to 260 clear, sunny days a year.

Britannica divides Mongolia into mountain chains in the north and west, basins between them and a great upland plateau across the south and east. The Mongolian Altai, the highest and longest chain and the only one with present-day glaciation, reaches 4,374 m at Khüiten Peak; the Khangai rise to about 4,025 m at Otgontenger. The Great Lakes basin holds more than 300 lakes, the saline Lake Uvs covers some 3,350 km², Lake Khövsgöl is the largest and deepest freshwater body, and the lowest point is Lake Khökh at 560 m. The Orkhon, about 1,130 km, is the longest river lying wholly within the country.

Mongolia lies on a continental divide: northern rivers reach the Arctic Ocean and northeastern ones the Pacific, while two-thirds of the country drains to interior basins. The climate is pronouncedly continental, with January-July differences of up to 44 °C and daily swings of up to 30 °C; precipitation ranges from under 100 mm in low deserts to about 350 mm in the northern mountains, mostly as summer thunderstorms. The Gobi is a typical rock-floored desert with gravel cover and occasional dunes, and its Gurvan Saikhan range is known for dinosaur fossils at Bayanzag and Nemegt.