Dalanzadgad

People have crossed and grazed this part of the Gobi for thousands of years, and the rocks around the town hold a much older record: the sandstone beds of Ömnögovi are among the world's richest dinosaur sites. The expeditions led by Roy Chapman Andrews of the American Museum of Natural History reached Bayanzag, north-west of the town, in the 1920s and found the first nests of dinosaur eggs to be recognised as such, and Soviet, Polish and Mongolian teams continued the work through the 20th century.

Dalanzadgad itself is a 20th-century creation, laid out as the administrative centre of Ömnögovi province, a cluster of buildings on the gravel plain below the Gurvan Saikhan. Under the socialist system it acquired the standard provincial equipment — a square, government offices, a theatre, a hospital, schools, an airfield and blocks of flats — while the herders of the province were organised into collectives raising camels, goats and sheep.

The change that matters most came after 2000, when the South Gobi's mineral wealth was developed: the Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold deposit and the Tavan Tolgoi coalfield, both within the province, turned Ömnögovi into the centre of Mongolian mining. Dalanzadgad grew quickly, gaining hotels, shops and a paved road to the capital, and its airport was rebuilt to handle the traffic. Tourism grew alongside, as flights made the Gobi's gorges, dunes and dinosaur cliffs reachable in a few days rather than a week.

The South Gobi is camel country, and that shapes local identity. Bactrian camels supply milk, wool, meat and transport, and families take pride in their herds; the Thousand Camel Festival at Bulgan in this province brings two days of camel racing and camel polo each March. Herders live far apart around scarce wells, which makes hospitality a serious obligation rather than a courtesy: tea and milk are offered to anyone who arrives.

The town's own culture is a provincial-capital mixture. Its Naadam in July draws wrestlers and riders from every district, the theatre and cultural centre stage concerts and the long-song and horsehead-fiddle traditions that the Gobi shares with the rest of the country, and the museum keeps the dinosaur and ethnographic collections that visitors come for. Buddhist practice, broken by the purges of the 1930s, has revived in a small way, and ovoo cairns on the passes are maintained and circled.

Mining has brought a second population — engineers, drivers, contractors and their families, Mongolian and foreign — and with it a debate that runs through local life about water, grazing land, dust and who benefits from the wealth underground. People in Dalanzadgad tend to be direct about both the jobs and the costs.

About 33,000 people live in Dalanzadgad, one of the larger towns of the Gobi, and the population has grown steadily since the mines opened. Most live in ger districts rather than in the small centre of flats, keeping animals in fenced yards on the town's edges. Work is in the provincial administration, the hospital and schools, the market, transport and construction, and in mining-related jobs on rotation at Oyu Tolgoi and Tavan Tolgoi, which take workers away for weeks at a time.

Water governs everything. It is pumped from wells and boreholes, trucked to parts of the ger districts, and its use by the mines is one of the most contested subjects in the province. Electricity, heating coal and most goods arrive by road from the north or from the Chinese border, and prices are higher than in central Mongolia.

Outside town, families herd goats above all, for the cashmere that pays for everything else, along with camels, sheep and horses, and they watch the season for drought and for dzud. Summer brings tour vehicles, dust and long days; winter empties the roads and turns the town inward. Air quality suffers on still winter days from stove smoke, and road dust is constant in the dry months.

Gobi cooking is built on what the desert supports. Goat is the meat of celebration, cooked as boodog, in which a carcass is sealed and cooked from the inside with fire-heated stones. Mutton fills the everyday dishes: buuz, steamed dumplings of minced meat and fat; khuushuur, fried and flattened; tsuivan, hand-cut noodles steamed over meat; and guriltai shul, a noodle and mutton soup. Borts, meat air-dried in strips through the winter, is shaved into soups when fresh meat is short.

Camel dairy sets the region apart. Bactrian camel milk is drunk fresh and fermented into khoormog, a sour, faintly sparkling drink, and camel cream and curds appear alongside the usual white foods — öröm, tarag and hard dried aaruul — made from goat, sheep and cow milk. Salted milk tea is offered to every visitor, and in summer families make airag from mare's milk where horses are kept.

The town adds what a provincial capital and a mining centre bring: bakeries with Russian-style bread, shops full of Chinese imports from the border crossings, and restaurants serving Korean and Chinese dishes beside Mongolian ones. Vegetables and fruit are trucked in and cost more than in the north, and melons grown in the Gobi's irrigated plots appear in late summer.