Sainshand

The eastern Gobi was crossed for centuries by caravan routes between the Mongolian steppe and China, and the area around present-day Sainshand was monastery country long before it was a town. In 1820 the lama Danzanravjaa (1803–1856), a poet, playwright, painter and physician, founded Khamaryn Khiid in the desert south of the present town and built around it a monastic settlement with a school, a library and museum, and a touring theatre troupe that performed his own plays. His writings, and the religious treasures of his monastery, gave this stretch of desert a cultural weight out of proportion to its population.

The modern town is a twentieth-century creation. It grew around a well and a station on the line from Ulaanbaatar to the Chinese border, completed in 1956, and it is the administrative centre of Dornogovi province. Soviet-era planning gave it apartment blocks, a power supply and the offices that still occupy the middle of town, while herding families kept their gers on the edges.

Khamaryn Khiid was destroyed in 1937, as almost every monastery in Mongolia was in that decade. Its portable treasures survived because the monastery's custodians buried them in the hills after the revolution of 1921 and passed a map of the place down the family; the present curator unearthed twenty-four boxes of manuscripts and relics in 1991 and put them in a small museum in Sainshand. Since then the monastery has been rebuilt, the museum in town has opened, and Sainshand has added wind power and a role as a railway and mining service town to its older life as a provincial seat.

Sainshand's identity is bound up with Danzanravjaa, known locally as the Noyon Khutagt, whose combination of Buddhism, poetry and theatre made him an unusual figure in nineteenth-century Mongolia and a lasting local hero. His songs are still sung, the museum in town carries his name, and the monastery and meditation grounds in the desert draw Mongolian visitors who come as pilgrims rather than as sightseers, tying ribbons, walking circuits and leaving offerings.

Around that runs ordinary Gobi life. Buddhism practised alongside older shamanic custom, ovoo cairns hung with blue silk scarves on ridges and at road junctions, and the horse and camel culture of the desert steppe all shape the year. Local Naadam festivals in July bring wrestling, horse racing and archery to the town and to the surrounding districts, and the lunar new year of Tsagaan Sar empties the apartment blocks as families drive out to elders in the countryside.

Manners are steppe manners: hospitality to anyone who arrives, tea and dairy offered and accepted with the right hand, and a reluctance to refuse food. Visitors are still uncommon enough to attract friendly curiosity. Russian is understood by older residents and English by some younger ones, but in a town this size a phrasebook and patience go further than either.

About 25,000 people live in Sainshand, which makes it one of the larger towns of the Gobi provinces but still small enough to cross on foot. The population divides between the concrete centre, where flats have piped heating and water, and the fenced ger plots on the outskirts, where households burn coal or dung in stoves through the winter and collect water from standpipes.

Work comes from the railway, the provincial administration, schools and the hospital, from trade with the mining and freight traffic moving between the capital and the Chinese border, and from herding in the surrounding sums, where families keep camels, goats, sheep and horses across huge, thinly grassed ranges. Cashmere from goats is the main source of cash for many herding households. Wind turbines on the plain outside town supply power to the national grid.

The rhythm of the day is set by the trains, which arrive and leave at night, and by the seasons, which are severe at both ends. Water is the constant concern in a province with almost no surface supply, and dust, drought and the deep-cold dzud winters that kill livestock are recurring worries. Younger people leave for Ulaanbaatar to study and often stay, a drift the province shares with most of rural Mongolia.

Gobi eating is meat and dairy, and Sainshand's canteens serve the Mongolian standards: buuz, steamed mutton dumplings eaten by the dozen at festivals; khuushuur, the same filling flattened and fried; tsuivan, thick flat noodles fried with meat and whatever vegetables are to hand; and banshtai tsai, small dumplings in salty milk tea. Suutei tsai, tea boiled with milk and salt, is poured for every visitor and drunk all day.

The desert supplies its own specialities. The two-humped Bactrian camel gives milk that is drunk fresh or fermented into khoormog, sour and slightly sparkling, and camel and goat meat are more common here than the beef of the northern steppe. Goat is the feast meat, cooked as khorkhog with fire-heated stones in a sealed churn, or as boodog, roasted from the inside with hot stones packed into the carcass. Strips of air-dried meat, borts, keep through the winter.

Dairy is the summer food: öröm, a thick clotted cream skimmed from boiled milk and eaten with bread; aaruul, hard dried curds stacked on ger roofs to dry; tarag, a set yoghurt. In town, the market and small shops sell flour, rice, tinned goods and Chinese imports that arrive by rail, and vegetables are expensive and limited. Airag, lightly alcoholic fermented mare's milk, appears in summer, though it belongs more to the grasslands than the desert.