Mongolia's culture: a herding tradition kept from teacher to pupil

What UNESCO lists and why half is urgent

Mongolia's entries on UNESCO's intangible heritage lists run from 2008 to 2024 and cover music, sport, craft, food and the herding year itself. Ten are on the Representative List. Seven are on the list for practices in need of urgent safeguarding: the tuuli epic, the biyelgee dance, the music of the tsuur, a circular-breathing technique for the long song, calligraphy, a ritual for coaxing camels and the worship of sacred sites.

UNESCO's own descriptions give reasons for two of the older entries. The morin khuur and the long song grew up in herding camps, and the 2008 files note that most Mongolians have settled in towns over the past forty years and that desertification has pushed families off the grasslands where the songs' themes made sense.

Which languages and names Mongolians use

Mongolian is the official language, and its standard form is Khalkha. Oirat, Buryat and Khamnigan varieties are spoken mainly in the west and are converging on it. Kazakh, a Turkic language, is the majority language of Bayan-Ölgii province, Tuvan is spoken in Khövsgöl, and Mongolian Sign Language is used by the deaf community.

Mongolian is written in Cyrillic, introduced in the 1940s. The classical vertical script, which UNESCO describes as ninety letters joined top to bottom by continuous strokes built from six basic shapes called head, tooth, stem, stomach, bow and tail, is taught from the sixth grade and used mostly for ceremony. From 2025 legal papers and official documents carry both scripts. When calligraphy was added to the urgent list in 2013, UNESCO recorded three middle-aged scholars training just over twenty young calligraphers, unpaid, over courses of five to eight years.

English replaced Russian as the main foreign language after 1990; in 2023 it was declared the first foreign language and moved into the curriculum from the third grade. Korean has spread because tens of thousands of Mongolians work in South Korea.

The socialist state banned clan names in 1925 as feudal, along with family trees and aristocratic titles. The Law on Culture of April 1996 restored them, and regulations followed in January 1997, so citizens now carry three names: a clan name, a patronymic formed from the father's given name, and a given name. Britannica notes that the clan name appears on identity cards and is otherwise little used. Marrying within the clan is still avoided.

Some names were chosen to protect a child. The Wikipedia article on Mongolian culture records non-names such as Nergui, "without name", and Enebish, "not this one", given to mislead spirits.

What a ger is and how it is arranged

The ger is a round dwelling of a painted wooden lattice wall, roof poles and a peaked roof, covered in felt and white canvas and tied with ropes of animal hair. UNESCO's file describes its making as household work, with men carving the wood while women and men share the sewing, painting and felt-making, and dismantling and pitching it as a family job children learn by watching. The Secret History of the Mongols calls Genghis Khan the leader of all who live in felt tents, and the word ger also means home; gerlekh, to make a home, means to marry.

Its arrangement is fixed. The door faces south. The north is the place of honour, where Buddha images and family photographs stand. The west is the man's side, with the saddle and the skin bag of airag on its stand, and the east is the woman's, where food is prepared. The stove stands in the centre. Stepping on the threshold is taken as disrespect to the host.

The ger also shaped the monasteries. The artist and critic N. Chultem, cited in the Wikipedia country article, traced Mongolian architecture to it: many 16th- and 17th-century temples began as ger-temples, and as they grew their builders used six- and twelve-sided plans under pyramidal roofs to keep the round form, replacing lattice and felt with brick, stone and timber.

The ger is not only rural. Britannica describes the outer districts of Ulaanbaatar and the provincial towns as ger encampments, many without piped water or sewerage, where families who left the countryside after 1990 settled.

What a Mongolian table is built on

Meat and milk. Mutton is the usual meat, camel in the south, beef, goat, horse and yak elsewhere. Dairy comes mostly from cows, with some from yaks and goats, as cheese, curds and cream. Common dishes include buuz dumplings, khuushuur pastries, khorkhog, a meat stew kept for guests, and boortsog biscuits; tsuivan noodles and goulash came in from China and Russia.

Airag, fermented mare's milk, has its own UNESCO entry. It is made by milking the mares, cooling the milk and churning it more than 500 times in a cowhide vessel, the khökhüür, with a wooden paddle, with starter left inside the vessel to start the fermentation. Guests are offered milky tea, airag or the spirit arkhi in a bowl held in the right hand with the left supporting the elbow, and men exchange snuff bottles.

What Tsagaan Sar and Naadam mark

Tsagaan Sar, the white month, is the lunar new year and falls in late January or February. Britannica describes three days that begin with a family feast on the eve, best clothes, visits to elders and gifts; khadag are the usual present, and buuz are eaten in quantity. Buddhists give thanks at temples or at the ovoo, the roadside cairns that travellers also walk around for a safe trip.

Naadam, held every year from 11 to 13 July, is the festival of the three games of men: wrestling, archery and horse racing. In Qing times the games were held every three years with a Buddhist rite for the life of the Javzandamba; they became annual in 1912 and dropped the rite after 1921. Wrestlers in red and blue zodog jackets and briefs enter the ring with a dance imitating the flight of the mythical Garuda bird and compete for titles such as Falcon, Elephant, Lion and Titan. Archers shoot at rows of small leather-covered cups. Children ride the horse races over distances of up to 32 kilometres, depending on the age of the horse. The festival also carries long song, khöömei, biyelgee dance and morin khuur, and UNESCO's description counts sportswomen among the competitors.

How the music is made

The morin khuur has two strings and a bow of horsehair, a trapezoid body with a skin soundboard, and a horse's head carved at the top of a fretless neck. UNESCO dates horse-headed string instruments to sources of the 13th and 14th centuries and records tunes, tatlaga, still played to calm animals. It is mostly played solo, and also accompanies dances, long songs, tales and ceremonies. Its sound mixes a main tone and overtones and resists standard notation, so it has been taught orally.

The long song is a slow vocal line with heavy ornament, falsetto and a very wide range, sung at weddings, at the raising of a new ger, at a birth and at the branding of foals. UNESCO notes the belief that it is about 2,000 years old and records it in literature from the 13th century, in Mongolia and in Inner Mongolia across the Chinese border. Khöömei, from the Altai in the west, produces two sounds at once: a drone and a melody of harmonics. Its two main styles are kharkhiraa, which deepens the drone by an octave, and isgeree, a high whistle of overtones.

Under the socialist state, the masked tsam dances were banned in the 1930s; they are now performed in the monasteries again. The poet Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj, whose opera Three Sad Hills is still staged, died in 1937 shortly after release from prison on false charges. Tsendiin Damdinsüren, a translator of Russian novels once accused of bourgeois nationalism, wrote the words of the national anthem.

Who the people of Mongolia are

Khalkh Mongols make up about four-fifths of the population by Britannica's estimate, and the Wikipedia country article puts them at 86% of ethnic Mongols, who in turn are about 95% of the people. The other Mongol groups, the Dörvöd, Buryat, Bayad and Dariganga among them, are distinguished mainly by dialect. Turkic-speaking Kazakhs and Tuvans, known in Mongolian as Uriankhai, live mostly in the west, and a few Tsaatan, or Dukha, keep small herds of reindeer in the far north. Falconry is practised, and the Kazakhs hunt with eagles.

Dress still marks the groups apart. The deel, a long gown cut in one piece with its sleeves, closes on the wearer's right, traditionally with five fastenings, and men tie a sash of contrasting colour round it; each ethnic group has its own cut, colour and trim. Before the revolution herders wore plain deels summer and winter and lamas wore yellow, and Britannica describes boots with turned-up toes, gutal, and quilted embroidered felt, shirdeg, as living folk crafts.

What Mongolian writers and film-makers made

The Secret History of the Mongols, a partly historical and partly legendary account of Genghis Khan's life written for the royal family some time after his death in 1227, was almost unknown until a Russian Orthodox monk found a copy in Beijing in the late 19th century. It was written in Chinese characters that transcribe medieval Mongolian, which made it hard to identify and fed doubts about its authenticity; it has since been published in the old script and in Cyrillic and translated into English. Older still are the oral genres: heroic epics, yörööl verses of good wishes and magtaal verses of praise, carried by bards called khuurchin.

The 20th century added a literature written under censorship. Byambyn Rinchen was attacked for novels judged feudal and nationalistic and imprisoned, survived the purges, and became a leading writer of the historical novel, a genre that emerged in the 1950s. He died in 1977. In painting, the religious art of the Qing period, with Zanabazar's 17th-century sculptures of Tara among its best-known works, gave way to socialist realism and to Mongol zurag, a style that used the manner of religious painting for secular, national subjects.

In film, socialist studios made legends, revolutionary heroes and later documentaries. After 1990 directors turned to foreign partners, and Byambasuren Davaa's The Story of the Weeping Camel, released in 2003, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. The State Academic Drama Theatre, founded in 1931, and the State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, founded in 1963, both in Ulaanbaatar, stage Mongolian and Western repertoire.

Mongolia's own sporting record outside Naadam is recent. The country first competed at the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck in 1964 and won its first gold medals, in boxing and judo, at Beijing in 2008. In sumo, Dolgorsürengiin Dagvadorj, fighting as Asashōryū, became the first Mongolian yokozuna in 2003.

Which faiths Mongolians hold

At the 2020 census, among people aged 15 and over, 51.7% were Buddhist and 40.6% had no religion. The Wikipedia country article gives Islam 3.2%, mainly among the Kazakhs. Britannica estimates that about a third of the population holds to traditional shamanic beliefs, which overlap with Buddhist practice. Tibetan Buddhism of the Gelug school returned after 1990: the number of monks, 100,000 in 1924 and 110 in 1990 by the Wikipedia count, began to rise as monasteries were rebuilt, Gandan in Ulaanbaatar having reopened in the mid-1940s. Mountain worship, revived by a presidential decree of 16 May 1995, now includes state ceremonies each summer on Burkhan Khaldun.