Mongolia and the Central Asian Steppe Interior

Mongolia is a landlocked country of roughly 1.56 million square kilometers, wedged between Russia to the north and China to the south, east, and west. With a population of approximately 3.4 million people as of the mid-2020s, it is consistently ranked as one of the most sparsely populated sovereign states on Earth, with an average density of only around two people per square kilometer. The country's southern third is dominated by the Gobi Desert, the largest desert in Asia, a cold desert of gravel plains, dunes, and sparse vegetation that extends across the Mongolia-China border, while much of the remaining territory consists of vast temperate steppe grassland, historically the setting for large-scale horse-based pastoralism.