Sharing a birthday, July 11, with the national day of this landlocked, mostly Buddhist country wedged between China and Siberia (a bit smaller than Alaska and with a population around 3 million) has helped drive a longtime fascination. In the early Middle Ages essentially a world power thanks to the westward conquests of Genghis Khan, in the 1990s Mongolia made a transition to multi-party democracy after 70 years of Communist and Soviet domination (one of the remnants of which is that its lan
