Mongolia

Mongolia is a landlocked country in East Asia bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, covering 1,564,116 square kilometers, the eighteenth-largest country in the world and the largest landlocked country that does not border an inland sea; with a population of 3.5 million it is the world's most sparsely populated sovereign state excluding Western Sahara, and Ulaanbaatar, its capital and largest city, holds roughly half the population. The territory was ruled by a succession of nomadic empires, including the Xiongnu and Turkic khaganates, before Genghis Khan founded the Mongol Empire in 1206, which became the largest contiguous land empire in history, and his grandson Kublai Khan established China's Yuan dynasty. Tibetan Buddhism spread to Mongolia in the sixteenth century and the Qing dynasty absorbed the country in the seventeenth; after the Qing collapsed in 1911 Mongolia declared independence, achieving it from the Republic of China in 1921, and the Mongolian People's Republic was founded in 1924 as a Soviet satellite socialist state. Mongolia conducted its own peaceful democratic revolution in 1990, adopting a new constitution in 1992 and transitioning to a multi-party system and market economy; about 30 percent of its population remains nomadic or semi-nomadic, and Mahayana Buddhism is the majority religion at 51.7 percent.