In October, a train with 30 coal wagons left Ulan Bator destined for the Russian port of Vostochny, the first rail freight service to link the Mongolian capital with the Pacific coast. It took four days to travel the 4,769km.
Waved off by Russian and Mongolian dignitaries, the train was important because of where it did not go. The coal came from Tavan Tolgoi, a vast and largely untapped reserve in the South Gobi Desert, which also happens to be less than 200km from the border with China.
Landlocked and long ignored, Mongolia is using an instrument of 19th- century geopolitics – railway-building – as a means of navigating 21st-century globalisation.
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