Secrets of the Steppe: A Road Trip Through China’s Northern Borderland

Roman Kierst (小罗)

A journey through Inner Mongolia’s grassland reveals the enduring pulse of nomadic life

Leaning back on the bed inside his yurt, somewhere on the endless grasslands of Inner Mongolia, Bayar seems to be not just looking at me—a city boy hunkered down across from him—but into me. “You’re very quiet,” he says after a long while in his native Mongolian.

It’s true. I was struck by the realization of just how disconnected my urban life was from the natural world—because I had just witnessed this 50-year-old man get as close to it as one possibly can.

Earlier, while his younger brother held one of his sheep on its back, Bayar had taken a knife and made a small incision in the animal’s chest. Then, he reached inside the still living, breathing animal to find its beating heart. He spent a few seconds fumbling for the main artery, before squeezing it shut with his bare hand to cut off blood flow to the brain.

The animal didn’t struggle. It lay with its eyes open, surrendered to its fate, almost as though in a tacit agreement between the herder and his animal chosen for slaughter: I have provided for you, and now you will provide for me and my guests. Thirty seconds later, the sheep was dead and the two men began taking it apart for dinner.

Under the harvest moon

A few days earlier, I had set out with three friends from Beijing to Qiqihar, Heilongjiang province, the starting point for our week-long road trip for the National Day holiday in October. We hoped to take in the vastness of the Inner Mongolian steppe and perhaps get a glimpse of Russia or Mongolia across the border.

Qiqihar, which sits at the convergence of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Inner Mongolia, apparently comes from a Daur word for “frontier.” But with its bustling streets and modern malls, the city didn’t seem to live up its name.

The day of Mid-Autumn Festival, we load up our camping gear and hit the road, heading west and then north. We spend our first night camping on a wooded ridge a few kilometers off the highway in the Greater Hinggan Mountains, with the valley below under a silver veil of light from the giant harvest moon. The sky glistens with constellations and shooting stars that I had only known from love stories, framed against the Milky Way.

The chilly night of camping is still in my bones as the terrain surrounding us unfolds like an autumn tapestry under the morning sun. In the valley, we spot a single brick house surrounded by cows, with smoke rising from the chimney. We make our way down to investigate. A young man dressed in army fatigues leans on a wooden table outside, in front of a muddy motorbike he had been riding to herd his cattle. The cows can’t stand the approaching winter and will be put into barns soon, he tells us.

The sky is bright blue, dotted with puffy clouds casting slow-moving shadows onto the rolling hills. We hike up the hills behind the farm. We’re perhaps eight kilometers from Mongolia, but a thick forest at the top of these mountains obscures any view or path to the border.

Borderlands

We leave the man and his farm behind and drive along a valley—no sign of the steppe yet, though we are in Inner Mongolia by now. Along the way we see tourists, presumably city-dwellers like me, stopped by the side of the road to take photos with hay bales.

We drive along the border with the country of Mongolia—the most recent of a long list of changing demarcation lines in a region historically rife with geopolitical conflict. In the 13th century, the Mongol Empire, under Genghis Khan, united the tribes inhabiting the Mongolian grasslands, forging the largest contiguous land empire in history. The Mongols founded the Yuan dynasty (1206 – 1368) in China.

However, by the late 14th century, the Yuan had been overthrown by the Ming dynasty (1368 – 1644). The subsequent Manchu-led Qing dynasty (1616 – 1911), founded with support from Mongol armies, incorporated both today’s Inner and Outer Mongolia. But as the Qing empire crumbled, Outer Mongolia, with Soviet support, declared independence in 1921. On street signs in this border region we see both the Russian-influenced Cyrillic script of the Mongolian Republic and the traditional top-down Mongolian script used by China’s ethnic Mongolians.

We arrive at Arxan, a county-level city not far from the Mongolian border, in the early afternoon. It looks like something outsiders are supposed to regard as local—an exotic backdrop for tourists to fill their social feeds with. The buildings resemble something in between an Alpine village and a rural Russian town. Other tourists drive around in electric tricycles, taking pictures of themselves in front of the motley architecture. “I’d like to get out of here as soon as possible,” one of my friends says as we discuss whether to spend the night here.

Stocked up for another night of camping, we find ourselves back on the road, a little disappointed by the fakeness of the tourist town—but then I reflect that authenticity is an illusion, and my perception of it probably gives away more about me (my city roots, my desire for solace in nature, and my search for “real” Mongolian lifestyle) than the place itself. “There is no original moment,” anthropologist Robert Shepherd wrote in a 2002 paper on tourism and commodification, “There are no ethnic Others who have existed in a never-never land, segregated in both time and space.”

Walking in steppe

The vast steppe finally emerges before us as we leave Arxan. The horizon seems to stretch infinitely, interrupted only by yurts, livestock, and low-hanging clouds drifting over the prairie below. The region is China’s largest grassland grazing area—1.32 billion acres, more than the size of the entire European Union.

Eventually, after what seems like an age on a straight road piercing through the flat earth, we arrive at Amugulang, a town of around 16,000 people. This is the “frontier town” I had been hoping for.

As we walk down the single main street at night, a man is taking pictures of a cow eating out of a trash can by the side of the road. I ask him if the cow is his. “My friend lost a cow, I’m trying to find out if it’s this one,” he answers in Mandarin Chinese, before switching back to Mongolian to talk to his friend over the phone. The cow silently chews away at the garbage.

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