© 2026 by STORYTELLUS
A FROST DIARY: MONGOLIA
Anyone travelling through the Gobi Desert towards Mongolia in the depths of winter is usually looking for one specific thing: to experience what it means to live on the edge of endurance. Temperatures that plunge below -30°C, a capital enveloped in the smoke of the coal that warms it, and a people who for centuries have made their homes into something dismantlable, portable, ready to move once more. What you find, in the end, is almost always more complex and more fascinating than expected. This is the story of a long train journey setting off from Beijing.
The train window soon becomes the only possible horizon. Outside, the steppe reaches out flat for as far as the eye can bear, cut only by a fence running parallel to the tracks for no apparent reason. Inside, time takes on a different consistency: it is measured in glasses of tea left to cool on the sill, in blankets pulled up against the cold that seeps through the glass anyway, in gazes lost outside without truly looking for anything. When it lasts long enough, the journey ceases to be mere transit and becomes a suspended state: you are no longer in Beijing, but not yet in Mongolia. You are in the middle, and the body adapts to that suspension even before the mind does.
Observed with patience, the landscape is not as empty as it seems at first glance. Sheep graze near wind turbines, an image that unwittingly juxtaposes two eras: ancient nomadic pastoralism and modern energy infrastructure, without either seeming out of place.
At Erlian, on the border between China and Mongolia, the journey stops being mere waiting and becomes an event again. The trains grind to a halt for hours: the track gauges differ between the two countries, a legacy of political choices decades old, when Soviet influence imposed its own gauge on Mongolia, distinct from China's. Each carriage is lifted and the bogies replaced one by one, a slow, theatrical operation. On the platform, men in dark uniforms keep watch with a ceremonial stillness that shades into boredom, standing frozen in the chill while the train is dismantled beneath them.
Arriving in Ulaanbaatar in the middle of winter means arriving in a city marked by one of the most extreme climates in the world for a capital. The average temperature in January, the coldest month, hovers around -28°C, with nights that can drop as low as -40°C, a reality that earns it, unchallenged, the title of the coldest capital on the planet. At those temperatures, staying outdoors without adequate protection for even a few minutes carries a real risk of frostbite; cars struggle to start and are often left idling for hours to prevent the engines from seizing up; and much of what is needed to face the winter comes from outside, often at great cost, in a vast and sparsely connected country.
This cold is accompanied by an equally harsh problem: the air. On the coldest days of the year, the average PM2.5 concentration can reach levels dozens of times higher than what is considered safe by the World Health Organization. Heating comes mainly from coal, burned both in power plants and in the stoves of traditional ger dwelling, the felt and wood tents that for centuries have enabled Mongolian nomads to live in the most inhospitable stretches of the steppe, and which today, relocated to the edges of the capital in sprawling informal districts, paradoxically become the primary source of urban smog. The dense smoke produced by incomplete coal combustion in these stoves, combined with congested traffic and low-quality vehicle emissions, forms a greyish-brown haze that hides the surrounding mountains for months. It is the direct consequence of rapid urbanisation: a population that in recent decades has moved en masse from a nomadic life to the outskirts of the capital, bringing their stoves with them—now incompatible with the urban density in which they find themselves.
And yet, life goes on with a stubborn normalcy. Pigeons gather in squares where smoke from smokestacks blends into the low winter sky. Contemporary art installations coexist with Soviet architecture and Buddhist temples in a visual layering that speaks to how much Mongolia's recent history has been a sequence of diverse influences.
It is the faces, more than any landscape, that tell the story of the adaptability of those who live here. Men wearing traditional fur headwear walk the streets with complete naturalness, not a costume to show off, but functional clothing against a climate that grants no distractions. An elderly man, cigarette and hot coffee in hand, pauses beside a car with his eyes fixed elsewhere: a quiet moment that says more than many iconic images. A stray dog looks straight into the camera, thick-furred, equally accustomed to a winter that lasts eight months of the year.
Among the most striking sights along the way are enormous ice sculptures, with figures clambering over them to carve them against the light—an art form that transforms the only resource the Mongolian winter offers in abundance from a climatic obstacle into a creative medium. Groups of people sit on the frozen blocks, almost indifferent to the cold they radiate, in a shared moment resembling a small collective ritual.
Inside the Buddhist monasteries, the atmosphere changes key. A figure kneeling with their back turned, alone in the centre of a rug within a richly decorated interior, captures the silence that defines these places. Tibetan Buddhism, practiced in Mongolia for centuries and long suppressed during the era of Soviet influence, when many monasteries were destroyed or repurposed, has now returned to a central place in the country's cultural identity.
Outside the city, the steppe and the desert reclaim center stage. Further south stretches the Gobi, one of the largest and coldest deserts in the world, capable of dropping well below zero in winter, defying the common image of deserts as exclusively hot places. An eagle perched on a post in the fog recalls a tradition of hunting with trained eagles practiced for centuries by nomadic communities, a relationship between human and animal that has endured almost unchanged through time. The gers dot the white snow in small, isolated clusters, testament to a nomadic way of life that, despite growing urbanisation, still persists in the countryside: structures designed to be dismantled, transported, and reassembled in a few hours, capable of withstanding fierce winds and extreme temperatures, exactly as a life in constant motion requires.
And finally, the equestrian statue of Genghis Khan, colossal and gleaming in steel against the grey sky, a monument built in 2008 a few miles from the capital, at the spot where legend has it the future conqueror found a golden whip, a presage of his destiny. It speaks to the complex and proud relationship contemporary Mongolia holds with its imperial founder: a man who in the 13th century unified the nomadic tribes of the steppe and forged the largest contiguous empire in history, and who today remains the country's most powerful symbol of identity, featured on banknotes, airports, and commercial brands long before history books.
What remains, at the end of this journey, above all is an awareness of how much living here means coexisting every day with extreme conditions, a climate that severely tests bodies, vehicles, and resources, and pollution that is itself a direct consequence of the daily fight against the cold. Yet, within these hostile conditions, a fascinating and deeply rooted culture continues to thrive. Nomadic traditions, Buddhist spirituality, and the rituals tied to the ice and the steppe have not survived despite the climate: they were forged by it, and they continue to renew themselves every winter, between the gers scattered across the snow and the frozen streets of the capital. This is perhaps the most surprising revelation of the journey: not the harshness of the cold, but the cultural richness that continues to bloom right at its hardest limits.
PHOTO GALLERY
