Inner Mongolia: Finding God in the grasslands
ER YANG BO VILLAGE, Inner Mongolia — I spent a good chunk of a week in Inner Mongolia — and I met not one person of Mongolian descent. I did meet three Roman Catholics, however. And thus, after one month on the road in this officially atheist country, my curiously lengthy list of religious run-ins grew a little bit longer.
This was in Er Yang Bo — population less than 100 — an increasingly touristed farming village in the central part of Inner Mongolia, the autonomous (in name only) region that covers a long swath of land in northern China, stretching from the northwest to the northeast and bordering eight other provinces or autonomous regions, Mongolia and Russia.
More than 85 percent of Inner Mongolia’s population is Han Chinese, and tourists who visit the region in search of Mongolians or signs of a traditional Mongolian way of life often leave disappointed. But, while post-1949 Inner Mongolia may be somewhat culturally barren, its rolling and wide-open landscape is beautiful — a wonderful place to get lost for a while and escape a sultry Chinese summer.
09.02.2004, 10:45 PM · Inner Mongolia, The Trip · Comments (5)
