9 Questions: How Well Do You Know Mongolian History?

The Great Wall of China exists because Mongolian nomads made it necessary. The Silk Road became viable because a Mongolian empire made it safe. Mongolia's history does not begin with Chinggis Khan — it begins with the Xiongnu, whose empire in the 3rd century BC extracted annual tribute from the Han Dynasty. This quiz starts there: with the oldest, the largest, and the most consequential chapters of one of history's great civilizations.

The scale of the empire is not what makes Mongolian history extraordinary. The ideas are. The kurultai established representative governance centuries before European parliaments existed. The Yasa imposed rule of law from Korea to Eastern Europe, from the Persian Gulf to Siberia. The yam postal system connected a continent. Religious tolerance became state policy in the 13th century. Then, in 1990, without foreign intervention or civil war, Mongolians built one of Asia's first stable democracies — on the same land where their ancestors had built the world's largest empire. The arc runs in both directions, and it holds.