With a poignant hopefulness, Mongolia, population 2.7 million, is trying to establish a market economy in the deep shadow of neighboring China. One morning when I was looking for a pastry in Ulaanbaatar, I strolled into a grocery store and found all the bakery workers watching me with quiet, expectant pride. “You are our first clee-ent,” the manager told me, explaining that it was opening day. “We are so honored.” Down the street, Louis Vuitton opened its first Mongolian outlet last year, and Hugo Boss likewise set up a shop for the Mongolian elite who have grown rich mining gold. I stood beneath an ad for a Mongolian department store— I am all new, read the slogan, next to a picture of a beautiful woman—and then the wind kicked up, uprooting a small road sign that came catapulting toward my head, pole and all.

Mongolia doesn’t quite have the modernity thing down yet. It remains a poor country where the electricity is constantly flickering, even in the capital, and it’s so dependent on ranching and sheepherding that last winter’s dzud, or unusually heavy snow, was still wreaking havoc on the economy when I visited in May. The tourist map I bought depicted what I swear were phantom roads. When I tried to follow one, I ended up in a cow pasture, being chased through a snowstorm by barking dogs.

On my way to the statue, I got lost. No road signs pointed there yet, and the only pedestrian I found outside Ulaanbaatar was an old man gathering horse dung for heating fuel. He could not help me. Finally, I found a gas station, built in 2009, where the attendants wore matching red-and-blue uniforms and sat inside a glass-and-steel booth.

“Chinggis?” I said.

“Ah!” They smiled and pointed.

A few miles later, I came upon a truck driver, who’d pulled over to pee. “Chinggis?” I said.

When he pointed, I saw it—a glimmer of silver down the hill. Genghis Khan sits astride a stallion, grimacing as he clutches a gold-tinted stainless-steel whip. The statue’s pedestal is a columned, white-granite rotunda, and everything inside the rotunda is calibrated to impress and make money. There’s a collection of Bronze Age artifacts, a screening room wherein a stentorian video (with English subtitles) heaps praise on the Mongolian construction industry, and a luxurious conference room and restaurant, both empty when I visited. The landscaping is brutal: not a tree or bush in sight. The black iron fence surrounding the complex goes on for more than a mile. Cumulatively, the place shouted, “Watch out, folks— Mongolia is back on its horse!” But I detected an undertone of desperation too. A more plaintive voice seemed to whisper, “Believe in us, please. We’re trying very hard.”

I snickered for a moment, but then, riding home, I felt guilty for laughing. I remembered a kid I had met earlier, while lost on a back road, named Ertene Bulgan. He was a shepherd, with a shaved head and a stud earring, and he invited me into his grandparents’ ger. Later, he drew a map of his world into the dirt with a stick. “Home,” he said, pointing. Then he drew a little rectangle. “School.” Then, with a solemn nod, he said, “Chinggis.” And he drew a long road, hooking into the distance, toward a steel marvel he hoped to visit one day.

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