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Photo Credit: Roman Kierst
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Secrets of the Steppe: A Road Trip Through China’s Northern Borderland

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

Content warning: descriptions of animal slaughter

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.

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Secrets of the Steppe: A Road Trip Through China’s Northern Borderland is a story from our issue, “Online Odyssey.” To read the entire issue, become a subscriber and receive the full magazine.

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author Roman Kierst (小罗)

Roman Kierst is a staff writer and editor at The World of Chinese based in Beijing but much more at home in Chengdu, where his own China story first began as a high school exchange student in 2006. Likes to pick up a film camera occasionally to take pictures of (mostly) old places.

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