The Gobi is a cold desert and grassland region spanning southern Mongolia and northern China. Covering about 1,295,000 km² (500,000 sq mi), it stretches roughly 1,600 km on its south-west–north-east axis and 800 km from north to south, and it is the sixth-largest desert in the world. It lies on a plateau mostly 910 to 1,520 m above sea level, between the foothills of the Altai, Sayan and Yablonoi ranges to the north and the ranges on the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau to the south. Most of it is bare rock and gravel rather than sand. It receives about 194 mm of precipitation a year on average, and temperatures can range from −40 °C in winter to 45 °C in summer. Its name comes from the Mongolian gov', "dryland". Large parts are protected, among them Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park (1993) and the Great Gobi Strictly Protected Area (1975), a UN biosphere reserve since 1991. The desert changes a great deal from one district to the next, and the sections below cross it: south from Ulaanbaatar by rail, then west by road and over the border into China.
Leaving Ulaanbaatar: The Trans-Mongolian Railway and the Choir Depression
The northern edge of the Gobi is not a line but a slow fading of grass. The Trans-Mongolian Railway, opened on 1 January 1956, runs south-east from Ulaanbaatar towards the Chinese border, and its stations trace the transition. About 250 km out of the capital it reaches Choir, capital of Govisümber Province, at 1,269 m. The town sits in the Choir Depression, a lowland strip about 150 km long and 10 to 20 km wide, some 500 m below the surrounding upland. Its climate is still classed as semi-arid steppe rather than desert, with most rain falling in summer and very dry winters.
Choir was a Soviet military base until 1989, and the longest runway in Mongolia, now abandoned, lies 25 km to the north. In the open country around it, grass still grows more or less freely; geographers note that streams are frequent for about 320 km south of Ulaanbaatar before the land dries out.
Sainshand and the Eastern Gobi Desert Steppe
South of Choir the railway enters the Eastern Gobi desert steppe, the easternmost of the Gobi's ecoregions, covering 281,800 km² from the Inner Mongolian Plateau north into Mongolia. Its surface is broad, flat depressions with floors mostly 900 to 1,000 m above sea level, separated by groups of flat-topped hills only 150 to 180 m high, with old rock breaking through as crags. Small lakes fill some hollows, usually salty or brackish. The plants are hardy and low: wormwood, saxaul, Caragana, Ephedra, saltwort and the taana wild onion, which herders say gives camel's milk airag its proper hazelnut-like taste.
The main stop here is Sainshand, capital of Dornogovi Province, with 25,450 people at the 2021 census. It has a true cold desert climate (Köppen BWk), with long, very dry, very cold winters and short, hot summers. A range of hills splits the town into northern and southern parts, and its fifth district is the oil settlement of Züünbayan, 46 km to the south. Sainshand also hosts the Gobi Solar Power Plant and the Sainshand Wind Farm, and its sights include Khamar Monastery and a museum dedicated to Danzanravjaa, the 19th-century Buddhist monk and writer.
Zamyn-Üüd and Erenhot: The Border Gate at 966 Metres
The railway leaves Mongolia at Zamyn-Üüd, whose name means "road's gate". The town stands on the old trade route between Beijing and Urga, as Ulaanbaatar was once called, and it is the most important border crossing between the two countries, with more than 950,000 crossings counted in 2004. A paved road now runs alongside the railway: the 432 km highway from Choir via Sainshand to Zamyn-Üüd, begun in 2007, was finished in 2013. Across the line in China, trains change from the 1,520 mm Russian gauge to the 1,435 mm standard gauge.
The Chinese town opposite is Erenhot, in Inner Mongolia's Xilingol League, at 966 m. It had 74,197 inhabitants in 2010 and grew from about 8,000 people after it opened to international trade in 1992. Erenhot shows the eastern Gobi's climate clearly: just 135 mm of precipitation a year, more than two-thirds of it from June to August, 3,232 hours of sunshine, and monthly mean temperatures from −17.8 °C in January to 24.0 °C in July. Mongolian coal, minerals, meat, cashmere and wool go south through it; Chinese machinery and consumer goods come north.
West to Dalanzadgad and the Gurvan Saikhan Mountains
To reach the high southern Gobi, travellers head south-west to Dalanzadgad, capital of Ömnögovi Province, 540 km south of Ulaanbaatar and reached by paved road or by air. Its name means "seventy springs". The city stands at 1,470 m and had 32,674 people in 2024. There is no direct road from here across the desert to China.
Dalanzadgad is the gateway to Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park, created in 1993 and enlarged in 2000 to nearly 27,000 km², the largest national park in Mongolia. It stretches 380 km from east to west and 80 km from north to south, and is named after the Gurvan Saikhan, "Three Beauties", a range of three sub-ranges rising to about 2,600 m. Their higher slopes carry steppe and shelter argali sheep, Siberian ibex, snow leopards and lammergeiers.
The best-known valley is Yolyn Am, the "Lammergeier Valley", a deep, narrow gorge in the Eastern Beauty sub-range linked to Dalanzadgad by paved road. Despite the desert around it, it holds an ice field several metres thick by the end of winter and several kilometres long. It once lasted all year, but it now tends to disappear by September.
East of Dalanzadgad, about 235 km away in Khanbogd district and 80 km north of the Chinese border, is Oyu Tolgoi, "Turquoise Hill", a copper and gold deposit discovered in 2001, when Canada's Ivanhoe Mines estimated its resource. It shipped its first copper on 9 July 2013. Rio Tinto's subsidiary Turquoise Hill Resources owns 66 percent and the Mongolian government 34 percent, and it is the largest financial undertaking in Mongolia's history.
Bayanzag and Khongoryn Els: Dinosaur Eggs and Singing Sands
Also in Ömnögovi Province lies Bayanzag, "rich in saxaul", which the American palaeontologist Roy Chapman Andrews named the Flaming Cliffs for the red and orange sandstone that glows at sunset. His Central Asiatic Expeditions of 1922 to 1928 found the first known dinosaur eggs here on 13 July 1923. They were first thought to belong to Protoceratops, but in 1995 were shown to be eggs of the theropod Oviraptor. The cliffs expose the Djadochta Formation, which has also yielded Velociraptor, Protoceratops, Oviraptor and early mammals. Removing fossils without a permit is illegal.
Further west, about 180 km from Dalanzadgad, the Gobi finally becomes the sand sea of popular imagination. Khongoryn Els, also called Duut Mankhan or the "Singing Sands", covers more than 965 km² inside the national park. The dunes run for about 100 km at the foot of the mountains, 6 to 12 km wide, rising to around 80 m, with some reports of crests far higher. When sand slides down their faces they boom, a sound often compared to an aircraft. Along their northern edge a small river, the Khongoryn Gol, fed by underground flow from the mountains, keeps green pastures for herders' camels and horses.
Great Gobi A: Wild Camels and the Last Gobi Bears
Much further west, the desert grows drier still. In the far south-west of Mongolia, along the Chinese border, lies Great Gobi A Strictly Protected Area, about 46,369 km² of desert and desert steppe, which with Great Gobi B to the west makes up a protected unit of 53,000 km². Rainfall averages about 100 mm a year, and the reserve's headquarters are at Bayantooroi, about 20 km to the north.
This is one of the last refuges of the wild Bactrian camel, a separate species from the domestic camel, with only around 950 left in the wild. Most live in China's Lop Nur reserve; estimates for Great Gobi A range from about 350 to 1,950. The Zakhyn Us breeding centre was set up in 2004 with 12 wild camels caught by herders. The reserve is also home to the Gobi bear, or mazaalai, a critically endangered brown bear subspecies. Hunting it has been banned since 1959; a genetic study published in 2021 estimated just 31 bears, confined to about 23,600 km² near water sources.
Across the Border: The Ejin River, Juyan Lake and the Alashan Gobi
South of the border the Gobi continues into China's Alxa League. Here the Ejin River, known upstream as the Hei He, or Black River, carries mountain water deep into the desert. It flows about 630 km from the Qilian Mountains north into Juyan Lake, building one of the largest inland deltas in the world, with a basin of about 78,600 km². Near its lower end stands the deserted Tangut city of Khara-Khoto; legend says it was abandoned after Ming forces diverted the river in 1372.
The river's end shows how fragile the desert's water is. Juyan once meant two lakes. The western one, Gashuun Nuur, covered 267 km² in 1958 and dried up completely in 1961; the eastern lake dried in 1992, reappeared in 2005 and covered 38 km² in August 2012. To the south-east lies the Badain Jaran Desert, 49,000 km² on a plateau around 1,200 m, whose name means "mysterious lakes" after the more than 100 spring-fed lakes between its dunes. The tallest of those dunes stands about 500 m above its base, the highest in Asia.
The southern edge is also where the Gobi is growing. Desertification turns about 3,600 km² of grassland in China into desert each year, driven mainly by overgrazing, deforestation and the depletion of water resources, as well as climate change. China's Three-North Shelter Forest Program, begun in 1978 and planned to run until 2050, plants fast-growing trees across 551 counties to hold it back. To place the Gobi in context, read our guides to the Mongolian Plateau, the cold desert climate, or see how it ranks among the largest deserts in the world.