Mongolia, the land of the Mongols, covers a vast extent of territory. It comprises the wide and in parts waterless plateau that divides the warm, fertile lowlands of China on the south from the cold Siberian depression on the north; the intervening distance being about 1,000 miles. The actual area of the plateau is 1,300,000 square miles, three times that of Manchuria (including the maritime province alienated to Russia), which itself, as we pointed out in the preceding chapter, exceeds that of France and Germany combined. But area alone is no test of value, and while Manchuria, as we have shown, is one of the richest countries in the world, Mongolia is one of the poorest. This natural poverty is due, always excepting the western desert portion, not so much to poorness of soil as to unfavourable location; the plateau is walled in by mountains which intercept the bulk of the moisture in the winds which sweep over its highlands, rendering these hot and dry in summer; while the elevation renders them bitterly cold in winter, so that agriculture can only be attempted in a few favoured spots, thereby confining its inhabitants to a pastoral life and so making of the Mongols a nomad race as much by necessity as by predilection.