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of the atrocities which took place in 1937/38. Recently, money has
been donated to reconstruct the monastery, and first steps towards
that direction are the erection of a small museum on its site with
many photographs of the 1920s showing the former dimensions of the
monastery complex.
Another famous monastery worth visiting is Amarbayasgalang, and en
route between Xujirt and Xar Xorin you can find the somewhat smaller
Baruun Xuree (Western Monastery).
The travel literature on Mongolia offers more in-depth information.
6. Inner Mongolia - Tourism
6.1. How to travel to Inner Mongolia?
Inner Mongolia can be reached by train and by aircraft. The
Transmongolian Railway which leads from Beijing via Ulaanbaatar to
Ulan Ude crosses the Mongolian-Chinese border at Erenhot
(Erlian[haote]) / China and Zamyn Üüd / Mongolia. North of Datong it
connects to the Chinese Railway, Inner Mongolian branch leading to
Baotou and eventually to Ningxia and Gansu which implies that one can
also travel to Inner Mongolia when coming from Lanzhou and Yinchuan.
It takes about 10 hours to travel from Beijing to Huhhot and the night
train which leaves Beijing in the evening is very convenient as one
arrives at Huhhot early in the next morning. Trains go on a regular
basis (usually every day, sometimes every second day depending on the
line) and are fairly reliable. Prices are reliable, too, but the
foreign traveller is forced to pay about twice as much as the Chinese
citizen. Due to frequent depreciation of the Chinese Yuan no fixed
number can be given here but a one-way trip (second class sleeper)
from Beijing to Huhhot should be around USD 40.--.
Flights between Huhhot and Beijing go several times a week and last
less than one hour. The ticket prices are not very much higher than
those of the railway (considering prices for foreigners). Other
destinations in Inner Mongolia are also served from Beijing. Up-to-
date information on schedules should be available at travel agencies
dealing China Airlines tickets.
6.2. What kind of accommodation is available in Inner Mongolia?
The traveller's situation is governed by more rules here than in
Mongolia. Basically, when staying in the cities (like Huhhot etc.) the
traveller has no choice but to stay in huge hotels. In the countryside
the situation is similar to that in Mongolia but is more difficult to
get to the countryside.
6.3. What kind of transport is available in Inner Mongolia?
In addition to railway (from and to Beijing, Huhhot, Baotou, Hailar
etc.) there are flights between regional centres and long-distance
busses within the regions. For local excursions you can also rent cars
with drivers.
6.4. Which season is recommended for travelling?
See the answer about Mongolia above. Generally speaking, travelling is
difficult in winter. The grasslands show their beauty only in summer,
and in winter there is ``nothing to see'' in the conventional sense.
On the other hand, since there is ``nothing to see'' in winter, winter
is a good time to go there if you want to see temples, monasteries
etc., because at that time you most certainly do not have to compete
with other tourists for resources like accommodation, transport e.a.
In addition, the places you're interested in will most probably be
fairly empty.
6.5. What are the points of sightseeing, museums etc.?
Inner Mongolia deserves a better coverage in literature and in this
FAQ than it finds at present. A few points of interest may be
mentioned here (indicating that this is a *very* preliminary list).
The Inner Mongolia Museum in Huhhot has an enormous collection of
archaeological findings from the times of the Xiong Nu on. The gold
crowns on display there are virtually identical in design with the
ones unearthed in Japan and dated to Japan's Kofun period. These
findings contain some of the strongest hints that early Japan (before
the nation state emerged) may have been part of a unified culture
stretching from Central Asia over Korea to Japan.
Not so many temples and monasteries survived in Huhhot. One of the
most intering ones is the ``Five Pagoda Temple'' (tabun suburGan sumu
- wu ta si) the walls of which are covered with thousands of Buddha
sculptures. Its most fascinating object is a stellar map cut in stone
(more than two meters in diameter) which is the eldest map with
Mongolian zodiacal names in the world. The stone carving is protected
by thick layers of glass which make it practically impossible to take
pictures but the site is well worth the visit.
Of the two main temples (``Big'' and ``Small'' temple: yeke zuu, baG-a
zuu; da zhao, xiao zhao) only the big one remains as the small one was
replaced by a school during the 1960s. The quarter of town where
these temples are located is pittoresque and offers an insight into
Chinese life (Huhhot by overwhelming majority is a city with Han-
Chinese population) as it might have been `before Revolution', i.e.
before 1949. The streets and lanes are so narrow that no automobile
can pass, and rare enough for a Chinese city, much of the old
architecture is preserved. Huhhot also has a mosque for its Hui
nationality.
7. Mongolia - Computing Issues
7.1. Is there some kind of ``Mongolian ASCII'' or commonly
acknowledged encoding standard for Mongolian language data
processing?
Unlike the American ASCII code, the Chinese GuoBiao code or the
Japanese JIS code there is not yet a national code system for the
encoding of Mongolian writing be it encoded in its Classical or
Cyrillic form. As a consequence, no international standard
organization (like ISO) could accept a national standard and turn it
into an international one.
The problems we find in this field are of a complex nature and
frequently have strong mutual dependencies.
Let's look at Cyrillic encoding first. It is not far-fetched to
suggest using an existing Cyrillic encoding scheme for encoding
Mongolian but not even such a simple idea is without its traps. There
is more than one Cyrillic encoding, and some encodings are incomplete:
they do not include the Cyrillic yo or ë. In addition, these tables
(or code pages) usually have no space to accommodate the additional
Mongolian vowel symbols ü which must then be placed somewhere outside
the natural order of the alphabet. Several modified code pages of this
type exist; implementations available are mentioned below.
With Classical writing, the situation is even more complicated. For a
long time in history, there has not been one commonly acknowledged
Classical Mongolian alphabet (or cagaan tolgoï); differences can be
observed in the number of letters, the sorting order and the treatment
of ambiguous letters which have more than one reading for a given
shape, like t/d. The situation is further complicated by the fact that
one given letter may assume numerous different shapes depending on its
position within the word. The designer of an encoding scheme has to
decide whether only canonical letters (the ones under which one would
try to find a word in a dictionary) are to be included or whether all
shape variants should be included as well.
The next problem arises when thinking of computer technology. The
eight bit (one byte) code space of commonly used systems cannot hold
more than 256 characters of which 128 have been defined already. If
both Cyrillic and Classical writing are to be enclosed in one common
code space, it is only possible at the cost of sharing common letter
shapes between Latin and Cyrillic characters. There is no other choice
if one wants to avoid the switching of code pages in one document.
Another problem intimately related to writing is the field of
transcriptions and transliterations. The layout of rules for
transliterating Classical or Cyrillic Mongolian has many consequences
in the field of data exchange, automatic text processing, the building
of library catalogues, etc. Some popular systems (e.g. the so-called
Petersburg transliteration) use characters which are not readily
available on today's computers, and the ones working with reduced
character sets are sometimes not popular.
Only in recent years (more or less starting with the UNESCO conference
on the Computerization of Mongolian script in Ulaanbaatar in August
1992) there has been a genuine international effort to solve these
problems and to come up with an encoding scheme that will be accepted
world-wide. The Mongolian National Institute for Standardization and
Metrology (MNISM), the Chinese National Standard Bureau, other
standard bodies of other countries, ISO and UNICODE all have held
regular meetings during the last years in order to define a standard.
So far, no final agreement exists, and there is no software package
which could serve as a demonstrator for this future standard. All
available software either defines its own code page or relies on ASCII
representations of Mongolian which are then converted into Mongolian
writing.
7.2. Are there computer programs for processing Mongolian language
documents?
Yes, there are.
Nota Bene: While the editor is happy to offer this information it must
be mentioned as a caveat that in most cases the editor could neither
verify the sources of these programs nor did he have a chance to
review them. In addition, not all of the programs are direct
competitors: some of them provide `pure' front-ends for printing
systems, other focus on data models which make them useful for text
processing, etc. The available programs can be roughly classified as
follows:
· Layout software for Classical Mongolian produced at Inner Mongolia
University for MSDOS and UNIX platforms. Maybe this is the most
complete package one can dream of since it supports everything from
different writing styles (Ulaanbaatar vs. Inner Mongol typeface) to
different alphabets (including Oirat, Phags-ba etc.) Availability:
Yes, but with a high price tag in the four-digit USD range.
· Windows Software by American and German producers. These are
usually only font sets which are sold in combination with some
exotic text processing software. Does not offer full support for
correct conversion of text data, etc.
· The ``Sudar'' package of the National University of Mongolia was
written in 1991/2 by M. Erdenechimeg. This package runs on a DOS
platform, can do both Classical and Modern Mongolian and has import
utilities for a number of encodings. The author is developing a new
package at the moment, the support for improvements of ``Sudar''
supposedly being discontinued.
· ``Cyrillic only'' products for enhancing MSDOS platforms are
available at little or no cost in Mongolia. These include printer
drivers, screen fonts and keyboard mappers for the extended
Cyrillic alphabet. Around three or four different encodings are
known under the following program names: NCC, MOSLAST, SUNCHIR and
MONKEGA. No commercial code converters available, no support for
Classical Mongolian.
· Research-type programs for MacIntosh machines, produced by the
Université de Nanterre but never made publicly available.
· One classical font is offered by Ecological Linguistics for Mac
systems.
· A commercial font package is available for extended Cyrillic by
Linguist's Software for both the Mac and PC worlds.
· One apparently free Cyrillic font package for Mongolian is
available from www.magicnet.mn, it is intended for Windows3xx
users. Numerous reports were received that the system, once
automatically installed (there is no manual installation process)
replaces system fonts and keyboard drivers in an irreversible
manner so it is difficult to use this font on an occasional basis.
· Daniel Kai's XenoType Technologies' Inner and Outer Mongolian
TrueType (and Postscript) fonts for the Mac (as well as Soyombo,
Phagspa) in the computer systems for Classical Mongolian. This
system gets good reviews.
· MBE -- Mongol Bichig Editor. Written in Taiwan and released in
1995, this editor for MSDOS system provides true vertical display
and editing as well as 48-pixel and 96-pixel bitmap fonts for nice
printing results. The awkward editing behaviour and the feature
that everything between whitespace is regarded as one input and
editing unit (one cannot delete a single letter, only a complete
word!) make it a bit difficult to use. For documents in the
pageno<10 range, like short letters etc. the system provides a
simple interim solution until really powerful systems emerge.
· MLS - Mongolian Language Support. Originally developed for IBM
compatible PCs, now extended to the Unix world. Availability:
free. See the MLS software section of Infosystem Mongolei. MLS is a
MSDOS enhancement featuring support for both Classical and Cyrillic
Mongolian. It offers conversion modules, a viewer for text with
vertical lines and allows the continued use of (text mode)
applications like dBASE, spreadsheets and text processing packages.
Windows support is currently under development. Besides the MLS
package itself there is the above-mentioned Mongolian text viewer
(MVIEW) with on-line conversion from transliteration to Mongol
script and a converter from Mongol text to graphics (MLS2PCX) which
generates graphics files out of Mongolian language texts. The free
packages do not yet contain printer support which is overly due and
can be expected soon (said the author of MLS a long while ago).
It should be mentioned that the focus of MLS lies in processing
Mongolian language data and providing Internet support rather than
creating beautiful documents.
Technology advances rapidly, and the original devices conceived for
printing MLS documents were superseded soon due to their numerous
limitations. The MLS author then developed a generic MLS printing
support via LaTeX, and in early summer 1998 a Windows software for
printing Mongolian appeared, too, which will soon offer MLS support
(see next two items).
· MonTeX -- Mongolian for LaTeX2e. Donald Knuth's TeX is certainly
the finest document processor available in the digital universe. It
enjoys outstanding reputation in university circles and beyond.
Since the original MLS package never provided meaningful printer
support, the task of creating hard copy documents was relegated to
TeX/LaTeX. MonTeX can typeset portions or complete texts of
Cyrillic Mongolian in an acceptable manner. The package allows the
use of virtually all popular codepage layouts, thus typesetting
one's texts in the favourite environment should not pose too much
of a problem. MonTeX is available from MLS or from the CTAN servers
(Comprehensive TeX Archive Network).
· QAGUCIN -- a Mongol Bicig editor for Windows95 and Windows3.xx with
an editing window for transliterated Mongolian and an output window
for Classical script. The QAGUCIN Download page offers this package
for free. QAGUCIN is still in an early development stage but looks
very promising. The author of QAGUCIN, Michael Warmuth, is also
working on including MLS support.
8. Mongolia - Suggested Readings
8.1. Which book do you recommend as a start?
A dedicated document by Christopher Kaplonski -- SROM - Suggested
Readings on Mongolia -- is available at Infosystem Mongolei. This
document is occasionally updated and gets posted to the USENET
newsgroup soc.culture.mongolian. A second document (SROMDIC --
Suggested Readings on Mongolia -- Dictionaries) by Christopher
Kaplonski and Oliver Corff at the same location reveals information
about commonly used dictionaries.
--
Dr. Oliver Corff e-mail: corff@zedat.fu-berlin.de
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