Kazakhstan
The world's largest landlocked country, a steppe nation astride two continents
Kazakhstan sprawls across the heart of Eurasia, the ninth-largest country on Earth and by far the largest with no coastline on the open ocean. Its identity was forged on the steppe, the endless rolling grassland where Turkic and Mongol horsemen once ranged and where felt yurts still rise each summer. Oil and uranium have made it the economic anchor of Central Asia, yet the romance of the place lies in its scale, a single nation stretching from the Caspian shore to the snow peaks of the Tian Shan, with Astana, a futuristic capital, conjured almost overnight on the bare plain.
The terrain runs from the Caspian Depression, which dips below sea level, eastward across the vast Kazakh Steppe to the glaciated ridges of the Tian Shan and Altai along the Chinese and Kyrgyz borders. The climate is sharply continental, baking in summer and bitter in winter, with little rain across the central semi-desert. The Aral Sea, once the world's fourth-largest lake, shrank catastrophically after Soviet irrigation schemes diverted its rivers. Khan Tengri, a marble pyramid on the southeastern frontier, is the country's highest named peak, and the Caspian holds enormous offshore oil reserves.
Nomadic Kazakh khanates coalesced in the fifteenth century before the Russian Empire absorbed the region in the nineteenth. Soviet rule brought forced collectivization, devastating famine, the Virgin Lands grain campaign, and the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site and Baikonur cosmodrome. Independence came in 1991, and the country has since balanced its enormous resource wealth against the legacy of Soviet-era environmental damage. A multi-ethnic society of Kazakhs and Russians, it leans on Russia and China alike while cultivating a distinct national revival rooted in the language, music, and horse culture of the steppe.