Landlocked Navies, Part 3: Mongolia

Note: I’m away on vacation biking around Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido with family. The posts in this series are autoposted. Hope you enjoy.

In the 13th century, Mongolia had the largest and most powerful navy in the world. Today, the Mongolian Navy has three boats, two guns, one engine, and seven sailors (only one of whom can swim).

In the 1980’s, a Mongolian university student known only as Ganbaatar won a scholarship to study fish farming in the Soviet Union. But the state functionary filling out his application put down the course code as 1012, instead of 1013, a bureaucratic error that detoured him from fish farming to deep-sea fishing. (Efforts by Ganbaatar to change this fell on deaf ears.) Upon graduation, he was sent to work with the seven-man Mongolian Navy, which patrolled the nation’s largest lake, Lake Hovsgol.

This “navy” was built for one purpose: to transport Soviet oil across a huge freshwater lake. The lone ship, a tug boat, had been hauled in parts across the steppes, assembled on a beach and launched in 1938. Mongolia’s merchant navy is now a rusting old ship looking for work, and technically no longer the Mongolian Navy any more, given that it was semi-privatized in 1997. However, it remains the unquestioned ruler of Lake Hovsgol.

Ganbaatar went on to write Mongolia’s new maritime law, which took effect in 1999. And recently, Mongolia has entered the ship registration business, dominated by Panama, Liberia, and the Bahamas. I saw one such example of this registration in Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan about one year ago, and posted here.