A settlement of unbounded frontiers

Remote crossroads

The village is positioned in a liminal space where China ends and Kazakhstan begins, the Siberian taiga collides with the Central Asian steppe, and a nomadic past is migrating toward a settled present.

Multiple ethnicities form a collective identity. Yet the local Tuva people wander across various frontiers of selfhood, preserving a language, conventions and heritage that set them apart from other Mongolians in China and Tuvans in Russia.

Baihaba is one of only three settlements in China inhabited by this ethnic Mongolian subgroup, whose population numbers around 2,500 in the country.

They speak a Turkic dialect closely related to that of Russian Tuvans, but their culture is uniquely their own, with local lore claiming they're the descendants of Genghis Khan's secret treasure guard.

The categorizations among fauna are similarly permeable, including delineations between domesticated and wild.

Semi-feral dogs snooze in human homes at night and spend their days roaming freely. Cows rove unhindered, causing traffic jams and stealing nibbles from unattended garbage trucks. Locals remind visitors to lock their doors, lest these bovines wander into their rooms.

It's another testimony to the people's symbiotic relationship with animals in a locale where livestock outnumber people five to one.

Baihaba is home to 4,875 grazing mammals, and a human population of 575 ethnic Kazaks, 390 Tuvans, seven Han and one Hui, according to the official 2023 tally.

Baihaba's people have long lived in isolation in this tract of valleys and foothills horseshoed on three sides by the Altay Mountains.

The settlement's location at 48 degrees north and 87 degrees east has earned it the title of China's First Northwestern Village. Just a stone's throw from the border, a large rock engraved with this designation draws visitors from around the world, who line up to snap selfies in front of this marker at the edge of China.

Since Kazakhstan begins where the village ends, visitors must obtain border passes to enter Baihaba.

The boundary is etched by the cutting waters of the Haba River, the second-largest tributary of the Irtysh — China's only river that empties into the Arctic Ocean.