It is not just that Mongolia is a treasure-chest of geological wealth.
But look in a Lonely Planet guidebook to Asia and the country can be found listed after Mongolia, not Brunei.
But Mongolia is concerned it will not receive royalties any time soon because development costs have increased.
Wind power is also being experimented with in a small way for power generation in northern and western China, where it could supply electricity to rural villages in windswept and increasingly arid Inner Mongolia and Gansu Province that are still not on the grid.
Ambitious plans are being aired to build new railways not just to nearby China, but into Russia or eastern Mongolia as well, whence there would be access to the markets of South Korea and Japan.
ECONOMIST: A tug of war between commercial logic and popular sentiment
China has enough capacity to process not just its own cashmere production, but also the whole of Mongolia's.
Given Mongolia's tradition of nomadic herding, it is not difficult for these children to be passed from one relation to another, until the parents have lost touch with them.
ECONOMIST: The street children are the symptom of a bigger problem
Yet even though the mine has not yet started producing, Mr McRae says its very construction has already benefited Mongolia's economy.
In 2006-09 the region's GDP (excluding Inner Mongolia, which extends into the north-east, but is not part of its industrial heartland) grew faster than that of the country's other three main economic regions, in the east, centre and west.
Chen Ningning built an early fortune in the steel business but now most of her fortune lies in publicly traded Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth Group, where she is an investor (not an executive).
FORBES: How China's Self-Made Women Billionaires Earned Their Fortunes
应用推荐