Baasanjav Terbish has produced a much-needed overview and thorough analysis of the most secret chapter in the long history of the Mongols from the empire of Genghis Khan through the eras of Buddhism and Socialism into the twenty-first century of globalization ... Sex in the Land of Genghis Khan is an excellent anthropological and historic work of tremendous importance that only a Mongolian scholar could produce. The book is well written, interesting, and above all, very important.

Jack Weatherford, Author of The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

In his newest book, Baasanjav Terbish offers an excellent survey of sexual issues throughout Mongol history. He covers a variety of subjects, including the roles and status of women in society, homosexuality, prostitution, sexual repression, and the views of Buddhism, Shamanism, and Islam toward sex. The work will inspire others to pursue research on additional details of such often neglected topics.

Morris Rossabi, author of Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times

As mirrors of social life, Baasanjav Terbish argues, ideas of sexuality and sexual practices continually shift through time. Embedded within religious, political, and gender ideologies, sexuality provides us with a unique vantage point from which to understand a given society. Tracing Mongolian sexual practices through a vast compendium of material ranging from the 13th century to the present, this book fills an important gap in both Mongolian studies and sexuality studies. In challenging contemporary ideologies of ethnicity and cultural purity, Sex in the Land of Genghis Khan also makes a crucial contribution to modern imaginaries of national belonging.

Franck Billé, UC Berkeley

Baasanjav Terbish shatters essentialist notions of what is ‘traditional’ regarding the practices, values, and identities surrounding sex among Mongolians. This provocative book chronicles the institutions and ideologies that have shaped sex and sexuality in Mongolia since the time of Genghis Khan, revealing a dynamic history seldom explored by academics. Writing with humor and insight and tackling difficult subjects with refreshing candor and sensitivity, Terbish has opened up fascinating avenues of research about intimate life in Mongolia’s past, present, and future.

Lauren Bonilla, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This is the first sustained look at Mongol and Mongolian sexuality through history: a short, accessible but serious book, with a strong throughline and a sense of historical movement-in directions people might not expect ... It reminds us that people in the past lived more differently than we imagine when left to ourselves. History always complicates our narratives. History gives options.

Asian Review Of Books

The results in this book … are utterly fascinating, offering a compelling perspective on the political economy of the region made famous by Genghis Khan.

The Financial Times