Mongolia: One Real, One Imagined

The Mongolian flag is a vertical triband with red on the outers and blue on the inner, the blue representing the never-ending sky and the red representing the harsh landscape surrounding the country. On the hoist side is what's known as the Soyombo Symbol. The Soyombo on a thing will verify that that something is Mongolian, or one of the Russian republics or Chinese provinces bordering Mongolia.

That symbol is a special character from the Soyombo script, which is the alphabet the Mongolian language uses, although Cyrillic is also acceptable. Looking closely at the Soyombo, one can see the representaions of fire, the sun, the moon, then the earth and the yin-yang as well. The "earth" is a little more figurative than some of the others.

While playing on the internet, I found the following flag, a fictional representation of Mongolia:

You can see it's pretty close, but the colors are off. I believe it was from an episode of Futurama, of all things. At least they got the Soyombo correct.

The Soyombo adorned many of the Mongolian flags dating back to the late 1800s and early 1900s in one form or another.

From 1911:

And from 1924:

I've always had a romantic fascination with Mongolia and Mongolians...maybe because of Gehngis Kahn and the hordes and their effect on both the Western and Eastern worlds...but, inside me, it still holds strong.