She has since studied a master’s degree in Luxembourg, found work as a financial consultant, and made Mongolia’s capital city Ulaanbaatar her family home after moving away from her nomadic roots.
For millennia, Mongolians have lived off the land with their livestock in round ger dwellings that they pack up and move with the seasons.
A quarter of Mongolia’s 3.4 million people still lead nomadic lives, according to the World Bank, but hundreds of thousands have moved over the past two decades into Ulaanbaatar, now home to half the population.
And it is women like Khulan, who won a government scholarship for her master’s and is now 36, who have led the transition.
Speaking to AFP in the Ulaanbaatar apartment where she lives with her husband and their seven-year-old son, Khulan said many others raised on the steppe like her have rejected a life of physical labour and fighting the elements.
“They choose to live differently in the city,” she said, where they are offered greater access to modern amenities, education and welfare.
Khorol Enkhtuya, 42, a civil servant specialising in welfare, was also among them.
She was raised in Bayan-Unjuul south of Ulaanbaatar by parents who hoped she would follow in their footsteps as herders.
“I read by candlelight,” she told AFP at a cafe near Ulaanbaatar’s Government Palace.
“I read folk stories. It was the only book I had, but half of it was torn,” she said.
“I kept reading the same story again and again — my mum thought: ‘She needs to pursue education.'”
Her parents sent her 150 kilometres (93 miles) from home so she could attend secondary school.
Life in the city was not easy, Enkhtuya said, and during her university years she cooked, cleaned, and babysat for families to pay rent while studying at night.
Still, she felt lucky, as education was an opportunity that many older Mongolian women simply did not have.
Around 50 kilometres from the capital, Khulan’s mother, Sanduijav Altakhuyag, 60, told AFP she had missed out during the tumult of Mongolia’s transition to democracy.
“I want my kids to achieve what I didn’t,” she said.
Khulan’s parents have over the years moved closer to the capital city, though they still live as herders.
Khulan tries to visit them as often as she can, dutifully helping her mother prepare lunch in the ger as her son, raised in the city, scampers through lush, green fields.
Not everyone has the opportunity to balance city and rural life in this way, she told AFP.
