When I was in Mongolia back in 1988, I talked to some Russian men who described Mongolian prisons to me. They said if you committed a crime here, they would lock you up within Mongolia and, if you were non-Mongolian, you would die there quite soon. The said that the food people got in prison was all leftovers from normal food, with animals' hair and tails in it. Now the stomach of Mongolians has adopted to this type of food and isolates the hair turns it into a solid hair ball which simply passes through their digestive system. Other people did not have this capability and the hair in intestines, causing inflammation and leading to horrible pains and eventually death.

At the time this story made a deep impression on me but I have not been able to find anyone who would have either corroborated or refuted it. Since then the Soviet empire has fallen apart and Mongolia is, at least nominally, a free country. I expect that not too many foreigners are in Mongolian prisons. And there is of course the question of other Mongolian citizens who are ethnically non-Mongolians. There must have been a few Russians left behind. I also know that there are Chinese who were born and raised there. I wonder if their stomachs are capable of the same feat as those of the Mongolians. by Stephen Bekes, 2005

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