Every Country's Version of 'Timbuktu'

Outer Mongolia If an event is said to occur in Outer Mongolia, it quite often means it happens somewhere obscure and hard to find. If a person is “sent to Outer Mongolia“, it means they are effectively relieved of all real power and influence and given a symbolically important but practically meaningless post. The term refers to the state of Mongolia (in east Asia), a sparsely populated and geopolitically insignificant country in-between China and Russia. It had a revolution in the early 1920s and effectively became a Soviet satellite state, while never actually being incorporated into the USSR (a model of the later policy in eastern Europe). Although officially designated “Mongolia“, it is sometimes called Outer Mongolia because a region known as Inner Mongolia is part of the state of China.