The Gobi (Mongolian: Говь, Govi, "semidesert"; Chinese: 戈壁; pinyin: Gēbì) is a large desert region in Asia. It covers parts of northern and northwestern China, and of southern Mongolia. The desert basins of the Gobi are bounded by the Altai Mountains and the grasslands and steppes of Mongolia on the north, by the Hexi Corridor and Tibetan Plateau to the southwest, and by the North China Plain to the southeast. The Gobi is most notable in history as part of the great Mongol Empire, and as the location of several important cities along the Silk Road.

The Gobi is made up of several distinct ecological and geographic regions based on variations in climate and topography. One is the Eastern Gobi desert steppe Ecoregion, a Palearctic ecoregion in the Deserts and xeric shrublands Biome, home to the Bactrian camel and various other animals.. It is a rain shadow desert formed by the Himalaya range blocking rain-carrying clouds from reaching the Gobi from the Indian Ocean.

The Gobi measures over 1,610 km (1,000 mi) from southwest to northeast and 800 km (500 mi) from north to south. The desert is widest in the west, along the line joining the Lake Bosten and the Lop Nor (87°-89° east). It occupies an arc of land 1,295,000 km² (500,002 sq mi) in area as of 2007, making it the fifth largest in the world^{[clarification needed]} and Asia's largest. Much of the Gobi is not sandy but is covered with bare rock.

Sven Anders Hedin KNO1kl RVO (19 February 1865 – 26 November 1952) was a Swedish geographer, topographer, explorer, photographer, and travel writer, as well as an illustrator of his own works. During four expeditions to Central Asia he discovered the Transhimalaya (once named the Hedin Range in his honor) and the sources of the Brahmaputra, Indus and Sutlej Rivers, Lake Lop Nur, and the remains of cities, grave sites and the Great Wall of China in the deserts of the Tarim Basin. In his book "Från Pol till Pol", Heidin describes a journey through Asia and Europe between from the late 1880s to the early 1900s. While traveling Hedin visited Constantinopole (Istanbul), oil-rich Azerbaijan in times of Nobel Brothers, Teheran, Mesopotamia (Iraq), lands of Kyrgyz people, India, China, Asiatic Russia and Japan. The posthumous publication of his Central Asia atlas marked the conclusion of his life’s work.

At 15 years of age, Sven Hedin witnessed the triumphal return of the Arctic explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld after his first navigation of the Northern Sea Route. From that moment on, young Sven aspired to become an explorer. His studies under the German geographer and China expert Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen awakened a love of Germany in Sven and strengthened his resolve to undertake expeditions to Central Asia in order to explore the last uncharted areas of Asia. After obtaining a doctorate, learning several languages and dialects, and undertaking two trips through Persia, he ignored the advice of Ferdinand von Richthofen to continue his geographic studies in order to acquaint himself with geographical research methodology; the result was that Hedin had to leave the evaluation of his expedition results later to other scientists.