The massive country the same size as Europe that’s one of the world’s most empty

For many, Kazakhstan is famous for its portrayal in Sascha Baron Cohen’s 2006 film Borat where a hapless Kazakh documentary maker travels to the US in search of Pamela Anderson.

The film was funny, in a slapstick kind of way, but left viewers with a simplified and let’s be honest, negative view of the ninth largest country on earth.

Angelina Lee is half-Kazakh and lives in Surrey. For her, the satirical nature of the film was widely understood and in fact, benefitted the country.

She said: “The film was permitted to be shown in cinemas because for a country like that, it is a pretty big step and to be fair, it mostly mocks Americans rather than Kazakhs.”

But despite its size, the country is one of the most sparsely populated in the world. To travel across the country would be the equivalent of travelling from Portugal to Poland, yet the country boasts a population of only 20 million people. Uzbekistan – a neighbouring country one-sixth of its size – has twice as many people. So why is this?

In part, Kazakhstan’s size works against it. Much of the country is thousands of kilometres away from the nearest ocean and with few reliable water sources in the central land, the areas become uninhabitable.

Additionally, Kazakhstan’s climate is unlike very few places on Earth, with sunny, sandy beaches in the southwest and freezing mountains in the north, with hot desert and semi-arad steppe in-between. These conditions mean that large swathes of areas are unsuitable for the largely nomadic populations that make up the country.

But the nation has a lot going for it, in a way that is often misrepresented or overlooked by many in the west. Ms Lee describes a land of beauty unlike anywhere else on the planet

She said: “You will be hard done by to find anywhere on earth that are that diverse and untouched.

“Where I’m from you have beautiful, warm summers but then you travel east, and you have mountains, grasslands, and ski resorts.”

Kazakhstan is shaped by its history, where its importance to the Silk Road is as crucial to its national identity as the decades spent under Soviet control.

World events have seen the country welcome immigrants at various times over the last 200 years, meaning that it is ethnically diverse in a way many have become to understand the United States to be.

Ms Lee said: “It is so multicultural in a way that I don’t think many people realise.

“It is a Muslim country, but it is relaxed religiously and accepting of other cultures. It has expat communities brought by oil and gas and a whole host of other cultures that tend to happily live side by side.”