By Steven Mufson

Washington Post Foreign Service

TOV, Mongolia, Sept. 8 -- Sitting today at the hearth of a Mongolian hut and sipping mare's milk below a two-stringed horse fiddle, they had had a good summer.

They replied, as the American first lady nodded her head, that it depended on whether you were talking about the cattle and the sheep, which had done quite well, or the horses, which could use a bit more fattening up. The conversation turned to snuff boxes and the Zanabaatars' impending move to warmer pastures.

Also jammed inside the circular hut were the Zanabaatars' six children -- and more than a dozen American reporters and cameramen who descended like a Mongol horde to record the last leg of Clinton's six-day Asian journey.

For Clinton, this stop in one of Asia's emerging democracies has also been a move to gentler pastures after two tumultuous days in China at the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women. There the first lady irritated the Chinese government with thinly veiled criticism of its forced abortion policy opening and reforming its floundering economy. It has no political prisoners and an independent judiciary, and more than 90 percent of its people took part in its first open elections in June 1992 and 1993.

After years of prohibiting the open practice of religion, the government has allowed people to openly practice the Tibetan Buddhist Lamaism once popular here. The Dalai Lama, an exile from Chinese-ruled Tibet, recently visited.

Gone are the days after Genghis Khan united the nomads here into a single state and conquered nearly all of Asia and European Russia and sent his armies as far away as Europe and Southeast Asia. "Mongolia is situated between two giants. Therefore our cooperation with the United States is very important from the point of view of security as well as our progress toward democracy," said L. Galbagrakh, an adviser to the president.

More than half the country lives in huts like the one the first lady visited: wooden-framed, domed, covered with layers of horsehair blankets tied down on the outside by horsehair ropes. Built to withstand bitter Siberian winds of up to 50 mph, the huts, called gers, can be dismantled easily and moved to another location.

The first lady's briefing book for this leg of the trip had some useful advice such as: When you enter a ger, it is polite to walk clockwise around the fireplace and if you have to leave to go to the bathroom during a meal, just tell your host that you're "going to take a look at the horses" and everyone will understand.

After her mare's milk aperitif, Clinton strolled outside the nomadic bungalow to really look over the horses as well as the yaks grazing in this stunning valley. A local man pushed a reluctant mare forward for milking. The Zanabaatar children raced on horseback, and the first lady re the Politburo, the legalization of other parties and the writing of a new constitution."

Mongolia, she said, should be a model for all Asia. "There are some who claim that freedom and democracy are Western concepts and that Asians prefer authoritarian rule," she said in a speech here. "I say: Let them come to Mongolia."

Was that one last parting shot for the Chinese Communist regime in Beijing? No, said a senior administration official here. Mongolia is a "remarkable story" in its own right, and the first lady only wanted to lend U.S. support to Mongolian democracy.