50 Fun Facts About The Far East

Which country, the most sparsely populated sovereign state on Earth, has only two neighbours, Russia and China?

Mongolia is the world's second-largest landlocked country after Kazakhstan, yet it is home to only about 3.5 million people.

Which island nation, ruled by Spain for more than three centuries, is named after a sixteenth-century Spanish king?

The Philippines got the name in 1543, when explorer Ruy López de Villalobos honoured the future Philip II, who was still a prince at the time.

Which thorn-covered fruit, called the king of fruits, is banned from some hotels and public transport for its smell?

Durian takes its name from the Malay word for thorn, and its strong odour can linger in a room for several days.

Which Kyoto company, founded in 1889 to make playing cards, went on to create Mario and Zelda?

Nintendo spent its first decades selling hanafuda, handmade Japanese flower cards, long before it made a video game.

Which volcano between Java and Sumatra erupted in 1883 with the loudest sound ever measured?

Krakatoa's blast was heard on Rodrigues island near Mauritius, about 3,000 miles away, and the sea surges that followed submerged whole islands.

Which kingdom, called Siam until 1939, is the only Southeast Asian country never colonised by a Western power?

Thailand kept its independence partly because Britain and France found it useful as a buffer state between their colonies.

Which South Korean company, founded in 1938 as a grocery trader, has a name meaning three stars?

Samsung began as a small trading firm dealing in dried fish, local groceries and noodles, long before it moved into electronics.

Which pastime's name joins the Japanese word for empty to a clipped form of the word orchestra?

Karaoke took off in the nightclubs of Kobe, where bandleader Daisuke Inoue says he built his first sing-along machine in 1971.

Which country is the only place where Komodo dragons, the world's largest lizards, live in the wild?

Indonesia's Komodo dragons survive on just five islands, including Komodo, Rinca and Flores, where they ambush deer, pigs and buffalo.

The word tsunami was borrowed from Japanese, where its two characters literally mean what?

Harbour wave fits because fishermen out at sea often noticed nothing unusual, then sailed home to find their village devastated.

Which city was known as Edo until 1868, when Japan's imperial capital moved there from Kyoto?

Tokyo means eastern capital, and under its old name it had already grown from a fishing village into a city of over a million people.

Which city beat the favourite, Nagoya, in the vote to host the 1988 Summer Olympics?

Seoul's surprise win made South Korea only the second Asian nation to stage a Summer Olympics, after Japan in 1964.

Which city became the first to host both the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, completing the pair in 2022?

Beijing, whose name means northern capital, staged the Summer Games in 2008 and the Winter Games fourteen years later.

Which territory did Britain hand back to China in 1997, ending 156 years of colonial rule?

Hong Kong's return was timed by the 99-year lease Britain took on the New Territories in 1898, which ran out in 1997.

Which territory was expelled from Malaysia in 1965, only two years after joining the federation?

Singapore became an independent city-state almost overnight, after its leaders and Malaysia's secretly negotiated a separation agreement.

Which twelfth-century temple complex, the largest religious structure in the world, appears on Cambodia's national flag?

Angkor Wat was built as a Hindu temple to Vishnu and was gradually turned into a Buddhist one as Cambodia's kings changed faith.

Which active volcano, quiet since an eruption that began in 1707, is the highest mountain in Japan?

Mount Fuji's last eruption rained ash across eastern Japan and was followed by landslides and starvation.

Which river, the third-longest in the world, is spanned by the Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station on Earth?

The Yangtze dam came at a human cost: estimates of the people displaced by its construction run from 1.13 million to about 1.4 million.

Which conqueror, born Temüjin, united the steppe tribes in 1206 and founded history's largest contiguous land empire?

Genghis Khan took that title at a great assembly of the steppe peoples, and historians are still unsure what the name means.

Which animal did China give to foreign governments as a diplomatic gift until 1984, and now only leases?

Giant panda diplomacy had a famous sequel: after Nixon's 1972 visit a pair went to Washington, and the US sent two musk oxen in return.

Which S-shaped country on the South China Sea is only about 50 km wide at its narrowest point?

Vietnam makes up for its narrow waist in length, running 1,650 km from north to south.

Which country is the only landlocked nation in Southeast Asia, and was once a kingdom named for a million elephants?

Laos grew out of Lan Xang, a kingdom founded in the fourteenth century that became a hub for overland trade.

Which Pacific port in the Russian Far East is the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway?

Vladivostok means ruler of the East, and the rail journey there from Moscow covers 9,289 km and eight time zones.

Which city on the island of Java was known as Batavia during three centuries of Dutch rule?

Jakarta got its present name from Japanese occupiers in 1942; the Dutch had named the city after the Batavi, a people they claimed as ancestors.

Which Kuala Lumpur landmark held the title of world's tallest building from 1998 to 2004?

The Petronas Towers are still the world's tallest twin skyscrapers, a title they took from New York's original World Trade Center.

Which walled palace complex in China's capital was home to 24 emperors between 1420 and 1912?

The Forbidden City is the largest preserved royal palace complex still standing anywhere in the world.

Which is the largest of Japan's four main islands, home to Osaka, Kyoto and Hiroshima?

Honshu is the seventh-largest island in the world and the second most populous, behind only Java.

Which island, the third-largest in the world, is divided among three countries, including the tiny sultanate of Brunei?

Borneo's rainforest is estimated to be around 140 million years old, which makes it one of the oldest in the world.

Which island did Portuguese sailors mark on their maps in 1542 as Formosa, meaning beautiful island?

Taiwan kept the name Formosa among English speakers well into the twentieth century.

In which cold Asian desert did an American Museum expedition find the first Velociraptor fossil in 1923?

The Gobi find was only a crushed skull and a single claw, picked up at the Flaming Cliffs by expedition member Peter Kaisen.

Which warrior class of feudal Japan was required by a 1629 law to wear two swords while on official duty?

Samurai lost their place after 1868, when their hereditary stipends and the privilege of wearing swords were abolished.

Which emperor gives his name to the 1868 restoration that ended rule by the shoguns and westernised Japan?

Meiji, whose personal name was Mutsuhito, came to the throne at fourteen and reigned until his death in 1912.

What did farmers digging a well near Xi'an in 1974 find buried beside the tomb of China's first emperor?

The Terracotta Army fills three pits with more than 8,000 clay soldiers, and most of them are still in the ground.

Which drug's trade, banned by Qing China, sparked a war with Britain in 1839 and gave that war its name?

Opium stocks seized from British merchants at Canton triggered the fighting, which ended with five Chinese ports forced open to British trade.

Which Japanese port, long the only one open to Dutch traders, became the second city hit by an atomic bomb?

Nagasaki kept its Dutch merchants on Dejima, an artificial island built in the bay to serve as their trading post.

Which Venetian merchant served the emperor Kublai as an envoy and later dictated his travels to a cellmate in prison?

Marco Polo's cellmate, Rustichello da Pisa, wrote the stories down and worked in a few tales of his own.

Which movement led by Pol Pot ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and forcibly emptied the country's cities?

The Khmer Rouge years cost between 1.5 and 2 million lives, around a quarter of Cambodia's population.

Which Korean food was specially reworked by scientists in 2008 so the first Korean astronaut could take it into space?

Kimchi is also on UNESCO's intangible heritage list twice over, entered separately by South Korea and North Korea.

Which Japanese national sport has its competitors toss salt into the ring before a bout as a symbolic cleansing?

Sumo began in Japan, which is still the only country where the sport is practised professionally.

Which Korean martial art, known for head-height and spinning kicks, became an Olympic medal sport in 2000?

Taekwondo's name spells out the method: tae means to strike with the foot, kwon to strike with the hand, and do the way.

Which part of the Russian Far East is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its many active volcanoes?

Kamchatka is familiar to board gamers too, as one of the Asian territories on the Risk map.

Which American commodore reached Edo Bay in 1853 with a squadron of black ships to end Japan's isolation?

Matthew Perry was sent to end a policy of isolation that had lasted 220 years, by gunboat diplomacy if necessary.

Which ruler, enthroned at the age of two, was China's last emperor and the subject of a 1987 Best Picture winner?

Puyi ended up an ordinary citizen of the People's Republic, working as a gardener after his release from prison in 1959.

Which alphabet did King Sejong the Great introduce in the 1440s to tackle widespread illiteracy among Koreans?

Hangul was designed to be easy to learn: the shapes of its five basic consonants are based on the human speech organs.

Which country's prime minister Robert Menzies observed in 1939 that Britain's Far East was his own nation's near north?

Australia shows that the label is a view from Europe, where the term arose for the farthest of three Easts, beyond the Near East and the Middle East.

Which indigenous people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands were forced to assimilate under Japanese rule?

Ainu women traditionally tattooed around their mouths, a custom the Japanese authorities ordered them to give up.

Which capital is home to the Ryugyong Hotel, a pyramid-shaped skyscraper begun in 1987 and unfinished for decades?

Pyongyang's officials once edited the stalled concrete shell out of official photographs and left it off printed maps of the city.

Which line of latitude was proposed in 1945 to divide the Korean peninsula into Soviet and American occupation zones?

The 38th parallel was chosen at very short notice by two young US officers, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, working from a National Geographic map.

Which native religion of Japan worships spirits called kami at shrines entered through torii gateways?

Shinto has no single founder and no single sacred text, and it exists in a wide range of local and regional forms.

Which Chinese dynasty, in power from 1368 to 1644, sent admiral Zheng He's fleets as far as East Africa?

Ming rulers later let the navy fall into disrepair while forced labour fortified the Great Wall into its modern form.