China, Korea, Japan, Mongolia.
24 stories from this region.
In December 755 the frontier general An Lushan turned his armies on the Tang empire at the very peak of its golden age. Eight years of war followed — the sack of both capitals, the flight of the emperor, the forced strangling of his beloved consort Yang Guifei, and a census collapse of some 36 million people.
Read the story →In 1701 Lord Asano drew his sword against the court official Kira inside Edo Castle and was ordered to die the same day. His leaderless samurai — ronin — waited nearly two years, then stormed Kira's mansion in the snow, took his head to their master's grave, and surrendered. The shogunate's verdict: honourable seppuku for all 46 who stood trial. Japan has argued about them ever since.
Read the story →At 11:58 on 1 September 1923, two minutes before noon, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck the Tokyo-Yokohama region as the city's lunch fires were lit. Firestorms did most of the killing — including some 38,000 people incinerated by a fire whirl at a single open square. Around 105,000 died; in the chaos, mobs massacred thousands of Koreans.
Read the story →From 1932 the Chisso Corporation discharged methylmercury into Minamata Bay, Japan. The neurological disease it caused was officially identified on 1 May 1956; Chisso's own physician proved the cause by 1959 and was silenced. The dumping continued until 1968. Thousands were certified as victims; the true number is far higher.
Read the story →China's First Emperor was buried in 210 BC beneath a man-made mountain near Xi'an, guarded — the historian Sima Qian wrote — by crossbow traps, with rivers of mercury flowing across a model of his empire. In 1974 farmers digging a well found his terracotta army. The burial chamber itself has never been opened — and the soil above it really is laced with mercury.
Read the story →On the morning of 30 May 1626 the Wanggongchang Armoury — a major gunpowder works inside Beijing — detonated, devastating roughly two square kilometres of the capital and killing a reported 20,000 people. The emperor's infant heir died in the aftermath; contemporary accounts are so strange that theories still multiply around one of the largest accidental explosions of the pre-industrial world.
Read the story →Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming admiral Zheng He led seven expeditions of up to 300 ships and 27,000 men across the Indian Ocean — to India, Arabia, and the Swahili coast, returning once with a giraffe for the emperor. Then China turned inward: the voyages stopped, and the records were left to rot or worse. Europe's small ships entered an ocean the treasure fleets had vacated.
Read the story →The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists — the Boxers — were an anti-foreign, anti-Christian Chinese militia movement of the late 1890s. In June 1900 they besieged the foreign legations in Beijing for 55 days. The Eight-Nation Alliance — a combined force of approximately 20,000 troops from eight powers — broke the siege on 14 August 1900. The Qing dynasty paid an indemnity of 450 million silver taels, payable over 39 years.
Read the story →Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in May 1966 to purge his Party rivals and reassert ideological authority. The mass-mobilization campaign ran for a decade until Mao's death on 9 September 1976. The death toll from political killing, suicide, and famine across the campaign is estimated at 500,000 to 2 million.
Read the story →Cixi entered the Forbidden City as a junior fifth-rank concubine in 1851 at age 16. By 1861 she was co-regent for her infant son the Tongzhi Emperor. She ruled the Qing dynasty in fact if not in title from 1861 to her death on 15 November 1908. The Guangxu Emperor — her adopted nephew, whom she had kept under house arrest for ten years — died of arsenic poisoning the day before. The dynasty fell three years later.
Read the story →The 11 March 2011 earthquake off northeastern Honshu produced a 14-metre tsunami that overwhelmed the seawall of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant at 15:41 local time. Backup diesel generators flooded within minutes. Without cooling, three reactor cores went into meltdown over the substantial subsequent four days. The displaced population was about 154,000.
Read the story →The American B-29 Enola Gay dropped a uranium-235 fission bomb on Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. on 6 August 1945. The bomb detonated approximately 580 metres above the city centre and killed approximately 70,000 people instantly. By the end of 1945 the cumulative death toll from blast, burns, and acute radiation sickness had reached approximately 140,000. Japan surrendered nine days later.
Read the story →Hong Xiuquan failed the Qing civil service examination four times. After his 1837 nervous breakdown he became convinced he was the second son of the Christian God and the younger brother of Jesus. The 1850-1864 Taiping Rebellion he led against the Qing dynasty killed approximately 20 million people — the deadliest civil war in human history.
Read the story →Approximately 75,000 troops of the Korean People's Army crossed the 38th Parallel at 04:00 on 25 June 1950 to attack the Republic of Korea. The three-year war that followed killed approximately 3 million Koreans, 36,000 American troops, and substantial numbers of Chinese troops. The 27 July 1953 armistice established the demilitarised zone that remains the Korean border today.
Read the story →Approximately 86,000 Chinese Communist soldiers and political workers broke out of the Nationalist encirclement of the Jiangxi Soviet on 16 October 1934 and began a 370-day, approximately 9,000-kilometre retreat across southern and western China to the Shaanxi base area. Approximately 8,000 reached Yan'an in October 1935. The march established Mao Zedong's leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.
Read the story →The First Opium War (1839-1842) was a British naval campaign to force the Qing Empire to legalise the import of Indian opium into China. The Chinese imperial commissioner Lin Zexu had destroyed 1,200 tonnes of British opium at Canton in June 1839. Britain responded with a 5,000-troop expeditionary force. The 1842 Treaty of Nanking ended the war with the cession of Hong Kong, the opening of five treaty ports, and a £21 million indemnity.
Read the story →Saigō Takamori was the senior military commander of the 1868 Meiji Restoration that overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate and dragged Japan into industrial modernity. He resigned in 1873 over the abolition of the samurai class, led the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion against the government he had built, and died at Shiroyama on 24 September 1877 with about 40 samurai facing 30,000 government troops.
Read the story →Chinese student-led protests had occupied Tiananmen Square in central Beijing since 15 April 1989. On the night of 3-4 June 1989 the People's Liberation Army cleared the square and the surrounding boulevards with armoured vehicles and live fire. The death toll has never been officially published; credible estimates range from several hundred to several thousand.
Read the story →Wu Zetian (624-705) entered the Tang court at age 14 as a concubine, became empress consort to Emperor Gaozong in 655, ruled as effective regent for 23 years through her sons, and declared herself Emperor of the new Zhou dynasty in 690 at age 66. She is the only woman in 2,000 years of Chinese imperial history to hold the title of Emperor (huangdi) in her own name.
Read the story →On 15 February 2013 a 20-metre stony asteroid exploded over the southern Russian Urals at an altitude of about 30 kilometres. The blast injured 1,500 people, mostly from flying glass. It was the largest atmospheric impact event since Tunguska in 1908 — and the first to be captured on car-dashboard video.
Read the story →On the evening of 16 December 1997, approximately 685 Japanese children were hospitalised after watching an episode of the *Pokémon* television series. Most of them did not have photosensitive epilepsy. They had mass psychogenic illness propagated entirely through broadcast television — the first time the disease had ever spread that way.
Read the story →The standard narrative of European maritime expansion credits Vasco da Gama with finding the sea route from Africa to India in 1498. The Portuguese sailed the route. The man who navigated them across the Indian Ocean was almost certainly an Arab named Ahmad ibn Majid.
Read the story →In 1274 and again in 1281, Kublai Khan sent invasion fleets against Japan. Both times — once after a single battle and once after seven weeks of fighting — typhoons destroyed the Mongol ships. The Japanese called the wind divine.
Read the story →On 30 June 1908 something exploded above central Siberia with the force of a hydrogen bomb. It took the first scientists nineteen years to reach the site.
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