The Thursday Quiz XXVII

The Thursday Quiz!

The Thursday Quiz is an "Is It or Isn't It" game. From the list of twelve items, your job is to determine whether each IS or ISN'T a true example of the week's category.

Remember always the Path to Enlightenment:

No research, Googling, Wikiing, or use of reference books. The Thursday
Quiz is a POP quiz. Violators will lose standing in the scientific community.

This Week's Category will turn your world around!

Real and Bogus in the History of Asia

Which ones actually happened? And which ones only kind of seem like they might have happened, but really didn't?

1. Hinduism (c. 1500 B.C.) -- A young nobleman in what is today Thailand receives a series of revelations regarding the nature of God, the rebirth of souls, and the nature of suffering. Refined into the "Vedas," these become the central scriptures of a religious practice that spreads throughout SouthEast Asia over the next 500 years and, by 500 B.C., has become popular in India as well. Chinese Buddhist influence will eventually all but eliminate Hinduism from its birthplace, but it is still today the leading religion of India and Bangladesh.

2. Confucius (551-479 B.C.) -- The great Chinese social philosopher produces a wide set of teachings on morality and good government. In some ways very conservative, with their vision of society as a set of hierarchies based on family relationships, his teachings also include ideas progressive for the time, such as the principle that people of low birth should be able to rise by merit. Not a divine figure or one claiming special connections to a god, Confucius nevertheless inspires an essentially religious practice that remains widespread today.

3. Mongol Invasions (13th Century) -- The horsemen of Genghis Khan and his successors sweep south into the heavily populated areas of East Asia. China is conquered over the course of six decades, with the final capitulation coming in 1279. The Koreans fight for five decades, with massive loss of life, before submitting to a vassal agreement. The Vietnamese, by abandoning their cities and avoiding open field battles, gradually win a defensive war of attrition in the swamps and jungles of their homeland.

4. Voyages of Zheng He (1405-1453) -- Commanding the Ming dynasty's massive navy, Admiral Zheng He leads great expeditions through modern Indonesia to India, Arabia, and the East Coast of Africa, establishing diplomatic relations and commerce with dozens of local kingdoms. After his seventh and final voyage, budget cuts permanently mothball the great fleet, and in the following 150 years it will be small European countries, rather than China, that establish global maritime supremacy.

5. The Lao Empire (1410-1685) -- A ruthlessly efficient military and an even more ruthlessly efficient civil administration allow the relatively small Lao Kingdom to gradually build a vast multicultural empire of tributary states. At its height, around 1600, the Lao Empire has a population to rival the Chinese Empire to the north; however, decline sets in quickly as a succession of weak emperors seem unable to face challenges posed by encroaching Europeans and climate change.

6. The Phillipine Renaissance (c. 1570-1600) -- For about three decades, successive Phillipine kings sponsor scholars, teachers, and scientists in their lavish courts. In regular correspondence with London, Paris, Venice, and Constantinople, Phillipine scientists participate in the scientific discoveries of the era and make important contributions to the early study of electricity. This hub of research, and probably many of its findings, is lost when the Spanish take Manila and subject the kingdom to colonial rule, in 1608.

7. The Opium Wars (1834-1860) -- Not wanting to run a trade deficit with China, the British begin selling opium from their India colony through southern ports. Noting the socially corrosive effects of hard drugs, China outlaws opium and attempts to restrict its importation. The British, with massive military superiority, lay waste to coastal towns, river ports, and shipping until the Chinese are forced to "just say yes" to drugs. Thirteen years later, the sequence of events is repeated.

8. The Meiji Restoration (1868) -- A new government comes to power in Japan and starts the country on a program of radical modernization. Within four decades, Japan will go from being an isolated, near-medieval backwater to being a major industrial power.

9. Occupation of Korea (1910-1945) -- In approximate imitation of the European colonial empires, Japan deposes the royal government of Korea and imposes direct rule. What begins as economic exploitation, severe restriction of civil liberties, and horrifyingly draconian response to resistance becomes, by World War II, a virtual slave state. Korean attitudes toward Japan remain at best highly guarded today.

10. Manchukuo (1932-1945) -- With China in chaos during the first half of the 20th Century, the Empire of Japan occupies Manchuria and sets up a puppet state with the last Q'ing emporor as its figurehead. Clearly a Japanese colony, Manchukuo -- with about 1/3 the population of the United States -- is only ever recognized by Japan's Axis partners and by a few central American countries.

11. The French-Thai War (1940-1941) -- With French Indochina destabilized by conflict with Japan and under the questionable leadership of the Vichy regime, Thailand makes a move to regain territory lost to France in an earlier conflict. Air superiority is key to a decisive Thai victory. Celebration in Bangkok is short-lived, however, as Japan invades Thailand in late 1941, and the disputed territory is returned to French control after World War II.

12. The Great Leap Forward (1958-61) -- Chairman Mao launches an aggressive period of collectivization and industrialization in an attempt to modernize the People's Republic of China. Planned with little reference to either technical expertise or local knowledge, the program is a failure on a massive scale; its most visible effect is the death, by famine, of millions of rural farmers and townspeople.

Submit your answers in the comments.