The Wednesday Quiz II:2 -- Asian Independence!

The Wednesday Quiz -- Season II -- Quiz 2

How the Asian Countries Got Their Independence Back

The Wednesday Quiz is a "closed-book" test of knowledge and intuition; please do not look up answers, ask others for help, or answer as a team.

Questions about the rules and the ~Fabulous Prizes~ are answered here.

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This week's Quiz is an is-it-or-isn't-it game. For each story of how an Asian country came to be,

Is It or Isn't It more or less the real story?

NOTE: Yes, difficult. The Isn'ts, for what it's worth, are pretty comprensively wrong.

1. Bhutan -- No one really knows much about the origins of this mountain kingdom, because most of its records were destroyed in a fire in 1827. There seems to have been some sort of local autonomy under the Mongol empires, and something approaching the current nation had evolved by the 16th Century.

2. Brunei -- The division of the island of Borneo into Dutch and French territories in the 18th Centuries left a small pocket on the north coast as a neutral zone. The Islamic community from the more densely populated south migrated to the area and declared an independent sultanate in 1851. Although a British protectorate from 1876 to 1897, Brunei has remained basically independent ever since, its export economy sustained by a territory that is almost entirely comprised of highly fertile agricultural land.

3. Hong Kong -- A former British trading outpost, this small island country became independent in 1958. Special diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, its neighbor to the north, has allowed it to thrive first as an industrial nation -- at one time, almost everything was "made in Hong Kong" -- and today as a financial and trading center.

4. Laos -- "Laos" is, significantly, the Vietnamese word for "West." When the French occupied "Indochina" in the Nineteenth Century, they drew a convenient colonial border down the Mekong River, the traditional heart of the Vietnamese nation. Although differences in language, culture, and history across that border were and are trivial, the line and the political entities it created have proven sadly durable. Laos gained its independence separately from Vietnam when French Indochina dissolved in 1962.

5. Malaysia -- Nothing like modern Malaysia existed until well after World War II. What had traditionally been a bunch of local kingdoms became, during the colonial era, a bunch of local colonies under the British Empire. The peninsular part of the country merged as the Federation of Malaya in 1948, and then merged with the various island bits in 1963 to form Malaysia.

6. Mongolia -- Long having been a poor and exploited area under Chinese control, Mongolia -- or at least some ambitious Mongolian leaders -- took advantage of instability in China to declare independence in 1911. The Chinese marched back in in 1919, but then, after White Russians began using Mongolia as a base in 1920, the Soviet Union re-established an independent Mongolia as a nice, cozy communist client state in 1921.

7. North Korea -- In the 20th Century, Korea was occupied as a virtual slave state by Imperial Japan. It was liberated after World War II by the Allied powers, who split the country into temporary administrative zones. Due to philosophical differences regarding the role of the state in a country's economy, however, the administrative zones hardened into separate countries which then endured a devastating war followed by a half century of mutual antagonism.

8. The Philippines -- Although the Philippines declared independence in 1898, the islands were simultaneously being sold by Spain to the United States for $20 million dollars after the Spanish-American War. The Philippine-American War ended with American control over the islands. During the 1930s, plans were made for a transition to independence, but these were disrupted, as were so many things, by the armies of Imperial Japan. After the war, the Philippines finally attained independence on July 4, 1946.

9. Singapore -- When Malaysia became a country in 1963, the island city of Singapore was part of it. But since the federal government of the new country was dominated by Malay nationalists, and Singapore's population is mostly ethnic Chinese, there were serious tensions from the get-go. Less than two years later, the Malaysian parliament voted to kick Singapore out of the country. Singapore set up a government and declared itself a country on August 9, 1965, one of the few instances in history of a country achieving independence involuntarily.

10. Thailand -- Originally the northern, mainland portion of the Dutch colony of Indonesia, the area that is now Thailand was largely ignored by a colonial administration centered in faraway "Batvia" (Jakarta). This created a power vacuum in which a coalition of regional leaders -- or warlords, depending on who you ask -- could eke out a more or less functional administration by the beginning of the 19th Century. After the obligatory Nineteenth Century period spent as a British protectorate, full independence was granted in 1881.

Submit your answers in the comments!