The reading room
Explore 228 entries across places and centuries. Follow an event, compare its context, and examine the evidence.
25 entries · Earliest to latest
Asia / Trade
Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and related settlements formed a vast ancient urban network, with carefully planned streets, drainage, standardized weights and long-distance exchange across South Asia and the Persian Gulf.
Asia / Trade
A brick-lined basin offers a close view of construction and water management in an Indus city. Its physical remains are better understood than the ceremonies sometimes imagined around it.
Asia / Empire
Qin conquest ended the Warring States period in 221 BCE, divided the empire into centrally administered commanderies and standardized script, currency and measurements while expanding roads and canals.
Asia / Technology
Tang (618–907) and Song (960–1279) were separate dynasties, divided by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms era. Their changing societies developed major cities, commercial networks, printing, technical knowledge and distinctive scholarly and artistic traditions.
Asia / Faith
Built in central Java during the eighth and ninth centuries, Borobudur combines terraces, reliefs and stupas in a monumental expression of Buddhist cosmology.
Asia / Empire
Mongol armies created the largest contiguous land empire, devastating many societies while intensifying Eurasian exchange.
Asia / Technology
The surviving volume of Jikji, printed in Korea in 1377, is the oldest extant book printed with movable metal type. It sits within a much longer East Asian history of reproducing texts.
Asia / Empire
Mughal rulers governed much of South Asia through negotiated sovereignty, taxation and military power while court culture supported major architecture, painting and literature.
Asia / Trade
Britain fought Qing China in 1839–1842; Britain and France fought the second war in 1856–1860. Opium commerce, diplomatic conflict and military coercion produced unequal treaties and expanded treaty-port access.
Asia / War
Hong Xiuquan’s movement challenged the Qing state with a rival religious and political programme. Civil war devastated large parts of China.
Asia / Empire
A military uprising became a wider challenge to the East India Company, drawing in rulers and civilians with different grievances and goals.
Asia / Technology
Japan centralized government, industrialized rapidly and reorganized education and the military while building an empire of its own.
Asia / Empire
Revolution ended the Qing dynasty, but establishing a republic did not settle how China would be governed or reunified.
Asia / Rights
The 1911 Revolution ended Qing rule, but republican government remained contested through regional militarism, Nationalist–Communist conflict and Japanese invasion. In 1949 the PRC was proclaimed on the mainland while the ROC government relocated to Taiwan.
Asia / War
Japan seized Manchuria in 1931; full-scale war with China followed in 1937 and merged with the wider Pacific war after 1941. In late 1937 and early 1938, Japanese forces perpetrated mass killing, sexual violence, looting and terror against civilians and disarmed soldiers in Nanjing.
Asia / Empire
Indonesians proclaimed independence in 1945 and fought Dutch efforts to restore colonial rule. The transfer of sovereignty in 1949 was a later milestone.
Asia / Rights
British rule ended and India and Pakistan became independent in August 1947. A hurried boundary divided Punjab and Bengal amid one of the twentieth century’s largest forced migrations, communal violence and the first war over Kashmir.
Asia / War
War in Korea from 1950 to the 1953 armistice and Vietnam’s longer wars through 1975 arose from distinct histories of colonial rule, revolution, divided states, civil conflict and large-scale foreign intervention.
Asia / Rights
A drive for accelerated socialist production reorganised rural China. The resulting famine killed tens of millions; dates and estimates vary across historical reconstructions.
Asia / Rights
Army units and civilian militias killed vast numbers of communists and alleged sympathisers. Imprisonment and stigma continued after the massacres.
Asia / Rights
Mao’s Cultural Revolution mobilised students and other groups against supposed enemies, destabilised institutions and subjected people to persecution.
Asia / Science
The release of IR8 rice illustrates the Green Revolution’s promise of greater yields and the importance of water, inputs and access to technology.
Asia / War
After the Awami League won Pakistan’s 1970 election, the refusal to transfer power and the Pakistani army’s March 1971 crackdown precipitated war, mass atrocities and flight. Bengali forces fought for independence; Indian intervention in December accelerated Pakistan’s surrender and Bangladesh’s creation.
Asia / Science
Local well-diggers near Lintong encountered terracotta fragments in March 1974; archaeological investigation then revealed warrior pits within the much larger mausoleum landscape built for Qin Shi Huang.
Asia / War
The Khmer Rouge imposed forced labour, persecution and executions in pursuit of a radical agrarian transformation. Nearly two million people died under its rule.
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