History of Asia

Some people regard history as a matter of memorizing facts and dates, but I’ve always thought of that as a decidedly narrow view. Narrow and often misguided, in fact, as those years are often a controversial matter in and of themselves.…

The death of Emperor Nero in 68 AD marked a turning point in the history of the Roman Empire. For the 95 years prior to that, the freshly minted Empire, born from the ashes of the Roman Republic, had been ruled by a single family. The…

The conflict of loyalties can be a deadly business. If you owe your loyalty to your country, what if your country gets taken over from within? If you are raised in a foreign country, do you owe them your loyalty? What if they invade your…

It seems ironic that one of the most fearsome of the White Russian generals was very nearly an Austrian officer, for there is much in common between Ungern von Sternberg and a certain Austrian corporal who fought on the opposite side of…

The first life of Dmitry Ivanovich, future Tsar of all Russia, began on the 19th October 1582 and ended on the 15th May 1591. He was the son of Ivan the Terrible, the greatest of all Russia’s Tsars and the first to take onto himself…

Sometimes looking into history is like being both short and long-sighted. Things far away are hazy, of course. Our sole source for a lot of early British traditions, for example, is the writings of the Romans who were conquering them. But…

I became obsessed with Bruce Lee when I was about thirteen. I was big into karate and martial arts. When I say "big into", I mean more the traditions and aesthetics of them than the actual fighting. I went to a few karate classes, and later…

The girl who who would become Lakshmi Bai, hero to some and villain to others, was born between 1830 and 1835 in Varanasi, the oldest of Indian cities and the religious capital of the subcontinent. Her birth-name was Manikarnika, one of…

Wu Zetian is unique in Chinese history. Had she merely been a powerful Empress, that would have been normal. Had she even been an Empress who ruled in truth through a puppet Emperor, that would have been rare, but not unprecedented. But…

Seoul is a city of landmarks. With a population of over ten million people you’d expect this, but few of these landmarks are older than 100 years, let alone fifty, and only one of these was designed by an Irishman. On the city’s north side…