Asia Flashcards
This (1) geographical division was created as a result of (2) this agreement between the United Kingdom, China and Tibet. The purpose was to create clear delineations between British India, Outer Tibet and Inner Tibet (China). China never became an official signatory.
- McMahon Line
- Simla Accord
In what Central Asian country did President for Life Saparmurat Niyazov build a $50 million amusement park called Land of Fairy Tales, which opened shortly before his death in 2006?
Turkmenistan
Two separate wars in the mid-19th century had their origins in China’s efforts to block British traders from importing what product into China from India?
Opium
What are the last names of the two individuals who served as Prime Minister of India from independence in 1947 until March 1977, with the exception of a 20-month period beginning in May 1964?
Nehru, Gandhi
Francophone Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf’s 1988 novel blends two tales of historical fiction. One is of an American traveler witnessing firsthand the Iranian Constitutional Revolution that began in 1905, and the second is a tale of palace intrigue, poetry, murder, and secret romance taking place eight centuries prior in court cities including Isfahan and what titular Central Asian city, which Tamerlane would later make the capital of the Timurid empire and a haven for the arts and sciences?
Samarkand
Who led the Home-by-Christmas offensive against the Chinese in 1950?
Douglas MacArthur (Korean War)
What was burned along with a man’s corpse in the ancient Asian custom of suti / suttee?
Their widow
In September 2017, the United Nations–backed Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal found Myanmar guilty of genocide against what people in the country’s Rakhine State?
Rohingya
On September 25, 1950 U.S. Marines retook this Asian capital city.
Seoul
Though the CIA’s supposed involvement in the Kennedy assassination remains in the realm of conspiracy theories, they at least had connections to the plotters of another assassination three weeks earlier. CIA operative Lucien Conein passed along a promise of non-intervention from US ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to the generals who overthrew, and the next day assassinated, what president of South Vietnam on November 1, 1963?
Ngo Dinh Diem
From 1975 until 1979, while under the control of the Khmer Rouge, the present-day nation of Cambodia was known by what name?
Kampuchea
Due to a number of historical events, this surname is the most prevalent in Vietnam. Nearly 40% of people have this surname.
Nguyen
What is South Korea’s second-most populous city?
Busan
What Russian lake is the deepest and largest freshwater lake by volume, constituting 22% of the world’s fresh surface water.
Lake Baikal
Which world capital is home to ‘Wat Phra Kaew’, the ‘Temple of the Emerald Buddha’?
Bangkok
The national anthems of Bangladesh and India and the national song of India were all first composed in which language?
Bengali
The world’s worst industrial disaster, a toxic gas leak that killed over 3,500 people in 1984, occurred in which Central Indian city?
Bhopal
Which Southeast Asian nation is a sultanate, separated into two parts by the Malaysian district of Limbang?
Brunei
Which kingdom is divided into twenty dzongkhags (districts), and has its capital located in Thimphu Dzongkhag?
Bhutan
Hun Sen, who spent much of the 1970s in exile in Vietnam, became Prime Minister of this country in 1985 and was still in office 30 years later.
Cambodia
What is the plainly and accurately descriptive name used, in English, for the massive withdrawal of the Chinese Red Army from southeastern to northwestern China in 1934-35, which had the essential effect of establishing Mao Zedong as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Long March
Originally an opthalmologist, then an author and revolutionary, his most famous work is Noli Me Tangere, a novel of colonial oppression. Executed by the Spanish in 1896, the works of which national hero are nowadays read by all Filipino high school students?
Jose Rizal
The “Year Without a Summer” of 1816, where a volcanic winter caused extreme weather events, cold, loss of agricultural production, floods and famine in the Northern Hemisphere, is generally traced to the massive 1815 eruption of what volcano on the Indonesian (then Dutch East Indies) island of Sumbawa?
Mount Tambora / Tamboro
Japanese troops massacred and raped civilians in this former capital of the Republic of China for six weeks starting on December 13th, 1937. To this day the incident remains a source of contention in Asia-Pacific relations, especially due to the lack of Japanese military records on the matter.
Nanjing / Nanking
He was the 10th president of the Philippines, in power from 1965 to 1986. For the second half of his time in office he ruled as a dictator, instituting martial law from 1972 to 1981.
Ferdinand Marcos
In 1991 she became the first female prime minister of Bangladesh. She was the second female to serve as the head of a Muslim-majority country (after Benazir Bhutto).
Khaleda Zia
Give the name of either the Indonesian statesman and nationalist who was his country’s first, post-revolution president, or the general who succeeded him in 1967 and served until his own presidency collapsed in 1998.
Sukarno, Suharto
The Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960 saw British and Commonwealth forces employ several unconventional anti-guerilla tactics, including the first use of which controversial tool?
Agent Orange
Although it has been referred to formally as “Day of the Sun” since 1997, April 15 has been a public holiday in North Korea since 1968, celebrating the birthday of what man?
Kim Il-Sung
Port Arthur, a Chinese city named for an Englishman, was in 1904 the site of the beginning of a war between what two other countries?
That’s where the Russo-Japanese War began. It ended the following year in New Hampshire, of all places.
The first Asian to accept the Nobel Peace Prize was the PM of this country who in 1967 renounced use of nuclear weapons.
Japan (Eisaku Sato)
In 1873, while digging at a site named Hisarlik near the Dardanelles, German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann uncovered what are widely believed to be the remains of what?
Troy
UNESCO’s King Sejong Prize for promoting literacy is named for the monarch who created hangul, the Korean this.
Alphabet
What dynasty, whose name is now a common surname worldwide among individuals of Indian descent, existed on the subcontinent from the 300s CE until the late 500s, during what is widely regarded as the Golden Age of India?
Gupta
The Hindu-Buddhist empire that dominated Southeast Asia until the 15th century, ruling what is now Cambodia and parts of Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, was founded in 802 by a people known by what name?
Khmer
