Countries
Nations, borders, flags and their quirks.
“Kazakh” and “Cossack” are the same word
The name of the Kazakh people most likely means a free wanderer, and the Cossacks of Ukraine and Russia share the same root.
A noodle dish whose name has 58 strokes
Xi’an’s wide, hand-pulled biangbiang noodles are written with one of the most complex Chinese characters in use. It wasn’t in any dictionary, and only entered Unicode in 2020.
Basque is related to no other language on Earth
Spanish, French, English, Russian and Hindi are all distant cousins. Basque, spoken between Spain and France, is no one’s cousin at all.
Bhutan measures Gross National Happiness
In 1972 Bhutan’s young king declared that happiness mattered more than GDP. The idea reached the UN, and also attracted serious criticism.
Born Shinto, married Christian, buried Buddhist
Japan has more religious adherents than people. Most of the population is counted as both Shinto and Buddhist, yet most say they have no personal faith.
China owns nearly every giant panda on Earth
The pandas in zoos from Washington to Vienna are on loan. China charges rent, and even cubs born abroad belong to Beijing.
China spans five time zones but uses one
All of China runs on Beijing time. In the far west, the sun can rise after 10 a.m. in winter, so many people unofficially keep their own clock.
Every apple you have eaten comes from Kazakhstan
The main wild ancestor of the domestic apple still grows in forests in the mountains around Almaty, a city whose name is often linked to the Kazakh word for apple.
France has more time zones than any other country
Not Russia, not the United States: France. And mainland France itself runs an hour ahead of where its geography says it should, because of 1940.
General Tso’s chicken is unknown in General Tso’s home province
America’s favourite Chinese takeaway dish was invented in Taiwan, sweetened in New York, and was too sweet to sell in Hunan.
How a meat-eater’s body survives on bamboo
The giant panda is a bear with a carnivore’s gut, eating a plant it can barely digest. It survives by eating almost constantly and spending almost no energy.
In a Kazakh home, a half-empty cup is a compliment
Kazakh hosts pour tea only part-way, so they can keep refilling it while you stay and talk. A cup filled to the brim can be a polite hint.
Japan learned curry from the British Navy
Japanese curry came from India by way of the British, was adopted by the Japanese navy to fight a deadly vitamin deficiency, and is still served on navy ships every Friday.
Kazakh has been written in three alphabets in a century
Kazakh moved from Arabic script to Latin in 1929, to Cyrillic in 1940, and is moving back to Latin today. Kazakhs in China still use the Arabic script.
Kazakh names that tell a story
A girl named Ulbolsyn carries a message: “let the next one be a boy”. Traditional Kazakh names record wishes, fears, wars and the day a child was born.
Kazakhstan brought half of a dying sea back to life
The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth-largest lake. Soviet irrigation drained it into a desert, but a dam built by Kazakhstan in 2005 revived its northern part, and the fish came back.
Kazakhstan’s national symbol might be a woman
The “Golden Man” on top of Almaty’s Independence Monument is a Saka warrior found in 1969 in a costume of about 4,000 gold pieces. Archaeologists still can’t say for sure whether the warrior was a man.
Kiribati moved the International Date Line
Until 1995 Kiribati was split by the date line, so different parts of the country were on different days. So it moved the line.
Nepal’s flag comes with geometry instructions
It’s the only national flag that isn’t a rectangle, and Nepal’s constitution explains how to draw it, step by step, like a geometry exercise.
One of the oldest faiths, and Freddie Mercury’s
Zoroastrianism was once the state religion of Persian empires. Today it has perhaps 100,000–200,000 followers, among them the Parsi community into which Freddie Mercury was born.
Pandas are almost absent from classical Chinese art
Dragons, tigers, cranes and even crickets fill Chinese painting and poetry. The animal now synonymous with China barely appears at all.
Sichuan pepper makes your lips buzz at 50 Hz
It isn’t a pepper and it isn’t hot. It makes your mouth tingle, and researchers found the tingling feels like a vibration of about 50 times a second.
Tea if by sea, chai if by land
Almost every language calls tea either “te” or “cha”, and which one it uses depends on how tea first arrived: by Dutch ship or by overland trade.
The “last wild horse” descends from tamed horses of the Kazakh steppe
5,500 years ago, people at Botai in northern Kazakhstan were bridling horses and probably milking mares. Their horses’ descendants became Przewalski’s horse, long thought to be truly wild.
The “Laughing Buddha” isn’t the Buddha
The cheerful, round-bellied figure in restaurants and gift shops is Budai, a Chinese monk from about a thousand years ago, not Siddhartha Gautama.
The city in Kazakhstan that provoked Genghis Khan
In 1218 the governor of Otrar, a Silk Road city in today’s southern Kazakhstan, executed a Mongol trade caravan. The insult launched one of the most destructive invasions in history.
The country that gave up the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal
The Soviet Union set off 456 nuclear explosions in Kazakhstan. After independence, Kazakhstan closed the test site and gave up about 1,400 nuclear warheads.
The first human in space took off from Kazakhstan
Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin both launched from Baikonur, on the Kazakh steppe. Today Russia rents the cosmodrome, and the town around it, from Kazakhstan.
The Kazakh bride who renames her husband’s family
By custom, a Kazakh daughter-in-law does not say the names of her husband’s elder relatives aloud. Instead she invents a respectful nickname for each one.
The pizza Margherita story is probably a myth
Every pizzeria tells it: in 1889 a Naples pizzaiolo invented a red, white and green pizza for Queen Margherita. Historians have found little evidence it happened.
The temple kitchen that feeds tens of thousands every day, free
At the Golden Temple in Amritsar, anyone, of any religion, can sit on the floor and eat a free meal, cooked and served mostly by volunteers.
The Terracotta Army was found by farmers digging a well
In 1974 farmers near Xi’an dug into an army of more than 8,000 clay soldiers. The emperor’s tomb next to it has never been opened, and the soil around it contains unusually high levels of mercury.
Tulips are Central Asian, not Dutch
Long before the Netherlands made them famous, tulips were wild flowers of the Tian Shan and Pamir mountains, where many species still bloom every spring.
Who lives in Xi’an’s Muslim Quarter
In the heart of an ancient Chinese capital is a mosque that looks like a Buddhist temple, run by a Muslim people descended partly from Silk Road traders.
Why many Kazakhs can name seven generations of ancestors
A Kazakh child is traditionally expected to know seven fathers back, and the rule exists to prevent marriage between relatives.
Xi’an was once one of the largest cities on Earth
Around 750, the city now called Xi’an was Chang’an: a “million-man city” at the eastern end of the Silk Road, home to Persians, Sogdians, Arabs and Christian monks.
You can’t see the Great Wall from the Moon
The famous claim was made in 1754, two centuries before anyone went to space. China’s first astronaut said he couldn’t see it.