The Abandoned God of Wat Kon Laeng & 13th Age Review
Sukhothai, in what is today central Thailand, was the capital of a Medieval Thai kingdom in the 1200s and 1300s. The city was later abandoned, and by the mid-20th century, the ruins were totally overgrown by jungle. When archaeologists began to study the site, they were initially perplexed by an odd pyramid south of the […]
Families Turned Detective in Edo Japan
Societies have handled the enforcement of laws a lot of different ways in different places and times; the ubiquity of police in the 21st century can make it hard to imagine what other systems might even look like. The way the authorities tracked down suspects in Edo-era Japan (1603-1867) is particularly interesting. The system was […]
Xuanzang and the Five Border Towers
In the chaotic years of the early 7th century, China’s new Tang dynasty closed the western border with Central Asia. But that didn’t deter Xuanzang, a Buddhist monk, from leaving China in search of knowledge and religious truth. In order to do that, though, he first had to sneak across the border. Xuanzang’s trek through […]
The Secret History of the Mountain Folk
This post starts out slow, but it goes to some awfully interesting places. I hope you enjoy it! In the late 19th century, Japan underwent a period of rapid change. Emperor Meiji seized control of the country from the military dictators who’d ruled it for centuries. He dragged the whole of Japan from feudalism into […]
Zheng He’s Alien Invasion
Zheng He was a diplomat/explorer/admiral for the Ming dynasty of China. In 1410, he felt compelled to invade the far-off island of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) and overthrow the king of Kotte. At the time, few Ceylonese people had even heard of distant China. Nonetheless, a fleet of enormous Chinese warships came from out of […]
The Dunhuang Manuscripts and the Mogao Caves
In the early 20th century, an itinerant Daoist priest in the deserts of western China discovered a treasure trove of medieval documents, hidden for a thousand years behind a false door in an abandoned Buddhist temple. The discovery would give historians a corpus of documents they still use to this day – and the discovery and […]
Origin Stories & The Lake of Milk
The inhabitants of the remote Nepalese village of Tarang tell an interesting story about how their village came to be. Tarang is a hamlet of a few hundred souls clinging to the mountainside in the out-of-the-way Tichurong valley in the Himalayas (check it out at these coordinates: 28°52’47.3″N 82°58’52.0”E). Tarang’s origin myth is a great […]