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Wow, this is a fascinating timeline! I'm very interested in evidence of ancient Chinese presence in the Indian subcontinent, so this timeline really resonates with the inner amateur cultural anthropologist in me. I thought I'd share this picture of a temple I randomly took in Patan, Nepal...

What's the big "what if" here? The idea that William's Syndrome influenced the popular conception of elves, especially since the Romantic period, is very possibly reality. The same is true for legends of changelings and "feral children" being influenced by pre-modern observations of autism and...

Could Jeju work as an independent island city? The present population is about six hundred thousand. Could that be beefed up to at least one million? As for how it happens, there are many possibilities from antiquity up to the Korean War. Other than that, Zanzibar was the first thing to come to...

I've also long been curious about this topic, and it should be noted that in 1762 and 1763, Catherine the Great issued manifestos invited Western European gentiles to migrate to the fertile regions around the Volga River. It offered many incentives to potential immigrants and was open to all...

In pre-modern China and Mongolia, it seems a lot of monotheist communities (Nestorian Christians, Manichaeans, sometimes Muslims, and even Jews) just disappeared due to lapse of faith. They just married into a majority non-monotheist population (Buddhist, Taoist, or other folk religion) and...

Namibia would make more sense as a German penal colony. There's not much economic incentive to send a bunch of convicts halfway around the world just to have them all die of malaria.

There's one historically time-tested region overlooked in this thread: Tamil Nadu. Almost every great ancient empire to arise on the Indian Subcontinent failed to take the Tamils, and they had no serious outside threats until the Europeans showed up. Not only did the Tamils maintain cohesive...

As others pointed out, the Qing Dynasty nominally claimed everything up to Lake Balkhash, which includes today's Almaty, most of Kyrgyzstan (including Bishkek), and the entire eastern half of Tajikistan (Gorno-Badakshan Autonomous Oblast). This historic region is sometimes referred to as the...

Southeast Asia has always been a crossroads of trade between different civilizations -Initially India and China, but later the Islamic and Western worlds as well. Initially, the indigenous cultures practiced localized forms of animism, until Indian merchants and missionaries brought Hinduism and...

I can't pronounce them either, but I'm not from there. I can pronounce local place names in Pennsylvania like Tulpehocken, Punxsutawney, Catasauqua, Conshohocken, Allegheny, Monongahela, Hokendaqua, Susquehanna, Manayunk, Passyunk, Kingsessing, and Wissahickon like the back of my hand, though...

If local people can pronounce OTL city names like Chillicothe (IL, OH, IA) or Dowagiac (MI), they'll adapt to pronouncing these names, too. They'll just alter the pronunciation to fit the phonetics of their English (most Native American place names presumably sound very different from their...

This is an interesting topic and one I've often thought about. I think in order to really see the pre-Islamic elements that have persisted in post-Islamic cultures, you have to look on a case-by-case basis. Here in Xinjiang (and Central Asia on a grander scale), there are a lot of folk beliefs...

I think you're misinterpreting his point. In the realms of pre-modern European Christiandom, nobody interpreted fairies, elves, brownies, domovoi, kobolds, or monaciello as gods either. The point is that any lingering pagan stuff was relegated to folk belief after the arrival of monotheism.

I think Japan and Korea could have had much larger diasporas, particularly the former. While there is a sizeable Japanese diaspora in the Western Hemisphere, and notable ethnic Korean populations in China, the former Soviet Union, and the US, I think there was potential for a much larger spread...

Is it possible to have French Indochina become a unified, independent country comprising modern Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos? By the modern day, it would have a population of about 120 million people, with around 65-70% Kinh (Vietnamese), 10-15% Khmer, 5% Lao, and 10-15% Other (Thai, Han Chinese...

Hindu dieties have been assimilated into East Asian traditions as the result of Buddhism, though, even taking on new life beyond India - For example, there are temples dedicated to Brahma in Thailand and Cambodia, whereas temples specific to Brahma worship are rare in the Insian Subcontinent...

Zoroastrianism may not have been evangelical, but there's a lot to be said about Nowruz, a traditional festival derived from Zoroastrianism, that is now celebrated all over Central Asia among Iranian and Turlic speakers alike. I think Central Asia will be a mix of different religions. For...

Were the turkeys of New England even the domesticated variety? I always thought they were wild turkeys that the natives hunted rather than farmed. The domesticates turkeys came from Mesoamerica and didn't spread far beyond that region until post-Columbian times, unless I'm wrong.

The modern-day Uyghurs who live around the Tarim basin *are* the genetic descendants of the Tocharians (along with the Iranic-speaking Saka who were dominant in Kashgar and Hotan, with further ancestral input from the Turkic tribes who assimilated them and every other people who crossed the...

From World Statesmen: Other interesting cases are the Kingdom of Araucania-Patagonia and Maurice Benyovszky's kingdom in Madagascar. For the 20th Century example, there's also the Kingdom of La Gonave.