Asian History Trivia
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49 free Asian History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Asia's past runs from the first cities and alphabets of the Near East to the empires of the steppe, the courts of Korea and Japan, and the independence movements that redrew the map after 1945. These 49 questions move across the whole continent rather than parking in one country. Expect dynasties and their founders, temple-building kings, admirals and astronomers, trade routes and spice ports, and the treaties, revolts and declarations that made today's nations. Each answer comes with a short explanation and a cited source. Good for a pub round, a classroom warm-up or a solo test of what you remember: broad questions up front, deeper cuts as you go.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which American port received the Manila galleons that carried Chinese silk across the Pacific from 1565?
Acapulco
Acapulco received the galleons for 250 years, until 1815. Their Asian cargo was then hauled overland through Mexico City to Veracruz on the Gulf coast and loaded onto the treasure fleet for Spain.
Q 02Who became the world's first female prime minister by winning Ceylon's July 1960 election?
Sirimavo Bandaranaike
Sirimavo Bandaranaike led her assassinated husband's party to victory in July 1960, a year after his murder. When she took the office for the last time, in 1994, the president who appointed her was her own daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga.
Q 03Which emirate's ruler, Sheikh Zayed, became the first president of the United Arab Emirates when it was founded in 1971?
Abu Dhabi
Abu Dhabi. Six sheikhdoms launched the union on 2 December 1971 and Ras Al Khaimah held out for two more months, while Bahrain and Qatar, invited into a federation of nine, chose to go it alone.
Q 04Which nation became the first new sovereign state of the 21st century, on 20 May 2002?
East Timor
East Timor, officially Timor-Leste, was a Portuguese colony until 1975 and was then held by Indonesia until 1999. Its people voted to leave in a UN-run referendum that year, and peacekeepers held the ground until the handover.
Q 05Which site, where Ashoka set up a pillar in the 3rd century BCE, is revered as the Buddha's birthplace?
Lumbini
Lumbini's pillar records that Ashoka came in person to honour the spot where the Buddha was born. The place was later forgotten for centuries, until the pillar and its inscription were rediscovered in 1896.
Q 06Which territory stayed Portuguese from 1510 until Indian troops annexed it in December 1961?
Goa
Goa fell to Afonso de Albuquerque in 1510 and became the capital of Portugal's eastern empire. When India invaded in 1961 its governor defied Lisbon's order to fight to the last man, surrendered the next day and was expelled from the army.
Q 07Which of Japan's great unifiers died in 1582 when retainer Akechi Mitsuhide ambushed him at Honnō-ji temple?
Oda Nobunaga
Oda Nobunaga controlled about half of Japan when his own general turned on him as he set out on campaign. Toyotomi Hideyoshi destroyed the traitor within two weeks and carried on the work of unifying the country.
Q 08Bangladesh's nine-month war of independence against Pakistan ended on 16 December 1971 with a surrender in which city?
Dhaka
Dhaka. Bangladesh had been Pakistan's eastern wing, cut off from the west by the whole width of India, whose army joined the war in its last two weeks and took the eastern garrison's surrender.
Q 09Which country is held to have become the first to adopt Christianity as its state religion, in 301?
Armenia
Armenia's King Tiridates III had thrown Gregory the Illuminator into a pit and left him there for over a decade. In the traditional account the prisoner then healed the ailing king and converted him, his court and his kingdom.
Q 10Which 1905 battle saw Japan wreck a Russian fleet that had sailed halfway round the world from the Baltic Sea?
Tsushima
Tsushima cost Russia almost every heavy ship it had sent, and within months both sides were at a peace table in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Theodore Roosevelt brokered the treaty that ended the war.
Q 11Which Korean admiral, left with only 13 ships, held the Myeongnyang strait against more than 130 Japanese warships in 1597?
Yi Sun-sin
Yi Sun-sin had been stripped of command by court rivals and reduced to the ranks; he was recalled only after his successor, Won Gyun, lost almost the whole fleet. His 13 ships then sank about 30 of the enemy in the strait's currents.
Q 12Which Philippine president fled to Hawaii in February 1986 after four days of mass protests on Manila's EDSA avenue?
Ferdinand Marcos
Ferdinand Marcos had himself sworn in at the palace on 25 February, the day Corazon Aquino took the oath elsewhere in Manila. By evening he was heading into exile, and crowds were pouring into the palace to see how he had lived.
Q 13Which city was Pakistan's first capital from 1947 until the government moved north to Rawalpindi?
Q 21Which temple did the Khmer king Jayavarman VII raise at the centre of Angkor Thom, its towers carved with giant smiling faces?
Bayon
Bayon. Jayavarman VII broke with the Hindu god-kings before him to rule as a fervent Buddhist, and beside his temples he gave the empire more than 200 hospitals and rest houses.
Q 22Which sultanate, a great spice entrepôt, fell to a Portuguese fleet under Afonso de Albuquerque in August 1511?
Malacca
Malacca commanded the narrow strait through which all sea trade between India and China had to pass, which is why Albuquerque wanted it. Portugal held the port for 130 years, until the Dutch took it in 1641.
Q 23Which kingdom, built into an empire by Anawrahta from 1044, left over 2,000 surviving temples and pagodas on the Irrawaddy plain?
Bagan
Karachi
Karachi was the capital until 1959, when a commission found it unsuitable and picked a site beside Rawalpindi. Rawalpindi stood in as capital while the new city, Islamabad, was built next door.
Q 14Which fan-shaped artificial island off Nagasaki held the Dutch traders who were Japan's only Western contact from 1641?
Dejima
Dejima was built in the 1630s to pen in Portuguese traders; when they were expelled, the Dutch were moved onto it instead. For two centuries Western science reached Japan through this one small island, as 'Dutch learning'.
Q 15Which Ming loyalist, born to a Japanese mother, drove the Dutch from Taiwan in 1662 after besieging Fort Zeelandia?
Koxinga
Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong) set up a dynastic state on Taiwan that outlived him until 1683, and he died of illness only months after the Dutch surrendered. He had been planning to attack Spanish Manila next.
Q 16Which samurai leader, romanticised as 'the last samurai', led the 1877 revolt against Japan's Meiji government?
Saigō Takamori
Saigō Takamori had helped found the Meiji government and quit it in 1873. He died as his revolt collapsed in September 1877, the old warrior class beaten by an army of conscripted commoners, and the samurai never took the field again.
Q 17Which Qing emperor, reigning from 1735, received George III's Macartney embassy in 1793 and abdicated three years later?
Qianlong
Qianlong stepped down after 60 years so as not to outlast his grandfather Kangxi, who had reigned for 61. The gesture cost him little: as retired emperor he went on holding real power until his death in 1799.
Q 18Which Han-dynasty polymath presented the first known seismoscope to the imperial court in 132 CE?
Zhang Heng
Zhang Heng's device dropped a bronze ball to show the direction of a distant quake. It once fired when nobody at court had felt a thing, and the doubters were silenced days later, when a courier reported an earthquake far to the west.
Q 19Which south Indian dynasty, under Rajendra I, sent a fleet across the Bay of Bengal to raid Srivijaya in 1025?
Chola
The Chola fleet struck Kedah on the Malay Peninsula and Srivijaya's heartland on Sumatra, and took its king prisoner. Rajendra then added 'conqueror of Kadaram', the Tamil name for Kedah, to his titles.
Q 20Which Sri Lankan rock fortress did King Kashyapa build in the 5th century atop a granite column some 180 metres high?
Sigiriya
Sigiriya became Kashyapa's capital because he had murdered his father, the king, by walling him up alive, and expected his exiled half-brother to come back for revenge. Its lion-paw gateway and painted 'cloud maidens' survive on the rock.
Bagan's kings and wealthy subjects built more than 10,000 temples to earn religious merit. On one account the tax-free land donated to religion starved the treasury, and the kingdom fell apart after Mongol invasions in the 1280s.
Q 24The kingdom of Lan Xang, founded by Fa Ngum in the 14th century, was the forerunner of which modern country?
Laos
Laos. Fa Ngum grew up in exile at Angkor, married a Khmer princess and came home at the head of a Khmer army to carve out his kingdom from Muang Sua, today's Luang Prabang.
Q 25Legend says a golden turtle reclaimed the magic sword of Lê Lợi, who freed Vietnam from Ming rule, in which city's lake?
Hanoi
Hanoi. The lake has been Hoàn Kiếm, 'Lake of the Returned Sword', ever since; the real Lê Lợi was as gracious in victory, giving the defeated Ming troops ships and supplies to sail home.
Q 26Which Filipino novelist, author of Noli Me Tángere, was executed by Spain in 1896 and is honoured as the national hero?
José Rizal
José Rizal was shot for rebellion even though he favoured peaceful change over revolt; his novels exposed colonial abuses and galvanised reformers and armed revolutionaries alike. His death day, 30 December, is a national holiday.
Q 27Which city, where the Nobel brothers built their oil company, was supplying half the oil sold on world markets around 1900?
Baku
Baku drilled its first oil well in 1846, thirteen years before the first American strike, and between 1898 and 1901 it pumped more oil than all of America.
Q 28Which religion, founded by Guru Nanak in the Punjab around 1500, centres on the Golden Temple at Amritsar?
Sikhism
Sikhism teaches Ik Onkar, faith in one creator, and Nanak was the first of ten Gurus; the line ended when the scripture itself, the Guru Granth Sahib, was declared the eternal Guru.
Q 29Which dynasty, ruling China from 618 to 907, produced the poets Li Bai and Du Fu?
Tang
The Tang is remembered as the golden age of Chinese verse, and for centuries children learned to read from an anthology of 300 of its poems. A well-known tale has Li Bai drown, drunk, reaching from his boat for the moon's reflection.
Q 30Which Korean dynasty, founded by Taejo in 1392, ruled for five centuries until the Korean Empire replaced it in 1897?
Joseon
Joseon's Confucian scholar-officials shaped Korean manners so deeply that its court dress and etiquette still define 'traditional' Korea. Under its fourth king, Sejong, scholars also devised the Korean alphabet.