Word: asia
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...spell has also sparked controversy within China with regard to whether or not the Dai people should hold Songkran, the New Year's festival celebrated in parts of East and Southeast Asia, in which lively water-splashing is a prominent feature. Duan Jinhua, head of the information office in Yunnan's Xishuangbanna Dai autonomous prefecture, announced that the fete would not be canceled, but that the sprinkling spree would be cut down from five hours to two. The government of the Dehong Dai and Jingpo autonomous prefecture, on the other hand, has decided to cancel official festivities and leave citizens...
...Manas air base, outside the capital, Bishkek, there was another condition: that the U.S. military stop calling it a base. The U.S. agreed, and so since last summer the busy hub has been officially known as the Transit Center at Manas - a Greyhound bus terminal for central Asia and the U.S. war in Afghanistan...
...near the modern day town of Talas - where it's reported anti-Bakiyev unrest first broke out on Apr. 6 - a vast army sent forth by the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad defeated an expeditionary force of the Chinese Tang Dynasty. Historians suggest that this decisive battle solidified Central Asia within the orbit of the Muslim cultural world rather than that of China. It also marked an epochal moment in human history: as the story goes, war prisoners taken to the city of Samarkand were compelled to set up a mill to produce a key Chinese invention: paper. That product would...
...migration of a significant population of Russians as well as the dilution of Kyrgyz culture. New tree-lined urban centers like Bishkek as well as spas along the land's salt lakes became popular destinations for Russians escaping the industrial grimness further north. As in elsewhere in Central Asia, Cyrillic is the adopted script and vodka shops abound...
...Soviet policy of gerrymandering borders to better control populations of ethnic minorities has left the independent states of Central Asia a mess of territorial disputes. The populous and staunchly Muslim Ferghana Valley, where Osh lies, had been fragmented over the decades by Moscow and, after 1991, fell within the borders of independent Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. This has led to all sorts of confusion and conflict. Bloody riots in Osh in 1990 between ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz marred the run-up to independence; political spats over everything from border troop movements to the sensitive issue of water access blow...