Word: koreas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gandhara kingdom and its art are important because it shows the impact of Hellenistic influence brought by Alexander the Great and his Macedonians. Likewise Gandharan Buddhist art reached as far as China, Korea, and Japan. After it became part of the pre-Islamic Persian Empire, Gandhara's culture went on to influence artistic developments in the Middle East. Peshawar, Swat and much of northern Pakistan lay astride a portion of the old Silk Road, the ancient highway that transported riches between the east and west. Indeed, the Jehanabad Buddha looks out over a stretch of the old path. Later...
...Years' Day is more about revolutionary zeal than ushering in 2010, when thousands of North Koreans will walk in a yearly procession to the Kumsusan Memorial Palace at the northeast outskirts of the capital to pay homage to the preserved body of Kim Il Sung, the father of North Korea. (See pictures of Kim Jong...
...missionaries arrived as early as the 1880s (Catholics arrived centuries earlier but the religion didn't catch on as widely), building religious schools and universities across the capital. Later, as Christianity gained popularity, worshippers held group prayers in public every Christmas. But after the Japanese government took control of Korea in 1910, the new administration began suppressing religious gatherings, and by the 1950s, - after the Korean War left the peninsula split into a communist north and capitalist south, - the northern government began to carry out executions of thousands of Christians for the years to come...
...government took a more nuanced - if short-lived - approach to religion in the following decades. In 1988, South Korea expanded economic ties with its neighbor, bringing in more foreigners on business and exchange trips; the following year Pyongyang hosted the World Festival of Youth and Students, a massive socialist festival that attracted 22,000 people from 177 countries. With an influx of foreigners, the government saw a need to build four state-run churches in Pyongyang in the following years, though critics maintain they're facades to show the world that it supports freedom of religion. "[Foreign missionaries] are allowed...
...Still, some scholars contend the regime practices a kind of pragmatic tolerance of Christianity, suggesting North Korea's intelligence agency chooses to ignore underground churches because of their political usefulness. "How can they not know the whereabouts of 100,000 Christians?" says Philo Kim, a professor of sociology at Seoul National University in South Korea, who has visited North Korea several times to study Christianity there. "The government takes advantage of them by dispatching spies into the churches. They can gather information about the churches in China and how they help defectors escape...