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WonderHistory

The Ifugao Rice Terraces are mountain fields in the Philippines, carved into steep slopes to grow rice with shared water systems.

UNESCO inscribed the Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras on the World Heritage List in 1995, the first site ever listed as a 'cultural landscape', meaning the fields and the farming culture that keeps them working are protected together. The listing covers five terrace clusters, including Batad and Bangaan in Banaue. Each cluster is topped by a muyong, a privately owned but communally managed forest that holds rainwater and feeds the irrigation channels below. Guidebooks often say the terraces are 2,000 years old, but radiocarbon dating by the Ifugao Archaeological Project suggests most were built about 400 years ago, around the time of Spanish contact. Their age is still debated.

UNESCO World Heritage CentreRead card

WonderLanguage

On La Gomera in the Canary Islands, people can whistle Spanish: Silbo Gomero turns speech into whistles that carry up to five kilometres across the island's deep ravines, much farther than a shout.

Silbo Gomero is not a separate language but a way of whistling Spanish: the whistler turns the sounds of speech into a few vowel and consonant whistles that rise and fall in pitch, sometimes with a finger in the mouth. It descends from a whistled speech used by the island's pre-Spanish inhabitants, the Guanches, and was adapted to Spanish after the conquest in the 1400s. It was vital for shepherds and farmers on an island where a neighbour visible across a ravine might be an hour's walk away. Use fell sharply from the 1950s, as people left the island and telephones arrived. The Canary Islands made it a compulsory school subject in 1999, and UNESCO added it to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2009.

Silbo GomeroRead card

WonderArt

The Benin Bronzes are thousands of brass and bronze plaques and sculptures made for the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin, in today's southern Nigeria. They recorded kings, ceremonies and court life until British troops looted them in 1897.

The works were made by a royal guild of casters in Benin City, now in Edo State, Nigeria, from at least the 13th century; many plaques date from the 16th and 17th centuries and honour past kings, called obas. In February 1897 British forces took the city, the palace was burned and thousands of objects were carried off. Britain presented the raid as punishment after Benin soldiers killed most of a British party travelling to the city, but historians see it as part of a push for colonial control. The works were sold and scattered across museums and private collections in Europe and North America. In 2022 Germany transferred ownership of about 1,130 bronzes to Nigeria, and other museums have begun returns.

Kingdom of BeninRead card

WonderMigration

Polynesian navigators crossed thousands of kilometres of open Pacific without compass, charts or instruments. They steered by rising and setting stars, the sun, ocean swells and seabirds, and kept track of speed and direction in their heads.

By the 1970s the old skills had almost disappeared, and some scholars argued that the Pacific islands had been settled by canoes drifting there by chance. The Polynesian Voyaging Society set out to test this with the help of Mau Piailug, a master navigator from the small island of Satawal in Micronesia, where a closely related tradition survived. In 1976 he guided the double-hulled canoe Hōkūleʻa about 4,000 kilometres from Hawaii to Tahiti without any instruments. The voyage showed that deliberate long-distance navigation was possible. Piailug went on to teach Hawaiian navigators, among them Nainoa Thompson, and traditional wayfinding has since been revived across the Pacific.

Polynesian wayfindingRead card

WonderTrade

The Silk Roads were not a single road but a web of caravan and sea routes that linked China with Central Asia, India, Persia and the Mediterranean for more than 1,500 years. Along with silk and spices, they carried religions, inventions and diseases.

The name is much younger than the routes: the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen coined it, as Seidenstraße, in 1877. The trade grew under China's Han dynasty from the second century BC, when envoys and caravans opened paths westwards through oasis towns such as Kashgar and Samarkand, while ships linked Chinese, Indian, Arab and East African ports. Few merchants travelled the whole way; goods passed from hand to hand. Along these routes Buddhism reached China, and papermaking travelled west to the Islamic world and then to Europe. In the fourteenth century the plague is thought to have spread along them towards the Black Sea and Europe.

Silk RoadsRead card

WonderTrade

The Hanseatic League was an alliance of German merchant guilds and trading towns that dominated commerce in the Baltic and North Sea from the 13th to the 15th century, with Lübeck as its informal capital and trading posts from London to Novgorod.

The League grew in the late 12th century from a few north German towns and at its height took in nearly 200 settlements across what are now eight countries. It had no king, army or permanent government. Member towns sent delegates to occasional assemblies called Hansetage, shared trading privileges, and sometimes blockaded or even fought rivals, as in the war that defeated Denmark in 1370. Its great foreign offices, called kontors, stood in London, Bruges, Bergen and Novgorod. As strong territorial states rose, the League faded; its last assembly met in 1669. Hamburg and Bremen still call themselves Free Hanseatic Cities.

Hanseatic LeagueRead card

WonderArchitecture

The Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali, often called the largest mud-brick building in the world, survives because the whole town re-plasters its walls with fresh mud every year before the rains.

The present building was completed in 1907 under Ismaila Traoré, head of the town's guild of masons, on the site of a mosque said to date from the 13th century. Its walls are made of sun-dried mud bricks, and bundles of palm wood jutting from them serve as permanent scaffolding. Rain wears the plaster away each year, so every spring the town holds a festival, the Crépissage, to renew it. Men and boys race to carry baskets of mud up the walls, women bring water from the river, and the elders of the masons' guild direct the work. Djenné's old town has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988.

Great Mosque of DjennéRead card

WonderCulture

The haenyeo of Jeju, an island off South Korea's southern coast, are women who dive without breathing equipment, holding their breath for one to three minutes to gather abalone, sea urchins, octopus and seaweed from as deep as 20 metres.

Haenyeo means 'sea women' in Korean. Girls traditionally learned the work from older divers in their village, and the women run local diving associations that set rules on when and what may be harvested and look after one another's safety. UNESCO recognised this way of caring for the sea when it added the culture of Jeju haenyeo to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2016. Their numbers have fallen sharply, from 23,081 in 1965 to 14,143 by 1970 and a few thousand today. Most are now over 60, and some of the oldest, past 80, still dive.

Jeju haenyeoRead card

WonderFood

Fermentation is the work of yeasts and bacteria that feed on the sugars in food and turn them into acids, alcohol or gas. It gives us bread, yoghurt, cheese, wine and pickles, and it kept food safe to eat for thousands of years before refrigerators.

People fermented food long before they knew why it worked: residues in pottery jars from Jiahu in China show that a fermented drink of rice, honey and fruit was made there about 9,000 years ago. For centuries fermentation was thought to be a purely chemical process. In the 1850s the French chemist Louis Pasteur showed that it is the work of living microorganisms, and that different microbes produce different results, some pleasant and some that spoil food. That insight led to pasteurisation, gentle heating to kill unwanted microbes, first used on wine in the 1860s and later on milk.

FermentationRead card

WonderFood

A sourdough starter is flour and water in which wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria live together. The yeasts make the gas that raises the bread; the bacteria make the acids that give it its sour taste and help it keep longer.

Until commercial baker's yeast became common in the 19th century, much leavened bread was made this way, by keeping back a piece of each day's dough to start the next batch. In 1971 the US Department of Agriculture researchers Kline and Sugihara isolated the bacterium behind the famous sour taste of San Francisco bread, later named Fructilactobacillus sanfranciscensis; it has since been found in starters all over the world. It lives beside a yeast that cannot use maltose, the sugar the bacterium prefers, so the two share the dough without competing. Temperature and how often the starter is fed decide which microbes gain the upper hand, and so how sour the bread turns out.

SourdoughRead card

WonderMigration

Over several thousand years, Bantu-speaking farming peoples spread from the highlands between today's Cameroon and Nigeria across most of central, eastern and southern Africa. Hundreds of related Bantu languages, including Swahili, Zulu, Shona and Kikuyu, are spoken there today.

Historians once pictured a single great 'Bantu migration'. Linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence now points to a slower spread along many routes, roughly between 4000 BC and AD 500, with Bantu speakers reaching what is now South Africa by about AD 300. The German linguist Wilhelm Bleek coined the name Bantu in 1862 from the word for 'people' shared by many of these languages. Farming, herding and iron-working spread in different mixes from region to region, and everywhere the newcomers mixed with the people already living there. The click sounds of Zulu and Xhosa, for example, were borrowed from the Khoisan languages spoken earlier in southern Africa.

Bantu migrationsRead card

WonderEvolution

Most adults in the world make little lactase, the enzyme that digests milk sugar, after childhood. In several peoples with a long history of dairy farming, genetic changes that keep the enzyme working for life spread through natural selection, a trait called lactase persistence.

In Europe the most common variant sits in a stretch of DNA that switches the lactase gene (LCT) on and off; a widely cited estimate puts its first spread at roughly 7,500 years ago. Different mutations with the same effect arose independently among cattle herders in East Africa and pastoralists in the Middle East, so evolution reached one solution several times. Scientists call this gene-culture coevolution: a cultural habit, keeping animals for milk, changed which genes helped people survive. The story is more complicated than it first looked. A 2022 study in Nature found that Europeans used milk for thousands of years while the variant stayed rare, and suggested it spread fastest in famines and epidemics, when milk could make people without it seriously ill.

Lactase persistenceRead card

WonderTrade

From around the eighth century, camel caravans crossing the Sahara linked West Africa with North Africa and the Mediterranean, carrying gold north, salt south, and books, scholars and ideas in both directions.

Camels, which spread across the Sahara in the first centuries AD, made the crossing practical: they could go for days without water between wells and oases. Salt cut in desert mines such as Taghaza was in huge demand in the West African savanna, which had gold but little salt, and the gold of the Ghana, Mali and Songhai empires reached Mediterranean mints. Caravans could number thousands of camels. Timbuktu grew rich on this trade and, from the fourteenth century, became a centre of Islamic learning around mosques such as Sankore; many thousands of manuscripts from its libraries survive today. The same routes also carried enslaved Africans north across the desert.

Trans-Saharan tradeRead card

WonderTrade

For more than two thousand years, Indian Ocean trade ran on the monsoon winds, which reverse with the seasons. Timing their voyages to them, merchants linked East Africa, Arabia, India, South-East Asia and China through a chain of busy ports.

In the northern Indian Ocean the monsoon blows from the south-west in summer and from the north-east in winter, so a ship could sail out on one season's wind and home on the next. A Greek sailing guide from the first century AD, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, already describes this trade between Egypt, Arabia, East Africa and India. Arab and Persian dhows (wooden sailing ships), Indian and Malay vessels, and later Chinese fleets used the same system; Admiral Zheng He's expeditions reached East Africa in the early 1400s. Ports such as Kilwa, Calicut and Malacca grew rich on spices, cotton cloth, porcelain and gold, and Islam, Swahili culture and many words travelled the same routes.

Indian Ocean tradeRead card

WonderTrade

From 1565 to 1815, Spanish ships known as the Manila galleons crossed the Pacific between Manila in the Philippines and Acapulco in Mexico, carrying Asian silk, porcelain and spices east and returning with American silver.

Usually only one or two galleons sailed each way a year. The westward run from Acapulco took about three months on the trade winds, but the return had to swing far north to catch westerly winds and could take four to six months, and scurvy and storms cost many lives. Much of the silver, mined at Potosí in today's Bolivia and at Zacatecas in Mexico, ended up in China, whose economy increasingly ran on silver. Chinese porcelain arriving in Mexico influenced the blue-and-white Talavera pottery of Puebla, and Manila grew into a meeting place for Chinese, Spanish, Filipino and Japanese traders. Dozens of galleons were wrecked over the route's 250 years.

Manila galleon tradeRead card

WonderTrade

Cowrie shells, the glossy shells of small sea snails, served as money in parts of Africa, Asia and the Pacific for centuries, because they were durable, easy to count and carry, and hard to fake.

Cowries were used in China during the Shang dynasty, more than 3,000 years ago, and the Chinese sign for 'shell' still appears inside many characters to do with money, such as those for 'goods' and 'buy'. Most of the cowries used in Asia and Africa came from the Maldive Islands. The traveller Ibn Battuta saw them used as currency in the Mali Empire in the 1350s, and from the sixteenth century European ships carried them to West Africa by the ton, often as ballast. There they paid for everyday goods and taxes, and they were also used to buy enslaved people in the Atlantic slave trade. As imports soared their value fell, and colonial currencies replaced them around 1900.

Cowrie shell moneyRead card

WonderArchitecture

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, finished in 537 as the cathedral of Constantinople, has one of the most influential interiors in architecture. Its great dome rests on pendentives, curved triangles of masonry that let a round dome sit on a square plan, and 40 windows around its base fill it with light.

Emperor Justinian I ordered the church after riots in 532 burned down its predecessor. Two scholars, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, both skilled in mathematics and mechanics, designed it, and it was finished in under six years. The dome is about 31 metres across and its crown rises some 55 metres above the floor. The historian Procopius wrote that it seemed not to rest on masonry but to hang from heaven on a golden chain. Earthquakes brought part of the first dome down in 558, and it was rebuilt higher and steeper. The building was a cathedral for over 900 years, a mosque after the Ottoman conquest of 1453 and a museum from 1934, and it has been a mosque again since 2020.

Hagia SophiaRead card

WonderArchitecture

Angkor, capital of the Khmer Empire in today's Cambodia from the ninth to the fifteenth century, was ringed by giant reservoirs, moats and canals that stored monsoon rain and moved water across an urban area of about 1,000 square kilometres.

The largest reservoirs, called barays, are vast rectangles banked with earth: the West Baray, built in the eleventh century, measures about eight kilometres by two and still holds water. Moats such as the one around Angkor Wat framed temples modelled on the sacred mountain and surrounding oceans of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. Radar and aerial surveys published in 2007, and airborne laser scanning (lidar) that saw through the forest in 2012, revealed roads, canals and house mounds across at least 1,000 square kilometres, the largest known pre-industrial settlement. Researchers still debate how much the barays watered rice fields. Tree rings show long droughts broken by intense monsoons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which damaged the network and probably contributed to Angkor's decline.

Angkor hydraulic systemRead card

WonderArchitecture

The eleven churches of Lalibela in northern Ethiopia were carved out of solid volcanic rock in the Middle Ages, each shaped from the top down inside deep trenches, and they are still a place of pilgrimage for Ethiopian Christians.

Tradition credits the churches to King Gebre Meskel Lalibela of the Zagwe dynasty, who reigned around the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries; archaeologists think some parts are older, and the building sequence is still debated. Legend says he meant the site as a new Jerusalem after Saladin captured Jerusalem in 1187, and many places there carry biblical names, such as a stream called the Jordan. Masons first cut trenches to free a block of rock, then hollowed out rooms, columns, windows and doors from it; the most famous church, Bete Giyorgis, is shaped like a cross when seen from above. Tunnels link the churches, which are still in daily use. UNESCO listed them as a World Heritage Site in 1978.

Rock-Hewn Churches, LalibelaRead card

WonderArchitecture

The Alhambra, the hilltop palace and fortress of the Nasrid sultans of Granada in Spain, is threaded with channels, pools and fountains that cool its courtyards, mirror its buildings and water the Generalife gardens beside it.

The Nasrids, the last Muslim dynasty in Spain, ruled Granada from 1238 to 1492. Their founder, Muhammad I, began the palace complex, and water reached the dry hilltop through the Acequia Real, the Royal Channel, which draws on the Darro River several kilometres upstream and runs by gravity along the hillside. The Generalife, a summer palace with terraced gardens, was built in the early fourteenth century. In the Court of the Lions, from the later fourteenth century, twelve marble lions carry a fountain whose water runs out in four channels, echoing the Islamic image of paradise as a garden watered by four rivers. Some of the original channels still water the gardens today.

Alhambra and GeneralifeRead card

DriveTrade

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, six fairs a year in the Champagne region of north-eastern France were among the main meeting places of European trade, where Flemish cloth met Italian merchants, Mediterranean spices, credit and currency exchange.

The fairs rotated between four towns, Lagny, Bar-sur-Aube, Provins and Troyes, and each lasted several weeks, so that together they filled most of the year. The Counts of Champagne gave merchants safe conduct on the roads, and fair wardens enforced contracts and punished defaulters, so strangers from distant cities could trust each other. Deals were often settled on paper: debts run up at one fair were cleared at its end or carried over to the next, an early step towards modern banking. The fairs declined in the early fourteenth century. Champagne had passed to the French crown when its heiress married the future Philip IV in 1284; royal taxes rose, war disrupted Flemish trade, and Italian ships began sailing directly to Bruges.

Champagne fairsRead card

WonderMigration

Starting from Taiwan more than 4,000 years ago, seafarers speaking languages of the Austronesian family settled the islands of South-East Asia and much of the Pacific, as far as Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island, and to the west reached Madagascar.

Most linguists, archaeologists and geneticists agree that the expansion started in Taiwan and reached the Philippines by around 2000 BC, though the newcomers mixed extensively with people already living in the islands. Sailing outrigger canoes, boats steadied by a float on one side, they carried taro, yams, pigs, dogs and chickens. From about 3,300 years ago a distinctive stamped pottery called Lapita marks their spread into the western Pacific. Navigating by stars, ocean swells and birds, Polynesian voyagers later reached Hawaii, Easter Island and finally New Zealand, around AD 1250 to 1300. About 1,500 years ago others crossed the Indian Ocean to Madagascar, which is why Malagasy is most closely related to a language of Borneo.

Austronesian expansionRead card

DriveMigration

During the Great Migration, from the 1910s to the 1970s, roughly six million Black Americans left the U.S. South for cities in the North, Midwest and West, reshaping work, politics, music and family life.

People left to escape Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation and kept most Black Southerners from voting, as well as racial violence and poorly paid work as sharecroppers, tenant farmers paid with a share of the crop. Historians usually describe two waves: the first, from about 1916 to 1940, began when the First World War left northern factories short of workers; the second and larger wave ran from 1940 to 1970. Chicago, Detroit, New York and Los Angeles gained large Black communities. Migrants brought Southern music with them: Muddy Waters moved from Mississippi to Chicago in 1943 and helped create electric Chicago blues. In the North they still met discrimination, including redlining, in which lenders and a federal agency marked Black neighbourhoods as too risky for home loans.

The Great MigrationRead card

WonderArchitecture

The Sagrada Família in Barcelona is the basilica Antoni Gaudí worked on from 1883 until his death in 1926, and it is still being built. Its tree-like columns and forms taken from nature are his, and the Nativity façade and crypt completed in his lifetime are on UNESCO's World Heritage List.

Gaudí took over the project in 1883 from the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar and turned a conventional neo-Gothic church into something new. For an earlier church he had studied arches with hanging chains: a chain hung from two points sags into a natural curve, and turned upside down that curve gives the shape in which a stone arch carries its load purely by compression. He also used ruled surfaces, curved shapes such as hyperboloids that can be built entirely from straight lines, which made complex stonework easier to cut. As an 'expiatory' church, built as an act of atonement, it is paid for by donations and today largely by visitors' tickets, one reason it has taken so long. Pope Benedict XVI consecrated it as a basilica in 2010. Gaudí is buried in its crypt.

Sagrada FamiliaRead card