Word: samarkand
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...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 later spread through Muslim lands and eventually to Europe. (See pictures of the ouster of the Kyrgyz government...
...claims to have been born, firstly, as a mare near the Caspian Sea in 1125 B.C. In A.D. 1402, he says, he was reincarnated as a peddler in Samarkand and, half a millennium later, after stints as a firewood collector and an "innkeeper in an unknown land," he says he was born the eldest son of a farmer in Gunsan, present day South Korea, in 1933. Walking home from school one day in that "obscure corner of the world" - then like the rest of the country under Japanese colonial occupation, but now a drab port with an American Air Force...