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SPEAKER_00 The Mongol Empire was famous for its vastness and brutality.
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SPEAKER_00 At its height in the year 1279, the empire took up 16% of all of the land on
Earth and was home to about one in every four humans on the planet.
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SPEAKER_00 Like all empires, the Mongols came and went, but what if suddenly the
empire was recreated tomorrow?
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SPEAKER_00 This is an exploration of what this hypothetically would look like if we
can suspend the disbelief that this could ever, ever happen.
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SPEAKER_00 So this is a map of the current world, and this is a map of the Mongol Empire
circa 1279 placed on top.
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SPEAKER_00 The empire would stretch all the way from South Korea to modern-day
Poland, but it could have been even bigger if a few more things had gone
right for the Mongols.
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SPEAKER_00 They tried invading Japan twice, but were twice smacked down by some
angry weather who didn't think that it was quite fair for the Mongols to
be using boats.
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SPEAKER_00 And speaking of boats, they also tried invading Indonesia once, but
guerrilla fighting in the jungle in the 13th century wasn't exactly the
biggest strength of the Mongol Empire.
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SPEAKER_00 They also pushed west as far as Gaza and Palestine, and raided into
Austria and Northern Italy and Europe before being pushed back.
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SPEAKER_00 So, this map is the maximum amount of land they ever controlled at one
time in 1279, so this would be the borders of the modern-day Mongol
Empire recreated today.
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SPEAKER_00 28 different countries would lose all or some of their territory to this
monstrosity, and the total population of this beast would be around
1,900,459,000 people.
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SPEAKER_00 making it by far the largest country in the world in terms of both size and
population, just like the old Mongol Empire was.
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SPEAKER_00 About 1 out of every 4 people in the modern world would be a citizen of this
empire, just like in the 13th century.
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SPEAKER_00 And out of the 15 biggest cities in the empire, 11 out of them would all be
located in China.
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SPEAKER_00 In fact, only one of the 15 biggest cities would even be located outside
of Asia, Moscow in Europe.
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SPEAKER_00 The three biggest cities would be Moscow, Beijing, and Shanghai, and we
would need to decide on a capital for the country to get behind.
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SPEAKER_00 You may think that a logical choice would be Ulaanbaatar, which is the
current capital of Mongolia.
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SPEAKER_00 But Ulaanbaatar wasn't even founded until 1693, long after the Mongol
Empire had already collapsed and only has a population of 1.3 million
people today, or about half of all of Mongolia's modern population.
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SPEAKER_00 The city is surrounded by extremely sparsely populated land and is very
far away from the rest of the empire.
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SPEAKER_00 So the most logical choice of a capital would probably be Beijing
instead, which not only is the current capital of China, but was
actually a historical capital of the Mongol Empire under this guy,
Kublai Khan, back when it was known as Khanbaliq.
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SPEAKER_00 Beijing would be the second biggest city in the empire and has enormous
infrastructure already in place since it is already the capital of
China, and we would of course have to rename the city back to Khanbaliq.
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SPEAKER_00 As for the actual people that would make up this empire, 66% or
two-thirds of the population would be ethnic Han Chinese, which would
likely dominate the country.
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SPEAKER_00 The next two biggest ethnic groups would be the Russians and Koreans,
who would account for 6% and 4% of the population respectively.
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SPEAKER_00 And the remaining 28% would be a mix of dozens of different groups.
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SPEAKER_00 Hilariously, in the modern Mongol Empire, ethnic Mongols themselves
would only account for 0.16% of the total population.
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SPEAKER_00 As for languages, about 51% of everybody in this country would be
speaking or able to understand Mandarin Chinese, which would likely
become the official or one of the official languages.
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SPEAKER_00 Russian would be understood by around 11% of the country and would be the
second largest language.
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SPEAKER_00 A combination of three other Chinese languages known as Wu, Yue, and Min
combined would be understood by 10.5% of everybody, and the next two
biggest languages would be Korean and Urdu.
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SPEAKER_00 The empire would also be extremely religiously diverse, and surely
everybody living inside would think that that's going to be just fine.
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SPEAKER_00 About 58.5% of everybody would adhere to traditional Chinese folk
religions, while Sunni Islam would be the second largest belief system
at 12.1% of the population.
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SPEAKER_00 Buddhism would be next at 5.3%, followed by Orthodox Christianity at
4.6%, Shia Islam at 4.5%, Protestants at 2.2%, and Catholics at 0.8%.
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SPEAKER_00 Atheists and non-religious persons would account for the remaining
12% of the population.
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SPEAKER_00 This also means that the modern Mongol Empire would be the world's
largest Muslim country, largest atheist country, and third largest
Christian country by numbers of people.
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SPEAKER_00 The Mongol Empire would also have a very powerful economy with a nominal
GDP of 17.778 trillion US dollars, which means that despite having all
of this land, it would still only be the world's second largest economy
remaining behind the United States.
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SPEAKER_00 The GDP per capita would be $9,355, meaning the citizens of the country
would be ranked with the 62nd best living standards in the world,
slightly behind the conditions in Malaysia and Mexico.
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SPEAKER_00 Finally, the modern Mongol Empire would also have an estimated
military size of 6,131,000 active soldiers, making the Mongol
military by far the largest in the world.
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SPEAKER_00 It's fascinating to think what this country would actually look like,
what would its government look like, how would it conduct its diplomacy
with the rest of the world, and could it actually survive for very long?
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SPEAKER_00 These are questions for another time, so please feel free to leave any
answers or questions that you may have below.
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SPEAKER_00 And as always everybody, thank you so much for watching.