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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.