Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Including the Asian portion of the former Soviet Union, Asia measures more than 17 million square
miles, nearly a third of the Earth's land surface. The continent covers more area than the continents of
North America, Europe, and Australia combined. Asia is not only the largest continent physically, but it
has a combined population of more than 2.5 billion people, about half the world's total population. More
than 1 billion of those are Chinese. There are seventy-eight Asian cities that have populations of more than
a million people each.
Nearly rivaling China in population is India, currently home to nearly 17 percent of the world's popula-
tion. Sometime in the next century, India will supplant China as the most populous country in the world and
by 2100, its population will be 1,631,800,000, according to World Bank estimates. Today, at least 100,000
people in Bombay pay rent for the right to sleep on a small stretch of sidewalk.
The world's tenth most populous country—also one of its poorest—is Bangladesh, where the median
age is only sixteen years. Once part of Pakistan, from which it is separated by a thousand-mile stretch of
northern India, Bangladesh won its independence after a brutal civil war in 1971. One of the most densely
populated areas in the world, and with a maximum elevation of only 660 feet, Bangladesh is threatened by
constant flooding, the most dangerous and frequent natural disaster in the country. Three major rivers flow-
ing out of the Himalayas—the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and the Meghna—meet in southern Bangladesh
to form the largest delta in the world, and their monsoon-swollen waters are an annual hazard. The defor-
estation of the Himalayas, caused by massive cutting of trees for firewood, worsens the problems of the
Bangladesh floods. In 1984, a severe flood left a million people homeless. Flooding in 1988 inundated
three quarters of the country. Add to Bangladesh's own natural woes the regular cyclones that form in the
Bay of Bengal, such as the one in April 1991 that killed 125,000 people and left as many as nine million
homeless. Yet ironically, Bangladesh has become a refuge for people from neighboring Myanmar, formerly
known as Burma, where a protracted civil war is forcing thousands of people to flee to Bangladesh, over-
taxing what is already a desperate situation.
In the Philippines, a collection of about 7,100 islands approximately 500 miles off the southeast coast
of mainland Asia, 30 million people (of 60 million total) live in absolute poverty. About 95 percent of the
population lives on the eleven largest islands.
Set against these scenes of privation is the other side of Asia. The nations of the Pacific Rim, led by
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia, boast some of the most dynamic economies in the world. And
at an even greater extreme are the oil-producing nations of the Asian Middle East, including the states of
the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, and Iraq. Although parts of the Middle East are more closely associated with
North Africa or Mediterranean Europe for historical, religious, and cultural reasons, these countries all
form part of the Asian landmass.
Why Is the Orient Called “the Orient”?
The Orient has long been labeled by Westerners as “inscrutable” and “mysterious.” Also mysterious is
where the word
Orient
—generally meaning the countries of East Asia—comes from. And what does that
have to do with arriving in a strange place and stopping to get “oriented”? Or getting lost and feeling “dis-
oriented”?
Both of these words—the place name “Orient” and the verb “to orient”—come from the same source:
the Latin word
oriri
, which means “to rise,” and the related
oriens
, which means “rising.” Since the sun
rises in the east,
oriens
was used in ancient times to denote the direction of the rising sun, the land and
regions east of the Mediterranean.
Orient
, meaning the eastern lands, eventually passed into the English
language in the fourteenth century from the Old French.
