Eastern History

Most history apps teach one country at a time. Eastern History puts China, Korea and Japan side by side on a single timeline, so you can finally see what was happening in all three at the same moment.

While the Spring and Autumn period was opening in China, Gojoseon was already eight centuries old in Korea. When the Kamakura shogunate took power in Japan, Goryeo was carving the Tripitaka Koreana under Mongol invasion. Those connections are the point of this app, and they are hard to see in any book that covers one nation per chapter.

WHAT IS INSIDE

• 245 events across four acts, from Gojoseon and the Jōmon period to the Meiji Restoration and the opening of the ports.
• Three countries in parallel columns. Scroll down through time, swipe sideways to compare.
• Every event opens to a full explanation, the events it connects to, and what the other two countries were doing at that moment.
• 1,190 quiz questions — multiple choice and true/false — including questions built specifically around cross-country comparison.
• Progress tracking: what you have read, what you have answered, and the questions you keep getting wrong.

HOW IT WORKS

Read an act, then test yourself on it. Each act's quiz unlocks once you have read through its timeline, so the questions always cover ground you have actually seen. Questions you miss come back in later sessions until they stick.

The question set is fixed and checked, not generated on the fly. Every question has one defensible answer and an explanation that tells you why.

FIVE LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE HISTORY ITSELF

English, Korean, French, German and Spanish. This is not just the menus: every event title, every description, every era name and all 1,190 questions are translated. The app opens in your device's language and falls back to English if it does not ship yours.

WORKS WITHOUT A CONNECTION

The entire timeline and every question are built into the app. There is no server, no account, no sign-up, and no sync. Put the phone in aeroplane mode and everything still works — which is rather the point on a commute or a flight.

YOUR PROGRESS STAYS YOURS

What you read and how you score is stored on your device and nowhere else. We run no servers for this app and hold no database of its users. You can erase everything from Settings at any time.

A NOTE ON ADVERTISING

The app is free and carries a single banner advert. Where consent is required by law, you are asked before the advertising system starts, and you can change that choice later in Settings. Nothing you read or answer is ever shared with advertisers — it never leaves your device in the first place.

FOR STUDENTS AND THE CURIOUS

Useful if you are studying East Asian history and keep losing track of how the three national stories line up. Useful too if you simply like knowing that Confucius and the Buddha were near contemporaries, or what Japan was doing while Rome fell.

Recent changes:
• Daily route: three events, three countries, then three questions. About five minutes a day.
• Review due: missed questions return after 1, 3, 7, 14 and 30 days.
• Save events to read later and pick up where you left off.
• Resume an unfinished quiz, or practise the event you just read.
• Your week at a glance on the Progress screen.
• Smoother timeline zoom, search and settings; fixed a rare crash on relaunch.