Asia on the Move: From the First Settlers to Today
Who moved across Asia, from the first modern humans among the Denisovans to rice farmers, seafarers from Taiwan, steppe peoples, Sogdian merchants, the Turks, Parsis, Tai, Russians in Siberia, Chinese and Indian labourers, refugees, Gulf workers and the great move to the cities.
Stop 01 · c. 60,000–45,000 years ago, debated
Someone Was Already Here
When our species moved east across southern Asia, the land was not empty. Many scholars picture a fast journey along the coasts of Arabia, Persia and India, living off the shore. Ahead lay the Denisovans, known from a finger bone found in a Siberian cave in 2008 and identified by its DNA. A jaw at least 160,000 years old shows they also lived high on the Tibetan Plateau. Modern humans reached Laos, where a skull at Tam Pa Ling is at least 46,000 years old. Genetic models favour a spread after about 47,000 years ago, though some sites look older. The two peoples had children, probably in South-East Asia. New Guineans carry roughly 3.5 per cent Denisovan DNA, by one estimate.
When our species moved east across southern Asia, the land was not empty. Many scholars picture a fast journey along the coasts of Arabia, Persia and India, living off the shore. Ahead lay the Denisovans, known from a finger bone found in a Siberian cave in 2008 and identified by its DNA. A jaw at least 160,000 years old shows they also lived high on the Tibetan Plateau. Modern humans reached Laos, where a skull at Tam Pa Ling is at least 46,000 years old. Genetic models favour a spread after about 47,000 years ago, though some sites look older. The two peoples had children, probably in South-East Asia. New Guineans carry roughly 3.5 per cent Denisovan DNA, by one estimate.
Rice reshaped the map of who lived where. A 2024 study puts the rapid rise of domesticated rice in the lower Yangtze at about 11,000 years ago, while others date domestication nearer 6000 BCE. Farmers from southern China later moved down into Vietnam and Myanmar, in a first pulse about 4,000 years ago. They mixed with local hunter-gatherers and probably carried the Austroasiatic languages, spoken today from Vietnam to India. Other farmers took to the water. They reached Taiwan somewhere around 4000 to 3000 BCE, and their descendants were in the Batanes Islands by about 2200 BCE. Most scholars accept this 'Out of Taiwan' story, though rivals exist. Austronesian languages came to stretch from Madagascar to Easter Island.
How the ancestors of Sanskrit reached South Asia is a sensitive question, so the evidence comes first. A woman buried at Rakhigarhi in Indus times shows no steppe ancestry, though she alone of 61 people sampled there gave enough DNA. A 2019 study found steppe ancestry arriving in the first half of the second millennium BCE, and it forms up to 30 per cent of the ancestry of some modern South Asian groups. Its authors read this as evidence for a steppe origin of Indo-Aryan languages, while one grants that bones cannot show what anyone spoke. Most scholars accept a migration, and the old picture of violent invasion has been dropped. A minority, mainly some Indian scholars, hold that the languages began in India.
For thousands of years Japan belonged to the Jomon, hunter-gatherers and fishers few in number and, it seems, cut off by rising seas. Around 3,000 years ago paddy rice arrived, and with it people from the mainland, most likely by way of southern Korea. In Europe, early farmers largely replaced the hunters they met. Japan went differently. Two Yayoi skeletons from north-western Kyushu, about 2,000 years old, are roughly half Jomon by ancestry, which suggests the two groups merged. Two people from one region can only tell us so much. Then came a surprise. Three individuals from the later Kofun period, when a state was forming, carry far more East Asian ancestry, pointing to a further wave.
In 209 BCE a ruler named Modu took power among the Xiongnu and built a confederation on the Mongolian Plateau that became Han China's great rival. Ancient DNA shows a truly multiethnic empire, diverse even within its elite families. Its wars pushed others into motion. About 176 BCE the Xiongnu crushed the Yuezhi of Gansu. Part of the Yuezhi headed for the Ili Valley around 165 BCE, then were driven on to Bactria around 132 BCE. The Chinese envoy Zhang Qian found them there about 126 BCE and proposed an alliance. They had settled, and they said no. Their Kushan descendants went on to rule into north-western India. In 48 CE the Xiongnu split, and the southern half accepted Han overlordship.
In 311 the Chinese capital Luoyang fell to Han-Zhao, a state in which descendants of the Southern Xiongnu held power. Refugees crossed the Huai and then the Yangtze. The Jin court followed, setting up again at Jiankang, today's Nanjing, and migrants came to make up about a sixth of the south's people. Officials drew provinces for them with northern names, expecting to go home. The return never came. After the An Lushan rebellion wrecked the northern heartland, China's economic centre shifted south. When the Song lost the north in 1127, the capital moved to Hangzhou. One reconstruction from the demographer Ge Jianxiong has four-fifths of China's people in the north in 2 CE, and about two-thirds in the south by 1085.
News of Luoyang's fall survives in a handful of lost letters. Around 313 a merchant wrote home to Samarkand that the city was no more. The letter never arrived. Aurel Stein found it in 1907 in a watchtower near Dunhuang. The writers were Sogdians, Iranian speakers from what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, who had settled in towns across China. They moved silver, musk and pepper in small, costly loads. One letter comes from Miwnay, a woman stranded at Dunhuang without clothes or money, begging her mother to get her home. By the Tang, Sogdians held posts in the army and government. Arab armies began conquering their homeland in the early 8th century, and in time their language gave way to Persian.
One people left Asia heading west and kept India in their speech. The Roma's ancestors came from northern India, and their language still shows it. The hard part is the date. A 2012 genetic study of 13 Romani groups across Europe pointed to north or north-western India, and its abstract dates the founding group there to about 1,500 years ago. One linguist says that is no departure date, and that the language evidence fits about 1000 CE. The Middle East and the Caucasus left their mark on the language, though little in the genes. By about 900 years ago Roma were spreading out from the Balkans. What happened next belongs to our tour of Europe.
Turkish is spoken today more than 5,000 kilometres from where its story began. In 552 a clan who had lived in the Altai, working metal for the Rouran, overthrew their masters and founded the first Turkic khaganate. Their rule reached across Central Asia, and Turkic writing of about 730 survives in Mongolia's Orkhon valley. Over the following centuries Turkic speakers drifted west. The Oghuz took up Islam in the 10th century and settled around Bukhara. Their Seljuk leaders took Baghdad in 1055, and in 1071 Alp Arslan beat the Byzantines at Manzikert. Byzantine civil war then opened Anatolia. Yet DNA suggests the language travelled further than the people: most Turkic peoples still resemble their neighbours, with a smaller trace of Inner Asia.
After the Muslim conquest of Iran, some Zoroastrians looked for a new home. Nearly all we know comes from one poem, the Qissa-i Sanjan, written by a Parsi priest in 1599, long after the event. It tells of a journey from Khorasan to a port called Hormuz, then to Diu, and at last to Gujarat. There a local king, Jadi Rana, let the newcomers stay if they took up the local language and dress and gave up carrying weapons. Scholars have proposed landing dates from 716 to 936, and some think trade drew them as well as persecution. Later Parsis followed the English East India Company to Bombay, which by the 1720s was the main centre of Parsi life.
Much of mainland South-East Asia speaks as it does because of a move hardly anyone wrote down. Tai speakers once lived in what is now southern China, growing wet rice in the valleys. Linguists date their spread by the words they carried. The ancestor of the south-western Tai languages holds Chinese loanwords as late as the Tang, so the move probably began between the 8th and 10th centuries. The name Syam then turns up in Cham and Pagan inscriptions of the 11th and 12th. By the 13th century Tai groups had reached Assam. Tradition dates the Tai kingdom at Sukhothai to 1238, and Lan Na rose at Chiang Mai in 1296. Mongol conquest in Yunnan in 1253 may have sent still more south.
Some of the longest journeys ran by sea. In the 9th century a ship with stitched planks, of Arab or Indian type, sank off Belitung in Indonesia, full of Chinese bowls from Changsha. It is clear early proof of direct trade between the western Indian Ocean and China. Merchants from Arabia and Iran settled in Guangzhou and Quanzhou, and some married locally. A family named Pu grew rich and rose to high office. Ibn Battuta, who passed through in the 1340s, called Quanzhou the greatest port in the world. Traders also carried their faith. Arab, Indian and Persian merchants based themselves at Malacca, founded about 1400, whose rulers turned to Islam and whose port became the region's Muslim hub.
The Mongols moved people the way others moved grain. When a city fell, craftsmen and other skilled workers were picked out and enslaved. In the 1250s the friar William of Rubruck found Karakorum with a quarter of Chinese artisans, and working there a goldsmith from Paris and a woman of Metz named Paquette, captured in Hungary. German slaves dug gold and made arms far to the east of Talas. Chinese captives went to Mongolia and the Muslim world into the 1330s. Experts went the other way too, Central Asian Muslims to run parts of China and Chinese and Khitans to run Bukhara and Samarkand. Those settlers, with the coastal traders, are among the ancestors of the Hui, 11.4 million people in China's 2020 census.
From the Red River, Vietnamese settlers pushed down the coast into Cham and Khmer land. In 1471 Le Thanh Tong's armies took Vijaya, capital of Champa, and Champa's northern lands opened to settlement. Soldiers and landless peasants cleared ground in military colonies and planted rice. From the 17th century settlers moved into the Mekong Delta, then Khmer territory, and the Nguyen lords won the far south from Cambodia by diplomacy and force. Emperor Minh Mang annexed what remained of Champa in 1832. Vietnamese writers later called all this Nam tiến, the southward advance. Historians now question the phrase: critics say it hides a series of separate events and takes the view of the Vietnamese majority over that of the Cham and Khmer.
As Vietnam pressed south, Russia pressed east. In 1581 Cossacks under Yermak began their campaign beyond the Urals, and in 1582 they entered Qashliq, capital of the Siberian khanate. Forts followed along the rivers: Tyumen in 1586, Tobolsk in 1587, Yakutsk in 1632. Fur drove it all. Local peoples were made to pay tribute in pelts, called yasak, often under violence. Russians reached the Pacific in 1639, only 58 years after setting out. Disease did terrible damage: smallpox is reported to have killed up to 80 per cent of the Tungus and Yakuts in the 1650s. Mass farming settlement came late. After the railway and a 1906 decree, more than three million people officially moved east.
When Britain ended slavery, its sugar planters wanted new workers. In 1834 the Atlas left Calcutta for Mauritius with 36 labourers on a trial scheme. By the time India stopped the system in 1917, over a million people had crossed the dark waters, the kala pani, to Mauritius, British Guiana, Trinidad, Natal and Fiji. Each signed or thumbprinted a contract, an 'agreement', which in Fiji became girmit. Most planned a short stay, yet most never went back. A far larger flow ran nearby. The historian Sunil Amrith counts about 28 million crossings of the Bay of Bengal, in both directions, in the century to 1940. Those journeys left an Indian diaspora around the ocean, from Natal to Malaya.
From the mid-1800s, poverty and ruined villages drove people out of Fujian and Guangdong, while new treaty ports and British Hong Kong opened the way. Many went south. Amrith reckons about 19 million Chinese moved into South-East Asia between about 1840 and 1940. They worked the tin mines and rubber plantations of Malaya and crowded into Singapore, where free trade drew merchants after 1832. Some came indentured under the coolie trade, abolished there in 1914. Hakka tin miners had reached Bangka even earlier, in the 18th century. Adam McKeown's figures put Asian migration of this era on a par with the ocean crossings from Europe. In 2020 Chinese made up about three-quarters of Singapore's people and nearly a quarter of Malaysia's.
At midnight on 14 and 15 August 1947 British rule ended and two states came into being, Pakistan and India. Punjab and Bengal were divided according to Muslim and non-Muslim majorities, and millions found themselves on the wrong side of a line. Hindus and Sikhs moved one way, Muslims the other. Economists working from district census records estimate that 14.5 million people arrived and 17.9 million left, a gap they describe as 3.4 million 'missing' people. They call it one of the largest and most rapid migrations in history. The violence was terrible and the deaths will never be known exactly: historians Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh note estimates from 200,000 to two million.
The late 20th century made refugees on a vast scale. After 1975 people left Vietnam by sea in small boats. UNHCR records 839,228 Vietnamese arrivals in camps across South-East Asia and Hong Kong by 1997, and many others died at sea. By mid-1979 the camps were overflowing, and 65 governments met at Geneva. Resettlement pledges doubled to 260,000, and in the next 18 months more than 450,000 people from Indochina found new homes. The United States took the most, then France, Australia and Canada. Further west, Afghans began crossing the borders in the late 1970s. By the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 more than three million were in Pakistan and about three million in Iran.
Oil changed who lived on the Gulf. From the 1950s its states began hiring abroad, at first mostly Arabs from Yemen, Egypt, Jordan and beyond, along with Palestinian refugees. Over time governments turned towards Asia, and by 1995 Asian workers far outnumbered Arab migrants. The Gulf states held over seven million migrants just before the 1991 war and almost sixteen million by 2008. Foreigners now make up about half the region's people, some 70 per cent in Kuwait and nearly 90 in Qatar and the UAE. Most come on short contracts under kafala, a sponsorship system that ties each worker to a local sponsor. Kerala alone had about 2.2 million emigrants in 2023, some 80 per cent of them in the Gulf states.
Much of today's movement runs inside countries, from villages to cities. China's 2020 census counted 376 million people living away from their registered home, up from 221 million ten years before, and many of them moved from inland provinces to the coast. Under the hukou system, in place since the 1950s, they can still be shut out of services such as local schools. The UN's 2025 figures name Jakarta the world's most populous city, at nearly 42 million, followed by Dhaka at almost 40 million and Tokyo at 33 million. Of the top ten only Cairo lies outside Asia. Tens of thousands of years after those first walkers came east, Asia's people are still packing up and moving on.