Carrom, where players flick a striker to knock wooden discs into the board's corner pockets, comes from India. Maharajas played it in their palaces, and a carrom board with a glass surface still survives in a palace in Patiala.
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📍 Buttevant & Doneraile, County Cork, Ireland
The first steeplechase is said to have been a bet in 1752: two riders raced about 6 km across country in County Cork, Ireland, from the church steeple of Buttevant to the one in Doneraile, jumping walls and ditches on the way. The steeples gave the race its name.
📍 London, England
Netball grew out of basketball at a women's PE college in Hampstead, London, from 1893, and its first rules were published in England in 1901. It then spread across the British Empire.
📍 Kyoto (the Heian court), Japan
Kai-awase began as a pastime of Heian-period nobles in Japan. A clam shell fits only its own other half, so players hunted for matching pairs among painted shells, often showing scenes from The Tale of Genji. Later the shells graced upper-class weddings.
📍 Guangdong (Canton), China
Kumquat is Cantonese for 'golden orange'. The little fruit is eaten whole, skin and all: the peel is the sweet part and the pulp the sour one. The plant hunter Robert Fortune brought it to Europe in 1846.
📍 China
Tofu comes from China. Legend credits Han-dynasty Prince Liu An with inventing it over 2,000 years ago, but the first clear written mention dates from around 965 AD. Japan's first record of it is from 1183.
📍 Thailand (formerly Siam)
Siamese cats come from Thailand, once called Siam, where old manuscripts of 'Cat-Book Poems' describe them. In the late 1870s the American consul in Bangkok sent one, named Siam, to President Rutherford B. Hayes: the first documented Siamese in the US.