Located off the coast of Southeast Asia lies an archipelago of 7,641 islands that constitute the nation of the Philippines.

The Philippines is one of the largest countries in the world by population and has a history and a culture unlike any other in Asia.

The process through which the modern nation of the Philippines came to be is a direct result of its unique history.

Learn more about the Philippines, its geography, and history,

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Usually when I do an episode about a country I tend to do episodes about small

countries. It's pretty easy to cover the story of Lictonstein or Andorra in a

single episode. In the case of the Philippines that is pretty much impossible to do.

The country is simply too big and its history too rich to cover everything given the time constraints

of this podcast. What I'm going to do instead is to just

attempt to give an introduction to the Philippines. Many of the topics that I'll be

covering are worthy of their own future episodes. And that being said, I've probably been asked by more people to do an

episode about the Philippines than any other topic. Moreover, even before I

started this podcast, I knew that the Philippines would probably be requested because of all the

Filipinos I've interacted with online and in person all around the world.

So before I get into the history of the Philippines, let's start with some basic geography of the country.

The Philippines constitute the northern part of the Malay archipelago.

The term Malay archipelago is sometimes confusing because of its similarity to the name of the country of Malaysia.

The Malay archipelago refers to all of the islands between Southeast Asia and Australia,

including the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysian Borneo, Singapore, East Timor, and

Poppo, New Guinea.

And fun fact, in the early 1960s, there was a movement in the Philippines to change the name

of the country to Malaysia, but they were beaten to the punch by the former British colonies of Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak, and Singapore.

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