March 16, 1968 was the Mai Lai Massacre in Vietnam, where American soldiers brutally extinguished a Vietnamese village and contributed to the public turn against the war against communists in the former French colony. Five hundred people died. That's brutal, but here are the 10 most brutal massacres in world history:
10. Chinese massacre of 1639. Chinese communities had existed all over southeast Asia for centuries, mostly as merchants, but sometimes as scholars too. This had both good and bad effects. One of the bad effects was that China's merchant class tended to be wealthier than the locals they provided goods and services to, and every now and again Chinese communities were massacred by indigenous inhabitant. The 1639 massacre in the Philippines was especially brutal, as 17,000 to 22,000 people were slaughtered in a joint Filipino-Spanish venture.
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