Pandaria, as I've said before, at first appears quite separate from the rest of Azeroth. No one here has ever seen humans, dwarves, gnomes, draenei, orcs, undead, blood elves, worgen, or goblins. The only version of the Tauren they know split off thousands of years ago and are not remotely the kindhearted, peaceful people we know. The trolls exist to them only in distant mythologized legends, as the bogeyman or the thing that goes bump in the night, and they don't appear to have much of a record of the night elves - even before the sundering, it appears the night elves did not hold sway over what would become Pandaria.
And yet, you scratch the surface and the connections begin to appear. The Mantid are, in fact, another branch of the Aqir, like the Qiraji and the Nerubians. The Mogu appear to be of Titanic origin, like many of the playable races. The Jinyu are transformed Murlocs, changed by the waters of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms just as the Dark Trolls became the Night Elves after they were affected by the Well of Eternity. Even the Grummles are, as you can find out through the book "The Mogu and the Trogg," re-engineered troggs.
And the Sha - the horrific corruption that embodies negative emotions - is the remnant of a dead Old God.
Pandaria is, in a way, a bit of a time capsule. Perhaps that is not exactly the way to look at it, though. Pandaria was isolated from the War of the Ancients, and has not been a part of any of the events running through the last 10,000 years.
Let's break this down, piece by piece:
The Mogu and the Zandalari:
One discovery we make is that the Mogu were actually allies with the Zandalari back in the day. When we first came across the Zandalari, they appeared friendly, even as late as 4.0, as you will encounter friendly and seemingly well-intentioned members of the tribe in Stranglethorn Vale. Yet they have been overtaken by a prophet who wants to return them to their glorious, bloody past, when the trolls ruled the world. Ten thousand years (if not more) is a lot of time for things to change. It's possible that the Zandalari really were good guys when we were fighting on their behalf, but it certainly appears that their past was not so bright.
Either that, or the Zandalari are the most reliable, loyal allies one could ever ask for. In fairness, we do not know that the Mogu were always this cruel and evil. If the Mogu are Titan constructs, one might ask what their specific purpose was. The Earthen (who later became Dwarves - and Troggs, and thus Grummles) were there to work underground, to dig and excavate. The Mechagnomes (who, obviously, became the Gnomes) were there to maintain the sophisticated hidden machinery that kept the planet's facilities running. The Tol'vir were there to guard Uldum and the Reorigination Device. (More on Uldum below.)
That leaves us with the Mogu and the Vrykul. We don't really have a specific purpose for either of them. The Vrykul are certainly important to three of the playable races, as they were the ancestors of humanity (and thus Undead and Worgen.) In the visions of the distant past, we do see Ymiron talk about (and reject) the Titans as their gods. Both the Mogu and the Vrykul seem to have been in a kind of stasis for thousands of years (the Mogu resurgence is a recent thing, if I recall correctly.)
The role for the Mogu seems to have something to do with shaping flesh. They do it easily to themselves, extracting souls and placing them in new bodies, such that death is more of an inconvenience than anything else. Perhaps the Mogu, in their original intended role, had actually been in charge of creating the other Titanic races? I draw the line at them actually being Titans themselves, but if their powers were not granted to them willingly, they certainly seem to have figured out how to use them just fine.
The Trolls are one of the few races we tend to assume pre-dated Titanic arrival. (And as the Old Gods and the Titans seem to disagree over who got there first, they may have even been there before the Old Gods came. So, I suppose it was just Trolls and other various creatures and the Elemental Lords running rampant - though perhaps less stirred up without the Old Gods to egg them on.) They don't seem to be Titanic in any way, yet they also had what now turns out to be a many-millenial alliance with the Mogu. Think about that:
The Zandalari have known about the Mogu, and thus Pandaria, all along.
The Uldum Connection:
For a long time, all we could see of Uldum was a closed off gate in southern Tanaris. When Deathwing broke everything, it included the protective cloaking device that hid the entire region away from the world. Uldum probably serves many purposes, but the key aspect of it is the Origination Device within the Halls of Origination. If we hadn't beaten some empathy into Algalon when he was in Ulduar, he would have sent back his Reply Code Omega and then either he or a similar construct would have headed down to Uldum, pressed a few buttons, and then all of Azeroth would have been atomized.
So it makes sense that the Titans would not want this to be the sort of place someone could just stumble across.
They create this cloaking device, as well as the entire Tol'vir race (some of whom were used in a metallic yet corrupted state by the Aqir, which explains their appearance in Anh-Qiraj and among the Nerubian Scourge forces in Frozen Throne.) (Incidentally, this example of corrupted Titanic races will probably be the subject of another article about how the Curse of Flesh might be the exact opposite of what we think it is.)
Anyway, they make quite the big effort to close the place off.
Now let's look at Pandaria. Through Blue posts and some dialogue with the Klaxxi, we discover that the Sha are actually the remnants of a dead Old God. Not "in a deathlike state," like Cthulu or the states we presumably beat C'thun and Yogg-Saron into. Y'shaarj is dead-dead. And the result is that anyone in the continent in which he resided (/made up the bulk of) who experiences a negative emotion too strongly will actually summon forth a hideous monster that can then corrupt them further or just outright stab them to death with their tentacle spikes.
Remember in Halls of Stone, when we found out that the Titans chose not to just kill the Old Gods because it would destroy the host (you know, the planet?) We didn't really get the specifics on what would happen. Now we know. It's the Sha.
The narrative of Mists of Pandaria is that we lousy brutes show up in the tranquil, peaceful land and ruin it with our imperialist tendencies. Yet I think that's only true if you look at the surface. In reality, Pandaria is the worst place in Azeroth - a giant HazMat area that normal, unsuspecting folks should stay away from.
The legends say that Shaohao, the last Pandaren Emperor, became one with the land in order to hide it away from the War of the Ancients. What if there was a mechanism in place to do that, rather than just the willpower of an extremely potent, magical emperor? Perhaps when the Titans saw the mess they had made killing Y'shaarj, they put together a system to close off the area from the rest of the world - the Mists.
Much as Uldum remained undisturbed for countless eras, Pandaria became stable in isolation. The Pandaren created a society built around avoiding the negative emotions that could summon the Sha, and created the Shado-Pan in order to have a sufficient defense against the regular Mantid swarms that would not allow their emotions to do harm to the land. In other words, the people of Pandaria became the caretakers of the waste facility. And now, after this massive earthquake that broke everything, the mechanism that kept the facility protected is gone, and a bunch of people who have no idea what it is have just blundered in and started playing with levers and dials.
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