1842The Treaty of Nanking ends the First Opium War
In the 1830s British merchants were smuggling ever larger amounts of Indian opium into China, paid for in silver. When the imperial commissioner Lin Zexu seized and destroyed their stocks at Canton in 1839, Britain sent warships. Steam gunboats and modern guns overwhelmed the Qing forces along the coast, and in the summer of 1842 a British fleet sailed up the Yangtze, cut the Grand Canal that fed Beijing and anchored before the walls of Nanjing.
With the old southern capital at its mercy, the Qing court gave way. On 29 August 1842, aboard the British flagship HMS Cornwallis, the British envoy Sir Henry Pottinger and the imperial commissioners Qiying and Yilibu signed the Treaty of Nanking. China ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain, opened five ports to British trade and residence, ended the Canton merchants’ monopoly and agreed to pay a heavy indemnity. It was the first of the ‘unequal treaties’ that Chinese historians count as the start of a century of humiliation.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: USC US-China Institute: Treaty of Nanjing (Nanking), 1842 ↗
1526Süleyman the Magnificent crushes the Hungarian army at Mohács
Five years after taking Belgrade, the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent marched north again in 1526 with a large army and some 300 cannon. Hungary was ill prepared to meet him: its king, Louis II, was only twenty, its nobles were quarrelling, and help from the rest of Christian Europe never came. Louis gathered what troops he could and chose to fight on the open plain near Mohács, beside the Danube.
On 29 August 1526 the Hungarian knights charged, but they were cut down by Ottoman artillery and the musket fire of the Janissaries, and within a few hours the army was destroyed. Louis was killed as he fled, falling from his horse or drowning in a swollen stream. His death ended the Jagiellonian line in Hungary and Bohemia, whose crowns passed to the Habsburgs. Hungary was split for a century and a half between Habsburg and Ottoman rule, with Transylvania in between.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Battle of Mohács (1526) ↗
1949The Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb
After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Stalin ordered his scientists to build a bomb of their own as fast as possible. The physicist Igor Kurchatov led the work, with the secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria in overall charge, and the project was helped by detailed information passed on by spies inside the American Manhattan Project. The design, a plutonium bomb, closely followed the American ‘Fat Man’.
On 29 August 1949 the device, known as RDS-1, was exploded on a tower on the steppe of the Semipalatinsk test site in Soviet Kazakhstan, with a yield of about 22 kilotons. American aircraft picked up radioactive traces, and on 23 September President Truman told the world that the US monopoly had ended years sooner than expected. The nuclear arms race had begun. The Soviet Union carried out 456 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk, with lasting harm to the people who lived nearby.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: CTBTO: 29 August 1949, first Soviet nuclear test ↗
1825Portugal recognises Brazil’s independence
When Napoleon invaded Portugal in 1807 the Portuguese royal family fled to Rio de Janeiro, and for thirteen years Brazil was the heart of the empire. After King João VI went home to Lisbon in 1821, the Portuguese parliament tried to put Brazil back in its old colonial place. His son and heir Pedro, left behind as regent, refused, and in September 1822 he declared Brazil independent and was soon crowned its emperor. Portugal would not accept the loss, and fighting followed in several provinces.
Britain, which traded heavily with both countries, brokered a settlement, and its envoy Sir Charles Stuart went to Rio to negotiate on Portugal’s behalf. On 29 August 1825 the Treaty of Peace and Alliance was signed there: Portugal recognised Brazil as an independent empire with Pedro I as its sovereign, while João VI kept the honorary title of emperor. In a separate agreement Brazil took on a payment of two million pounds to Portugal, money largely borrowed in London.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brazil, Concórdia treaty database: Treaty of Peace and Alliance between Brazil and Portugal, 1825 ↗
1475Two kings meet on a bridge at Picquigny
In the summer of 1475 Edward IV of England landed at Calais with one of the largest English armies ever sent to France, planning to renew the Hundred Years’ War with his ally the Duke of Burgundy. But the Burgundian help never arrived in strength, and King Louis XI of France, who preferred buying peace to fighting for it, offered terms. The two armies faced each other across the Somme.
On 29 August 1475 the two kings met at Picquigny, near Amiens, on a bridge built over the river for the occasion, with a wooden grille between them in case of treachery. They agreed a seven-year truce. Edward went home with 75,000 crowns and the promise of a pension of 50,000 a year, and his daughter was promised to the French heir. No final peace was ever signed, but the meeting at Picquigny is often taken as the real end of the Hundred Years’ War.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: How did the Hundred Years’ War end? ↗
