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On 4 September 626, Li Shimin took the throne as Emperor Taizong of Tang, two months after killing his brothers at the Xuanwu Gate and executing his ten nephews. He then spent twenty-three years building the most celebrated golden age in Chinese history - governing so brilliantly that history had no choice but to forgive him.
On 27 August 1689, Russia and the Qing Empire signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk. Mediated by Jesuits in Latin, it carved up Siberia and established the foundational template for three centuries of Sino-Russian realpolitik.
On 1 August 1927, Communist officers seized Nanchang and lost the city four days later. The People's Liberation Army marks the defeat as its birthday, and a century later Beijing is still fighting the argument it settled that night: who gets to hold the gun.
On 1 July 1997, Britain handed Hong Kong back to China after 156 years of colonial rule, closing the last major open account from the Opium Wars. Deng Xiaoping designed the deal but died four months before the flag came down, and the fifty-year promise he made has been fraying ever since.
On 5 May 1260, Kublai Khan was proclaimed Great Khan at Shangdu - the place Coleridge would later imagine as Xanadu. He went on to conquer all of China, found the Yuan dynasty, and invent fiat money. He also started the process that ended his grandfather's empire.
On 17 April 1895, China signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki and surrendered Korea, Taiwan, and 200 million taels of silver to Japan. Eight months of unbroken defeats confirmed what the Self-Strengthening Movement had spent thirty years denying: Japan had transformed itself. China had not.
In 1911, a cartel of Western banks lent the dying Qing dynasty £6 million to nationalise China's railways and hand the proceeds to foreign creditors. The protests that followed toppled the empire. The bonds were still worthless in 1983.
In 1836, a Qing official argued for legalising opium to save the empire. The emperor said no. Twenty-two years later, the empire was required by British treaty to permit it.
On 15 March 1638, Fulin was born — the ninth son of the Qing ruler Hong Taiji, and a child no one expected to matter. He was crowned emperor at five, began ruling at thirteen, died at twenty-two, and left behind a dynasty that lasted another 251 years.
Britain forced China to buy opium at gunpoint. Now China is the primary source of the chemicals that make fentanyl, which kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. The symmetry is not accidental, but it is not justice either.