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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.
Four hundred and ten years ago today, a Jurchen chieftain proclaimed himself Khan. The dynasty his heirs built solved an ancient problem — and created the conditions for a modern catastrophe.
On 7 February 1906, Aisin-Gioro Puyi was born in Beijing. He became Emperor of China at two, lost the throne at six, spent his life as the plaything of forces vastly larger than himself, and died a gardener.
On 23 January 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang proclaimed himself the Hongwu Emperor and founded the Ming dynasty. He had been born to a destitute peasant family, orphaned by plague, and spent his teens wandering as a mendicant monk. He ended a century of Mongol rule over China.
On 9 January 1127, Jin forces took Bianjing, the Song capital, and seized both Emperor Qinzong and his retired father Huizong - China's greatest painter and its worst tactician. The Northern Song dynasty ended. The humiliation never did.