10 septembre

Kublai’s line ruled China, Mongolia, Manchuria and Tibet from Khanbaliq and the summer capital Shangdu. It kept Chinese officials at arm’s length and ranked its subjects by origin, with Mongols first and southern Chinese last.

The last Yuan emperor fled north to Shangdu as the Ming army closed in, and Xu Da entered the capital days later. The Mongol khans ruled on in the steppe as the Northern Yuan, but never again in China.

Meeting the Dauphin Charles on the bridge at Montereau to make common cause against the English, the Duke of Burgundy was killed by the Dauphin’s men. His son Philip the Good went over to Henry V, and the alliance gave the English Paris and the north.

Pregnant at 42 and sure she would not survive the birth, she worked through the nights on a French translation of the Principia with a commentary, sent the manuscript to the Royal Library and died six days after her daughter was born. Published in full in 1759, it is still the standard French…

Van Helsing finds Lucy ashen in the morning after a night in which Seward slept through; “It is not too late”, he says, and since Arthur is not there, it is Seward’s blood this time. Mrs. Westenra tells Seward kindly, “You want a wife to nurse and look after you”, and Lucy turns crimson.

A killing in a forest told four ways, none of them reliable. Akira Kurosawa did not know his film had been entered until it won: an Italian distributor in Tokyo had suggested it, and the studio’s own president disliked it. The win opened the West to Japanese cinema, and to Asian cinema generally.

The marathon ran at dusk along the Appian Way and finished by torchlight at the Arch of Constantine. Bikila ran it barefoot in 2:15:16.2, a world best, and became the first Black African Olympic champion. Four years later he won again, in shoes.

On an X-ray film of repeated DNA from a technician’s family, Alec Jeffreys saw bands that differed from person to person yet were shared within the family. In 1988 the method convicted Colin Pitchfork of two murders in Leicestershire, the first conviction by DNA, after it had cleared another…

Gyula Horn announced on television the evening before that East Germans could leave for any country they chose from midnight, breaking a 1969 treaty with East Berlin. Tens of thousands drove west through Austria within weeks.