23 gennaio

Zhu Yuanzhang proclaimed the Ming, “bright”, at Yingtian, today’s Nanjing, on 23 January 1368 and reigned as the Hongwu Emperor. Ming armies drove the last Yuan emperor out of Dadu that September. His son the Yongle Emperor, who took the throne from his nephew in 1402, moved the capital to…

At Yingtian, his capital on the Yangtze, he took the throne as the Hongwu emperor of a new dynasty, the Ming, “bright”, and sent his armies north.

Four Deccan sultanates allied against Vijayanagara and beheaded its regent Rama Raya on the field. For months afterwards the capital was looted and burned, and never lived again.

Henslowe marked the play new, performed by the Earl of Sussex’s Men in a short winter season, and took £3 8s. The quarto printed that year names three companies that had played it: Derby’s, Pembroke’s and Sussex’s servants.

After a campaign in the nationalist press against a foreign woman, she lost by two votes to the inventor Édouard Branly. The Académie elected its first woman in 1962, a corresponding member: Marguerite Perey, her own former assistant and the discoverer of francium.

Enver Bey led a band of Unionist officers into a cabinet meeting, where Yakub Cemil shot the war minister, Nazım Pasha. The coup brought the Committee of Union and Progress to sole power, and with it Enver, Talat and Cemal.

Terms now end at noon on 20 January, cutting the four-month wait after an election. Too late for 1933: Franklin Roosevelt was the last president inaugurated in March, and his first term was shortened to fit.

At his first Carnegie Hall concert Ellington premiered a suite of about 45 minutes, a “tone parallel to the history of the American Negro”. The critics were cool, and he rarely played it complete again, though its themes stayed in his book for decades.

Twenty minutes, in a cabin at 7 °C, looking out into a cloud of silt their landing had stirred up. It hid the bottom, and no photographs came out.

About four and three-quarter hours, at just under a metre a second. Past 9,000 m a loud crack shook the craft: one of the outer Plexiglas panes of the entrance tunnel window had split. The sphere held, and they kept going.

The depth gauge read 37,800 feet; corrected for pressure and salinity it became 10,916 m (35,814 feet). Piccard reported a flatfish on the bottom. Biologists now doubt it; it may have been a sea cucumber.

Between Trieste leaving the bottom and James Cameron landing on it, no one went down to the Challenger Deep. More people walked on the Moon in that time than visited it. Only two robots, Kaikō and Nereus, reached the bottom.

They let go of iron-shot ballast and rose faster than they had gone down, surfacing in a rough sea to be picked up by the Wandank.

Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh of the US Navy, in a steel sphere 2 m across under a float holding about 85,000 litres of petrol. The tug Wandank had towed Trieste out from Guam. Local time 08:23 to 16:56.

South Dakota’s vote completed ratification. No one could now be charged a tax to vote in a federal election; the Supreme Court struck down poll taxes in state elections in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966).

The first craft through the asteroid belt and the first to Jupiter. It carries a gold-anodised plaque, designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake and drawn by Linda Salzman Sagan, showing two people and the way to the Sun. Its last faint signal came from about 80 times Earth’s distance from the Sun.