31 gennaio

Zhu Zhanji, Yongle’s grandson, pulled Ming troops out of Vietnam and wanted foreign rulers to send tribute again. Few had come since the fleets stopped, so in 1430 he sent Zheng He out one last time.

The city founded an exchange bank in its town hall to bring order to the hundreds of worn and clipped coins in circulation. Large bills of exchange had to be settled in its bank money, which came to trade at a premium over the coins it stood for.

The Senate had passed it in April 1864; the House, lobbied hard by Lincoln, voted 119 to 56, just over the two-thirds needed, and the chamber erupted in cheers.

Ten months after ordering Americans to hand in their gold coins at 20.67 dollars an ounce, Roosevelt revalued gold at 35 dollars. The price would anchor the world’s money for the next 37 years.

Hitler made Paulus a field marshal the day before, since no German field marshal had ever surrendered. He gave himself up in the basement of the Univermag store; the northern pocket followed on 2 February. Of some 91,000 prisoners, only about 5,000 ever came home.

Hundreds of thousands followed the procession to the Yamuna. Nominated five times, he never won the Nobel Peace Prize; in 1948 the committee gave none, finding “no suitable living candidate”.

During the lunar new year truce, communist forces attacked more than a hundred towns and cities in South Vietnam; a squad even got inside the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. It was a military defeat for the attackers, and it turned American opinion against the war.

North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces took most of the old imperial capital in a night. U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese troops retook it street by street; much of the city was destroyed. After the battle, graves were found holding about 2,800 people killed by the occupiers, and estimates of all…

A month of filmed rehearsals meant to end in a live show: first on a cold sound stage at Twickenham, then, from 22 January, in the basement studio at Apple with Billy Preston on keyboards. The film became Let It Be; the tapes sat unused for a year.