The last Emperor of China lived to see Gagarin fly. Puyi took the throne in 1908 aged two, abdicated in 1912 and died in 1967 as an ordinary citizen of the People's Republic who had worked as a gardener and an editor.
The events
- Xinhai Revolution1911–1912 · Wuchang. The Wuchang Uprising of 10 October 1911 led to the fall of the Qing dynasty. The Republic of China was proclaimed on 1 January 1912 under Sun Yat-sen, and the last emperor, Puyi, abdicated in February, ending over two thousand years of imperial rule.
- Gagarin's flight1961 · Baikonur. On 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1 became the first human in space. Circling the Earth once in 108 minutes, he landed safely in the Saratov region. The flight was a triumph for the Soviet space programme.
More amazing facts
- 1908 1908: the Tunguska blast flattened 2,000 km² of Siberian forest, and the Messina earthquake killed some 80,000 people.
- 1908 · 1927 The Tunguska 'meteorite' left no crater.
- 1908 Tea bags, the popular story goes, were an accident.
- 1909 · 1915 There are colour photographs of the Russian Empire over a century old. In 1909–1915 Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky toured the country in a darkroom railway car provided by Nicholas II, shooting everything through three colour filters.
- 1909 · 1910 Leo Tolstoy corresponded with Gandhi.
- 1910 In 1910 people bought 'comet pills'. Astronomers had found poisonous cyanogen in Halley's Comet's tail, which Earth was due to pass through, and hucksters sold pills and gas masks.