Afrasiyab (Samarkand)

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Painted around 660 CE, a single Sogdian throne-room wall shows ambassadors from China, Byzantium, and India attending the same feast — a diplomatic photograph 1,400 years before photography.

The AWB's tri-legged swastika flag flew at rallies where Eugene Terre'Blanche rode a white horse before crowds of 50,000 — a movement that threatened civil war, then imploded when apartheid ended anyway.

Xuanzang slipped out of Tang China illegally in 629 CE, walked to India alone through deserts that killed his guide, and returned 16 years later with 657 Sanskrit texts on 22 horses.

Screaming Lord Sutch lost 40 consecutive British elections across 35 years, founding the Official Monster Raving Loony Party — yet outlasted so many rivals that he became the longest-serving party leader in UK history.

Vidkun Quisling seized the Norwegian government by radio announcement on the night of Germany's 1940 invasion. He was executed by firing squad in 1945 — and his surname had already entered the dictionary as the universal word for traitor.

The Philippine tarsier kills itself by slamming its skull into cage bars when stressed — a pocket-sized primate with eyes larger than its brain, martyring itself rather than enduring a hand.

A sitting president joked, live on stage, that he should have 'gone first' before soldiers raped and killed Australian missionary Jacqueline Hamill in 1989. The crowd laughed. He won the election anyway.

Billy Batts told Tommy DeSimone to 'go get your shinebox' at a Queens bar in 1970; DeSimone beat and stabbed him to death, then dug him up and reburied the body twice as heat closed in.

Dawn Brancheau, SeaWorld Orlando's most senior trainer, was pulled into the water and killed by orca Tilikum in front of an audience on February 24, 2010. She had 16 years of experience. The show had just ended.