Dunhuang manuscripts

Digitization of a Dunhuang manuscript

A tulip, known as "the Viceroy" ( viseroij ), displayed in the 1637 Dutch catalogue Verzameling van een Meenigte Tulipaanen ("Collection of a Crowd of Tulips"). Its bulb was offered for sale for between 3,000 and 4,200 guilders (florins)…

Dunhuang manuscripts

A monk walled up 40,000 manuscripts in Cave 17 at Dunhuang around 1000 AD, then plastered it shut. The cache included sutras, contracts, love poems, and a star atlas — forgotten until 1900.

Golden eagle

At 150 mph in a stoop, the golden eagle strikes with talons exerting 750 psi — roughly the grip of a hydraulic press on a soda can. Civilizations from the Mongols to Rome named themselves by this bird.

Tulip mania

In 1637 Amsterdam, a single Semper Augustus tulip bulb sold for 10,000 guilders — enough to buy a canal house. The market collapsed in one week in February, leaving traders holding contracts for flowers that didn't exist.

Mengistu Haile Mariam

Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam ran Ethiopia's Red Terror from 1977 to 1978, killing between 30,000 and 750,000 citizens; families of the executed were billed for the bullets used in the executions.

District Six

Under the Group Areas Act, apartheid bulldozed Cape Town's District Six — a jazz-loud, mosque-and-church neighbourhood of sixty thousand people — and relocated them to sand flats twelve miles away. The rubble sat empty for decades.

Kim Philby

Kim Philby headed British intelligence's anti-Soviet section while simultaneously reporting to Moscow Centre. For nine years he sat across the table from the people hunting his handler — and warned Soviet networks whenever they got close.

Aurelian

Murdered by his own secretaries after single-handedly stitching Rome's three fractured pieces back together in five years. The man who saved the empire couldn't survive his own staff.

Chagai-I

On May 28, 1998, Pakistan detonated five nuclear warheads inside Koh Kambaran mountain; the granite turned white, then grey. A nation that had denied the bomb for two decades announced it in a single afternoon.

Jesse Livermore

He made $100 million shorting the 1929 crash, then lost it all twice more. Jesse Livermore walked into a New York coat-check room with a pistol in 1940. The note said he was a failure.