1839
Daguerreotype Announced
Louis Daguerre revealed his process for fixing an image on a silvered copper plate in a glimmer of mercury vapor. The French government bought the patent and gave it to the world. Within a year, every European capital had studios; within ten, millions of people had seen, for the first time, exactly what they looked like.
Lin Zexu Burns Opium
Qing commissioner Lin Zexu, sent to Canton to stop the opium traffic, confiscated twenty thousand chests of British opium and destroyed them in a trench flushed with seawater and salt. He wrote a firm, polite letter to Queen Victoria asking her to stop the trade. She never answered. A war answered instead.
Tanzimat Edict
At Gulhane Park in Istanbul, the young Sultan Abdulmecid's foreign minister read out a proclamation promising equality before the law, security of life and property, and an end to tax farming for all subjects - Muslim, Christian, Jewish. The Ottoman reform era had officially begun. What it delivered was another matter.
First Anglo-Afghan War
Nervous about Russian designs, the British marched an Army of the Indus through the Bolan Pass, took Kabul, and installed an unpopular shah on the throne. They dug in. Within two years the Afghans would rise, the army would try to retreat through the snow to Jalalabad, and one man in sixteen thousand would make it out.
Ranjit Singh Dies
The one-eyed lion of the Punjab, who had built a Sikh empire from Kashmir to Peshawar, died in Lahore aged fifty-eight. Four of his wives and several slave girls burned themselves on his pyre - the last great royal sati. Without him the Khalsa court fell into murderous court politics, and the British watched from across the Sutlej with interest.