Today is Veterans Day in the United States. Woodrow Wilson declared November 11, 1919 as Armistice Day to mark the one-year anniversary of the end of hostilities in World War I. It was made a legal holiday in 1938, and in 1954 the holiday was renamed Veterans Day and expanded to honor all of those who had served their country.
On this date in 1844, the Qing government reversed a long-standing ban on the propagation of Catholicism in the empire, allowing missionaries to work in the five treaty ports opened after the first Opium War.
In 1851, Wang Maoyin (1798-1865), an imperial censor and an official at the board of finance, requested the throne change the imperial examination system to include more practical topics such as military affairs and technology. He was worried about the steady encroachment of the foreign powers on Qing sovereignty. Wang would later ask the trhone to make the 《海国图志》”A Gazeteer of the Maritime Countries,” a history/atlas of foreign countries published by the official Wei Yuan 魏源 (1794-1856), required reading for all officials, princes, and Manchu banner troops. His requests went unheeded and during the next decade the Qing would suffer a stunning set of military defeats both by the foreign powers and the Taiping and Nian rebels.
Today is also the coronation date for Aisin-Gioro Zaichun, who officially ascended the throne as the Tongzhi Emperor on this date in 1861. Historically, restorations were not full-on revivals of dynastic fortunes so much as a brief delay during an inexorable decline, a stay of execution at best. Moreover, past ‘restorations’ usually involved strong central leadership. Not so much in this case: Zaichun was only six and his mother was a piece of work.
Finally, in the time honored tradition of study abroad, on this date in 1920 a young Zhou Enlai boarded an ocean liner bound for France as part of a work-study program for Chinese students in Europe. Also onboard was a dimunutive 16-year old from Sichuan named Deng Xiaoping.
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