Jan 23 in History

1556 — Shaanxi earthquake: The deadliest earthquake (more than 8.0 on the Richter scale) in recorded history hits Shaanxi province, China, in late evening in the middle of a densely populated area where most of the people live in yaodongs, artificial caves in loess cliffs. The sleeping residents are buried alive when the caves collapse. It claims the lives of some 830,000 people as an area of roughly 805km wide is wiped out.

1570 — James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray (born c. 1531), regent for the infant King James VI of Scotland since

1567, is killed with a carbine shot in Linlithgow, Scotland — the first recorded instance of a head of state to be assassinated by firearm.

1719 — The Principality of Liechtenstein is created within the Holy Roman Empire through the union between Vaduz and Schellenberg.

1879 — Anglo-Zulu War: The two-day Battle of Rorke’s Drift, aka the Defence of Rorke’s Drift, in Natal ends in a British victory.

1899 — The Malolos Constitution is inaugurated, establishing the First Philippine Republic. Emilio Aguinaldo is sworn in as its first president.

1900 — Anglo-Boer War: The Battle of Spion

Kop near Ladysmith, Natal, between the forces of the South African Republic and the Orange Free State and British forces starts. It ends the next day in a British defeat.

1912 — The International Opium Convention, the first drug-control treaty, is signed at The Hague.

1920 — The Dutch government refuses demands from the victorious World War 1 Allies to hand over Kaiser Wilhelm II, who abdicated as German Emperor and King of Prussia on November 28 1918 while in exile in Amerongen, the Netherlands.

1952 — Omar Henry, South African cricketer, is born in Stellenbosch. He plays domestic cricket in SA and Scotland and represents Scotland 62 times from 1981 to 1992. He is the second nonwhite cricketer to play for SA, first selected in 1992, after Charlie Llewellyn (1896-1912).

1960 — Trieste, a Swiss-designed, Italian-built deep-diving research bathyscaphe — carrying Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard (son of the boat’s designer Auguste Piccard) and US Navy Lt Don Walsh — reaches a record depth of 10,916m in the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench near Guam in the Pacific. They find that life does exist in the greatest depths of the ocean. Challenger Deep, the deepest known area on Earth, is named after the HMS Challenger, whose crew first sounded the depths of the trench in 1875. The average depth of the ocean is about 3,688m.