September 22 in History

The Tang dynasty, once the most powerful and cosmopolitan empire on earth, was already dying when its penultimate emperor was murdered. On September 22, 904, the warlord Zhu Quanzhong ordered the assassination of Emperor Zhaozong, strangling an imperial era that had lasted nearly three centuries and governed over 80 million people. At its height in the 8th century, the Tang had presided over a golden age of Chinese civilization. Chang'an, the capital, was the world's largest city, home to over a million people and connected by the Silk Road to markets stretching from Persia to Japan. Tang poets Li Bai and Du Fu produced works still considered the pinnacle of Chinese literature. The empire's civil service examination system became a model of meritocratic governance that would endure for a thousand years. The collapse began with the An Lushan Rebellion of 755, an eight-year civil war that killed tens of millions and shattered central authority. Provincial military governors accumulated power while the court weakened. By the late 9th century, the Huang Chao Rebellion further devastated the empire, and regional warlords operated as independent rulers in all but name. Zhu Quanzhong had risen from peasant bandit to the most powerful of these warlords. After capturing the emperor in 903, he forced the court to relocate from Chang'an to Luoyang, then systematically murdered Zhaozong's advisors and eunuchs. The emperor's assassination was merely the final formality. Zhu installed the thirteen-year-old Emperor Ai as a puppet, then deposed him in 907 to establish the Later Liang dynasty. China fractured into the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, a half-century of division and warfare that ended only with the Song dynasty's reunification in 960. The Tang collapse reshaped East Asian geopolitics and ended an imperial golden age that Chinese scholars and rulers would look back upon with longing for centuries.

Guru Nanak died on September 22, 1539, in Kartarpur, in what is now Pakistan's Punjab province, at approximately 70 years of age. He had spent the previous two decades establishing a community of followers at Kartarpur, living among them as a farmer and teacher, and building the foundations of what would become one of the world's major religions. Born in 1469 in Talwandi (now Nankana Sahib, Pakistan), Nanak grew up in a Hindu family but showed an early fascination with spiritual questions that crossed religious boundaries. He is said to have refused the sacred thread ceremony, challenging the Brahmanical caste hierarchy as a child. He worked as an accountant for a local Muslim official before experiencing a spiritual transformation at around age 30, after which he declared: "There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim." He embarked on a series of journeys, called udasis, that took him across the Indian subcontinent, to Sri Lanka, Tibet, and according to Sikh tradition, as far as Mecca and Baghdad. At each stop, he engaged with Hindu sadhus, Muslim Sufis, Buddhist monks, and Jain ascetics, debating theology and demonstrating the common ground between traditions. His message was radical in its simplicity: there is one God, accessible to everyone, regardless of caste, religion, or social standing. His teachings rejected the caste system, the authority of Brahmin priests, idol worship, and the efficacy of pilgrimage and ritual fasting as paths to salvation. He taught that God could be reached through honest work, sharing with others, and constant remembrance of the divine name. These principles became the foundation of Sikhism. He established the practice of langar, a communal kitchen where people of all castes and religions eat together as equals, a revolutionary act in a society rigidly divided by caste. Langars continue to operate at every Sikh gurdwara today, serving millions of free meals daily. Before his death, he appointed Angad Dev as his successor, establishing the line of ten Gurus that continued until Guru Gobind Singh in 1708. Sikhism now counts over 25 million adherents worldwide.

Abraham Lincoln had been waiting for a Union victory to play his strongest card. After the bloody stalemate at Antietam on September 17, 1862, he found his opening. Five days later, on September 22, Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, warning the Confederate states that all enslaved people in territories still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, would be declared "forever free." The proclamation was a calculated act of war, not a sudden moral awakening. Lincoln had privately drafted the document weeks earlier but accepted Secretary of State William Seward's advice to wait for a battlefield success, lest it appear an act of desperation. The preliminary version gave Confederate states one hundred days to return to the Union with slavery intact. None accepted. When the final Emancipation Proclamation took effect on New Year's Day 1863, it freed approximately 3.1 million of the 4 million enslaved people in the United States, though only in areas the Union did not yet control. The border states of Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri were deliberately excluded to keep them from joining the Confederacy. Enforcement followed the advancing Union armies, with each captured mile of Southern territory translating the proclamation from promise into reality. The document's most radical provision authorized the enlistment of Black soldiers into the Union military. By war's end, roughly 180,000 African Americans had served in the United States Colored Troops, and their valor at battles like Fort Wagner and the Crater helped erode white opposition to emancipation. Frederick Douglass called the proclamation "the immortal paper" and spent months recruiting Black volunteers. European powers that had been considering diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy pulled back. British textile workers, despite suffering from the cotton embargo, rallied behind the Union cause. The proclamation transformed the Civil War from a fight to preserve the Union into a crusade against slavery, making foreign intervention politically impossible. Full abolition required the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865. But Lincoln's September announcement broke the political dam.

Nathan Hale was twenty-one years old, a Yale graduate and schoolteacher from Connecticut who had volunteered for one of the war's most dangerous assignments. On September 22, 1776, British forces hanged him in Manhattan for espionage, and his reported last words turned a failed intelligence mission into one of the Revolution's most enduring legends. General Washington desperately needed information about British troop positions on Long Island after the Continental Army's disastrous defeat at the Battle of Brooklyn in August 1776. Hale volunteered to cross enemy lines disguised as a Dutch schoolteacher, sketching British fortifications and recording troop strengths in notes hidden in his shoes. The mission went wrong almost immediately. Hale had no training in espionage, and his cover story was thin. The British captured him on September 21, reportedly after his Loyalist cousin Samuel Hale identified him. The incriminating documents found on his person left no room for denial. General William Howe ordered his execution without a trial. According to British Captain John Montresor, who witnessed the hanging and later relayed the account to American officers under a flag of truce, Hale declared: "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." Whether he spoke those exact words remains debated by historians. The sentence closely echoes a line from Joseph Addison's 1713 play Cato, which was popular among Continental officers, and Montresor's account was secondhand. What is certain is that the British denied Hale a Bible and destroyed his final letters to his family, acts of petty cruelty that outraged Americans when the story spread. Hale became one of the Revolution's first martyrs, his youth and sacrifice a recruiting tool for a cause that badly needed heroes after a string of defeats. Connecticut later designated him its official state hero, and a statue stands outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, honoring him as America's first spy.