Zhou Enlai Born: China's Master Diplomat
Zhou Enlai served as China's Premier for 26 years, from 1949 until his death in 1976. He survived every purge. While Mao's Cultural Revolution destroyed millions of lives, Zhou stayed in power, sometimes protecting intellectuals from the worst of it, sometimes not. Whether that made him a pragmatic moderate or a complicit enabler has been argued ever since. He and Mao died within eight months of each other in 1976, and when Zhou died first, Mao refused to lower the flags to half-staff. The public mourning was so intense the government suppressed it. The grief spilled into Tiananmen Square anyway. Born March 5, 1898.
March 5, 1898
128 years ago
Key Figures & Places
What Else Happened on March 5
He brought 90,000 soldiers and a library. Julian the Apostate marched from Antioch into Persia with the largest Roman army assembled in decades — and 1,100 supp…
He was forty years old, hungover, and disgusted with himself when Naser Khosrow decided to abandon his comfortable government job in Persia and walk to Mecca. T…
Grand Duke Traidenis crushed the Livonian Order at the Battle of Aizkraukle, killing the Master of the Order, Ernst von Rassau, and seventy knights. This decisi…
King Henry VII granted John Cabot and his sons royal authority to sail under the English flag in search of new lands. This expedition led to the first European …
The Catholic Church officially banned Nicolaus Copernicus’s *De revolutionibus orbium coelestium* in 1616, declaring his heliocentric model formally heretical. …
The Vatican waited 73 years to ban Copernicus's book. Why? Because nobody thought it was serious. When *On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres* appeared in …
Talk to History
Have a conversation with historical figures who witnessed this era. Ask questions, explore perspectives, and bring history to life.