History, anything goes, including pictures

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An opium den in China around 1880. Use of the drug permeated every level of Chinese society despite repeated attempts to clamp down on its trade and consumption. PIC Lai Afong/Wikicommons/CC

The Scots who hooked China on opium

They were the kings of the opium trade in 19th Century China - two Scots with good educations and an unscrupulous yearning for money.


The antics of William Jardine and James Matheson are said to have had an “incalculable” effect on the health of China as they shipped in the best opium from India and perpetuated a desire for a drug consumed by an estimated 90 per cent of the country’s coastal population.

By the mid 1830s there were an estimated 3 million opium users in China. This rose to 15m by the late 1890s. By then, Jardine and Matheson had long ago left China but their importation of the drug had left a culture of consumption so ingrained that it had permeated all classes of Chinese society.
 
mellowyellow said:
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Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen stands next to his third wife, Dagmar Freuchen-Gale. He is wearing a polar bear coat made from a bear he killed himself, 1947

He spent a number of years living among the Inuit. His first wife was a native Inuk and when she died he tried to get her buried in a church graveyard but the church didn't want to perform the burial as she hadn't been baptized, so he buried her himself.
Click to expand...
Oh Yes!
 

The Remains Of The Astronaut Vladimir Komarov, A Man Who Fell From Space, 1967​

His spaceflight on Soyuz 1 made him the first Soviet cosmonaut to fly into outer space more than once, and he became the first human to die on a space mission—he was killed when the Soyuz 1 space capsule crashed after re-entry on April 24, 1967 due to a parachute failure.

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blow off steam.jpg

After 58 days of sustained around the clock combat operations, crewmembers on board the USS Kitty Hawk were allowed to blow off some steam back in 2001 in Japanese waters.
 

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