On This Day: October 21, China Announces the Restoration of the College Entrance Exam
October 21 has left more than its share of marks on history. GSM launches its daily "On This Day" column today, looking back at major events in China and around the world that happened on this date. This first edition features five.
1977: China Announces the Restoration of the College Entrance Exam
On October 21, 1977, People's Daily carried a Xinhua report on its front page, "Major Reform in College Admissions," and national radio broadcast the same news: the State Council had approved and forwarded the Ministry of Education's plan for 1977 college admissions, restoring the national college entrance examination system after an 11-year suspension. Admission would again be by voluntary application, unified examination and merit-based selection, replacing the recommendation system. That winter, more than 5.7 million candidates — teenagers alongside adults in their thirties — sat the exams across China, and about 273,000 were admitted, an acceptance rate below 5 percent. For readers today, the gaokao that now anchors every family's calendar in China traces its restart to this day.
1805: Britain's Triumph at the Battle of Trafalgar
On October 21, 1805, off Cape Trafalgar in southwestern Spain, a Royal Navy fleet of 27 ships of the line under Vice Admiral Lord Nelson engaged a combined French and Spanish fleet of 33 ships of the line. Nelson's fleet attacked in two columns and broke through the allied line; after about five hours of fighting, the French and Spanish had lost some 20 ships, while Britain lost none. Nelson himself was shot by a French sniper aboard his flagship, HMS Victory, and died that afternoon, by which time he knew victory was secured. The battle ended Napoleon's hopes of invading Britain and confirmed British naval supremacy for more than a century.
1879: Edison's Lamp Burns for 13.5 Hours in the United States
In the early hours of October 21, 1879, at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in the United States, Thomas Edison and his team switched on a vacuum bulb fitted with a carbonized cotton-thread filament — and it glowed for about 13.5 hours. Earlier electric lamps had lasted only minutes or cost far too much; this test showed for the first time that an incandescent lamp could be practical. Edison then set about building the generators, wiring, switches and meters of a complete power system, and electric light began its move from the laboratory into ordinary homes. The everyday act of flipping a light switch traces back to that night.
1959: Guggenheim Museum Opens in New York, United States
On October 21, 1959, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened to the public on Fifth Avenue in New York City, in the United States. Designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the white reinforced-concrete building wraps its galleries around a single continuous spiral ramp, breaking with the room-by-room layout of traditional museums. Counted from its 1943 commission, the building had taken 16 years to complete; Wright did not live to see the opening, having died that April. In 2019 the building was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List as part of "The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright."
1967: American Antiwar Marchers Reach the Pentagon
On October 21, 1967, more than 100,000 demonstrators against the Vietnam War rallied near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and about 50,000 of them then marched across the Potomac River to the Pentagon in Arlington, where they confronted the troops guarding the building. Organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, it was among the largest antiwar demonstrations in the United States up to that point. A photograph of a young protester placing flowers into the barrels of soldiers' rifles became an enduring image of the movement. The march showed that opposition to the war had moved from the margins into the mainstream of American life.
(Sources: Xinhua and People's Daily historical reports; Encyclopaedia Britannica; the Smithsonian Institution; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Compiled and written by the GSM Newsroom.)
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 特纳（J. M. W. Turner）描绘1805年特拉法尔加海战的画作（作于1806年，公共领域，Wikimedia Commons）
