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SCMP Reporter

In Hong Kong

1959: Hong Kong film queen Linda Lin Dai was presented with the key to the city in a ceremony in Honolulu, Hawaii.

1963: A total of 69,564 vehicles were registered with the Traffic Branch of the Hong Kong Police at the end of August. The figure included 43,421 private cars, 1,275 buses and 808 rickshaws.

1971: Dr Paul Dudley White, renowned American heart specialist, denied seeing Chairman Mao Zedong after arriving at the Tsim Sha Tsui railway station following a 12-day visit to the mainland. 'I had no time for politics in China. My visit was purely to meet medical people.'

1977: Actors Gig Young, Hugh O'Brian and Dean Jagger were in town to film the linking sequences for Game Of Death, the film Bruce Lee was working on prior to his death.

Around the world

1825: The world's first public railway to use steam locomotives was inaugurated when the George Stephenson-built 'Active' pulled a train along the track on the Stockton and Darlington Railway in northeast England.

1917: Frenchman Hilaire Germaine Edgar Degas died. He was considered one of the foremost 19th-century artists.

1921: Engelbert Humperdink, German composer of the opera Hansel And Gretel, died.

1922: King Constantine I of Greece abdicated. He was king from 1913-17 and from 1920-22. A military revolt cost him his throne for the second time when Greece failed to defeat Turkey after World War I.

1938: The British ocean liner Queen Elizabeth, then the largest passenger liner ever built, was launched at Clydebank, Scotland.

1939: In World War II, Warsaw surrendered to the invading German army after three days and nights of bombardment.

1940: The Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan was signed in Berlin, a 10-year military and economic agreement strengthening the Axis alliance.

1962: Imam Mohammed of Yemen was overthrown in an army coup a week after succeeding his father and the Yemen Arab Republic was declared by coup leader Colonel Abdullah al-Sallal.

1970: Jordan's King Hussein and Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Movement, signed an agreement in Cairo to end Jordan's civil war.

1979: Gracie Fields, popular English music hall entertainer, died aged 81.

1990: Carlos Melancia, governor of Macau, resigned after an official investigation found signs of his involvement in alleged corruption.

1990: Britain and Iran resumed diplomatic relations, broken by Teheran in March 1989 over the issue of British author Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses.

1996: Afghanistan's Taleban movement captured the capital, Kabul, and hanged Soviet-backed president Mohammad Najibullah.

2000: A Royal Jordanian Airbus 320 airliner with officials, doctors and medicines on board landed in Baghdad in the first Arab flight to Iraq in 10 years.



Today in history