› added 3 months ago

10

TIL about the Meat-Shaped Stone - a Chinese sculpture carved from banded jasper during the Qing Dynasty and made to look like Dongpo pork - a popular Chinese dish.

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pjYA TIL Concerned about the number of cobras in Delhi, British colonial officials created a bounty, only to discover secret cobra farms created to collect the bounty. When the officials shut down the program the farms released their snakes, meaning they had far more cobras than before they started.
xVDrg TIL that Martin Luther King Jr. considered running for president in 1968 after being urged to by anti-Vietnam Democrats, but ultimately decided against the proposal as he felt uneasy with politics and considered himself better suited for his morally unambiguous role as an activist.
e0LBn TIL of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, Icelandic explorer, who sailed to America around 1000ad. She was the first European to give birth there. She also sailed across North Atlantic eight times between Greenland, Iceland and Norway. Later in her life she made a pilgrimage to Rome and back.
mxR1E TIL of Theys Eluay, a leader of the peaceful papuan independence movement who was assassinated by indonesian special forces in 2001. When asked about the murder, the indonesian defense minister called the hitmen 'heroes'
9Yag7 TIL to defend a South African city under siege in 1899, a mining engineer from Detroit built a 155' high watchtower with search lights and telephones, a water supply system, a bulk refrigeration plant, two armored trains, artillery shells, a cannon, and also the tools needed to build the cannon