Alice Pemberton: In twenty eighteen, Jair Bolsonaro wins Brazil’s presidency, bringing the far right to power in Latin America’s largest country. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen twenty-eight, at an Indonesian youth congress, a song called Indonesia Raya is played aloud for the very first time, and it is now Indonesia's national anthem. Alice Pemberton: And in nineteen ninety-two, Prince Hans-Adam the Second threatens to sack Liechtenstein's parliament over the date of a referendum. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the twenty-eighth of October. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on a palace called Forbidden; Arthur Nightingale on the philosopher who wouldn't sign his revolution; Rufus McCrae on a monument the fire brigade hosed down; Judge Marion Calloway on the four hundred pounds behind Harvard; and at the table, a pharaoh's gaze. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: On this day in fourteen twenty, a Ming emperor declared the Forbidden City finished, and with it Beijing became his capital. For the front page, our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Finished, and he put it in writing. The Yongle Emperor issued an edict announcing that the palaces, the altars, the whole vast project were complete. Work had begun back in fourteen-oh-six. The official chronicle, the Veritable Records, measures the final push in bays: eight thousand three hundred and fifty of them. Alice Pemberton: Built from what, and by whom? Professor Edmund Cavendish: By the whole empire. Timber came from Sichuan and Yunnan, marble from Fangshan. Later accounts reckon a hundred thousand skilled workers, with hundreds of thousands more hands besides. The edict, in a surviving translation, gives them their credit: 'Since the beginning of the construction, soldiers and civilians from all over the country have taken an active part in it.' Alice Pemberton: And what did the Forbidden City do for Beijing? Professor Edmund Cavendish: It made the capital stick. Emperors ruled from those halls for nearly five centuries, and Beijing has been China's political centre for most of the last eight. The Forbidden City has since become a World Heritage Site, with queues at its gates. A palace built to keep the world out is now where the world lines up to get in. Alice Pemberton: On this day in seventeen-oh-four, at a country house in Essex, John Locke died, the man they call the father of liberalism. Our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: The father of liberalism died in a borrowed room. John Locke spent his last fourteen years at Oates, the house of Sir Francis Masham and his wife Damaris, a philosopher in her own right. A letter from London that week said only: 'Mr. Locke died Last Saturday.' Alice Pemberton: How did a boy from Somerset get there? Arthur Nightingale: Westminster School, then fifteen years at Christ Church, Oxford, studying medicine among scientific friends. Then he met Lord Shaftesbury, and Locke's quiet life tipped into politics. When Shaftesbury fell from royal favour, Locke fled into exile in the Netherlands. Alice Pemberton: And exile made him. Arthur Nightingale: It did. There he wrote his most important work, and when he came home with Queen Mary the books poured out. A Letter Concerning Toleration. The Two Treatises of Government. Government by the consent of the governed; the right to throw off a tyrant who has lost that consent; faith as a matter for the individual, never the state. Alice Pemberton: There's a shadow in the ledger, though. Arthur Nightingale: There is. John Locke is listed as a shareholder in the Royal African Company, chartered to trade in enslaved people. The philosopher of liberty held stock in its opposite. Alice Pemberton: Did he at least put his name to the treatises? Arthur Nightingale: No. The Letter and the Two Treatises both appeared anonymously. Two generations after his death, Locke's language is believed to have shaped Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. The sentences that helped make a revolution went out into the world unsigned. Alice Pemberton: On this day in nineteen sixty-five, the last piece of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis went up, and somebody had to call the fire brigade. Our sceptic and man of letters, Rufus McCrae. Rufus? Rufus McCrae: The fire brigade, Alice, because the sun was winning. The two legs of the Gateway Arch had been climbing toward each other for over two years. On the final morning, the heat had swollen the south leg by about five inches. So the St. Louis Fire Department hosed down a national monument until it shrank back into line. Alice Pemberton: What was going into the gap? Rufus McCrae: A stainless-steel keystone of about ten tons. Lifting it took barely a quarter of an hour; nudging it home took till noon. Vice President Hubert Humphrey watched from a helicopter, the most American way imaginable to attend a ceremony. Alice Pemberton: This is the Bookshelf, Rufus. Where's the book? Rufus McCrae: Welded inside. A time capsule in the keystone holds the signatures of more than half a million St. Louis residents, schoolchildren and nursing-home residents among them. America's most-signed book, shelved where nobody can borrow it. Alice Pemberton: And the man who designed it? Rufus McCrae: Eero Saarinen, Finnish-born, who beat more than a hundred rivals in the national competition. He died four years before the keystone went in. Half a million names made it into the Gateway Arch, and the one that belonged there most never saw it closed. Alice Pemberton: On this day in sixteen thirty-six, a young colony voted public money for a college, the one that became Harvard. Our jurist, Judge Marion Calloway. Marion? Judge Marion Calloway: Public money, and the minute survives. The Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony recorded: 'The Court voted for the erecting a publick Schooll or Colledge in Cambridge, ffour hundred pounds, to be payd out of the Country Treasurye.' For a colony founded only six years earlier, that was a substantial sum. Alice Pemberton: Though the minute and the anniversary don't agree. Judge Marion Calloway: They don't. The court book says September. An old inscription uncovered in a College Yard wall says the twenty-eighth of October, and Harvard keeps the wall's date. The judge in me prefers the minute. Alice Pemberton: What did the vote actually bind them to? Judge Marion Calloway: Read it as a contract: half the money the next year, half 'When The Worke is Finished', and 'The Next Court To Appoint Wheare & Wt Building.' They voted for a college with no site and no building. Only later was it fixed at Newetowne, renamed Cambridge. Alice Pemberton: So where does the name Harvard come in? Judge Marion Calloway: John Harvard, a minister in Charlestown, died two years later. He left the college half his estate and his library, nearly double what the court had voted. The colony paid first, in instalments. The minister who left his books got the name. Alice Pemberton: At the table: our theologian, Frances Calder; our field archaeologist, Marcus Hale; and our markets correspondent, Gwen Harmon. Marcus, you've brought a face. Marcus Hale: A gold one. In nineteen twenty-five, Howard Carter's team lifted the lid of Tutankhamun's innermost coffin and found the mask. Carter wrote: 'The mask has fallen slightly back, thus its gaze is straight up to the heavens.' Frances Calder: That's a theologian's sentence, Marcus. Buried, looking upward. Gwen Harmon: Mine's about who got left off the guest list. In eighteen eighty-six, Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty in rain and fog, before some two thousand dignitaries on the island. Only a handful of women were invited. Frances Calder: A statue of a woman, unveiled by a crowd of men. Gwen Harmon: And one account has the last rivet fitted on dedication day itself. Every project I've ever costed finishes on deadline day. Marcus Hale: My Rome is darker. In nineteen twenty-two, Benito Mussolini told his party in Naples: 'Either they give us the government or we will take it by marching on Rome.' On this day his Blackshirt columns massed outside the capital. Frances Calder: Wearing ancient Rome as a costume. Marcus Hale: Fascism claimed to be the empire's heir. My trade spends its life separating the ruins from the costume. Gwen Harmon: Mine's a chemist who left school with bad grades. In nineteen forty-eight, Paul Hermann Müller won the Nobel for showing DDT kills insects on contact, a weapon against malaria and yellow fever. Marcus Hale: He invented it? Gwen Harmon: No. A Viennese student, Othmar Zeidler, made it decades earlier and never noticed what it could do. Müller tested hundreds of compounds on flies to find what was already sitting on the shelf. Frances Calder: Mine is a door opening. In nineteen sixty-five, Pope Paul the Sixth promulgated Nostra aetate, recognising the legitimacy of non-Christian faiths. It opens: 'In our time, when day by day mankind is being drawn closer together.' Only eighty-eight of the Council fathers voted against. Gwen Harmon: How long is it? Frances Calder: The shortest document the Council produced. It began with a pope meeting a Jewish scholar, Jules Isaac. Marcus Hale: The shortest one, doing the longest work. Alice Pemberton: A mask gazing up, a statue missing its women, a march that shut doors and a sentence that opened one. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the twenty-eighth of October — where in eighteen ninety-one the Mino–Owari earthquake struck, the largest inland earthquake in Japan's history; where in sixteen sixty-four the Duke of York's Maritime Regiment of Foot was raised in London, the forerunner of the Royal Marines; and, more recently, where in two thousand and nine Barack Obama signed the federal hate crimes act named for Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Junior. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: What they didn't tell you: in the year ninety-seven, the Roman emperor Nerva was forced by his own Praetorian Guard to adopt the general Trajan as his heir. Mortimer Finch: Forced how? Politely? Humphrey Thwaite: The Guard mutinied. Nerva bared his throat at them, then gave in, climbed the Capitol and announced: 'May good success attend the Roman senate and people and myself. I hereby adopt Marcus Ulpius Nerva Trajan.' Mortimer Finch: Note who he put last. Humphrey Thwaite: Wisest thing he ever said, Mortimer.