Witness History

In 1982, after a two-year global search, the BBC auditioned Ken Hom to be the star of a new Chinese cookery TV series. In the show, called Ken Hom's Chinese Cookery, he introduced viewers to dishes like dim sum and spicy braised aubergine. He also gave advice on choosing and using a wok. He tells Josephine McDermott about his sudden rise to celebrity and how he brought Chinese dishes to new audien...

It’s one of the most popular dishes in South East Asian cooking and for many it’s seen as Thailand’s national dish. However, the origins of pad Thai are disputed. Some believe it was created and taken to the country centuries ago by Chinese immigrants. Others believe it was invented during the rule of military dictator, Plaek Phibunsongkhram, as a way of cementing Thai nationalism in the 1940s. Th...

In 1994, biotech company Calgene brought the world's first genetically-modified food to supermarket shelves. The Flavr Savr tomato kept fresh for 30 days and could be shipped long distances without going off. Yet the world was wary of this new food, and it took 10 years and $100m of investment to get it to market. In 2017, the firm's then-CEO Roger Salquist told Claire Bowes about his mission to r...

The kiwi fruit is synonymous with New Zealand in the minds of most European and American shoppers. But the hairy fruit actually comes from China and was once known as the Chinese gooseberry. So how did New Zealand hijack a Chinese fruit and turn it into their biggest horticultural export? Former fruit exporter Don Turner tells Vicky Farncombe how his family named the kiwi fruit in the 1950s and cr...

In 1946, Italian confectioner Pietro Ferrero set out to bring chocolate to the masses. His recipe evolved over the years to become a world-famous product. Thomas Chatenier from the manufacturer tells Uma Doraiswamy how the chocolate and hazelnut formula spread across the globe. (Photo: The famous spread. Credit: Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)

In the 1960s, the singer Dafydd Iwan started campaigning for the Welsh language to gain official status in Wales. For years, Dafydd received little support. In January 1969 he decided to up the pressure, defacing a police station sign written in English with paint. He ended up in prison, but soon young people across the country were picking up paint pots and taking up the cause. Today, the Welsh l...

In 2014 three journalists were sentenced to seven years in jail in Egypt. Peter Greste, Mohammed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed became known as the Al Jazeera Three. The jail terms handed out to them led to an international outcry as protesters called for press freedom. Peter Greste tells his compelling story to Gill Kearsley. (Photo: Peter Greste inside the defendants’ cage. Credit: Khaled Desouki/AFP v...

In late 1973, Chile was in turmoil. General Augusto Pinochet had led a military coup deposing the socialist president Salvador Allende who was now dead. The army was rounding up leftists; torturing, imprisoning and killing them. In the capital Santiago, the country’s best-known poet Pablo Neruda was lying in a hospital bed. He was 69 and had cancer. As a prominent member of the Communist Party his...

On 25 March 1975, Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal was murdered, shot by his nephew as he bent to kiss him as a greeting. The king’s oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani was standing beside him when the gun went off. In 2017, Ahmed’s daughter, Dr Mai Yamani, told Louise Hidalgo of her father’s pain at witnessing the death. (Photo: King Faisal in 1967. Credit: Pierre Manevy/Getty Images)

On 29 September 2009, a devastating tsunami hit Samoa, killing 149 people and leaving a trail of destruction. For Lumepa Hald it was a terrifying day which resulted in a tragic loss. She tells her story to Gill Kearsley. (Photo: The devastation in Samoa after the tsunami in 2009. Credit: Phil Walter/Getty Images)

On 15 December 2013, South Africa held the funeral of Nelson Mandela who led the struggle in defeating apartheid and became the country’s first black president. His ancestral home in the village of Qunu in South Africa’s Eastern Cape hosted 60 world leaders including four United States presidents and two UN secretary generals. It was the first state funeral held by the country. Nelson Mandela’s el...

In 1983, the disappearance of a teenage girl who was a citizen of Vatican City led to a scandal. When Pope John Paul II made a public appeal to the people holding Emanuela Orlandi captive, the world took notice and her case was treated as a suspected kidnapping. Forty years on, the reason she vanished is still unclear. Emanuela’s brother, Pietro Orlandi, speaks to Daniel Gordon about his life-long...

The great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova lived through some of the darkest chapters of Soviet history, but never stopped writing even though the communist regime repeatedly tried to silence her. One of Anna's most famous poems, Requiem, is about her son's arrest and the Stalinist terror. In 2022, art historian Era Korobova told Tatyana Movshevich about the poet's tumultuous relationship with her son....

In 1998, Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin shocked the nation with a last-minute decision to speak at the reburial of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, 80 years after their murder. “We must end an age of blood and violence in Russia,” he said, as he called for the country to face up to the crimes of its communist past. Lilia Dubovaya, a reporter for the state news service, told Robert Nicholson abou...

As civil war raged in Russia, on 17 July 1918, the imprisoned royal family were told they were to be taken to a place of refuge. But the move was a trick and half an hour later Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and his children lay dead, gunned down and bayonetted. In 2018, his great niece Olga Romanov told Olga Smirnova about that night, and the family’s reburial 80 years later. (Photo: The room where t...

In December 1993, the release of a new video game captivated gamers around the world. It was called DOOM. Set on a Martian military base overrun by zombified soldiers and demons, DOOM saw players take control of a nameless soldier called ‘The DOOM guy’ as he fights the demonic enemies to stop them taking over Earth. The game was released at a time when violence in video games was big news and a to...

Between 1976 and 1983 in Argentina, the military ruled the country. Thousands of mainly young, left-wing Argentinians went missing. Known as 'the disappeared', they were taken to detention centres, such as Escuela Superior de Mecanica de la Armada, known as ESMA in the capital, Buenos Aires. Around 5,000 prisoners passed through its gates. Most were killed. As well as the murders and torture, hund...

On 21 April 1967, a group of right-wing army officers seized power in Greece to prevent the election of a social democratic government led by veteran politician George Papandreou. The dictatorship, backed by the United States, lasted for seven years. Thousands of people were imprisoned, exiled and tortured. The grandson of that politician, also called George, was 14 at the time. He went on to be e...

In 1945, two Danish scientists opened an institute to study mental illnesses. In the four decades until it closed, almost 10,000 brains were collected from dead psychiatric patients and stored in plastic buckets. However, they were removed during autopsies without seeking permission from relatives. Following much debate in the 1990s, it was decided they should be used for research. Now based in th...

In 1993, film director Mathieu Kassovitz started work on what would become a cult cinema classic, La Haine. La Haine would follow three friends from a poor immigrant neighbourhood in the Paris suburbs 24 hours after a riot. The film was released in 1995 to huge critical acclaim and Mathieu won best director at the Cannes Film Festival. It was heavily critical of policing in France and it caught th...

In December 1948, a family of Hungarian refugees moved into the world's first home to be heated entirely by solar power. What made the Dover Sun House, in Massachusetts, United States, even more special was that it had been created by three women at a time when men dominated the fields of science and engineering. Heiress Amelia Peabody funded it, architect Eleanor Raymond designed it and biophysic...

After Tanzania, then called Tanganyika, became independent from Britain in 1961, the country's leader, Julius Nyerere, made Swahili the national language to unite its people. Walter Bgoya tells Ben Henderson about his conversations with Nyerere and how the policy changed Tanzania. (Photo: Julius Nyerere. Credit: Keystone via Getty Images)

On 21 August 1986, hundreds of villagers in a remote part of Cameroon mysteriously died overnight, along with 3,500 livestock. In the weeks-long investigation that followed, scientists tried to work out what had happened. How had hundreds died, but hundreds of others survived? In 2011, scientists Peter Baxter and George Kling told Tim Mansel how they cracked the case. (Photo: Dead cattle by the sh...

In 1969, a Peruvian farmer called Gustavo Del Solar received an unusual assignment - finding a bird called the white-winged guan that had been regarded as extinct for a century. After years of searching, he found the bird deep in Peru’s wilderness in 1977. He then made it his life’s mission to save the species, setting up a zoo in his family home. Thanks to Gustavo's discovery, the Peruvian govern...

In 1983, all hell broke loose when a new toy hit stores in the United States. Cabbage Patch Kids were so popular that people were getting injured when they tried to buy them. But Martha Nelson Thomas, whose original design she said inspired the dolls, received little credit. She watched on as sales of the toys generated hundreds of millions of dollars. Martha’s close friend, Meredith Ludwig, told...