1684

Centuries: 16th century - 17th century - 18th century

Decades: 1630s 1640s 1650s 1660s 1670s - 1680s - 1690s 1700s 1710s 1720s 1730s

Years: 1679 1680 1681 1682 1683 - 1684 1685 1686 1687 1688 1689

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Events

• Japanese Chief Minister Hotta Masatoshi is assassinated, leaving Shogun Sunayoshi without any adequate advisors, leading him to issue impractical edicts and create hardships for the Japanese people
• The Japanese poet Saikaku composes 23,500 verses in 24 hours at the Sumiyoshi Shrine at Osaka, the scribes can't keep pace with his dictation and just count the verses
• The British East India Company gets Chinese permission to build a trading station at Canton. Tea sells in Europe for less than a shilling a pound, but the import duty of 5 shillings makes it too expensive for most English people to afford
• Smuggled tea is drunk much more than legally imported tea
• England has its coldest winter in living memory, the Thames and the sea as far as 2 miles out from land freezes over

• John Bunyan writes The Pilgrim's Progress Part 2

Births

• April 15 - Martha Skavronskaya, a Lithuanian peasant who later became Empress Catherine I of Russia
• October 10 - Antoine Watteau, French painter

Deaths

• Chief Minister Hotta Masatoshi, assassinated\n