Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/February 4

February 4: Independence Day in Sri Lanka (1948); Lichun begins in East Asia (11:00 UTC, 2008).

• 1703 – Forty-six of the Forty-Seven Ronin committed seppuku (ritual suicide) in Edo, present-day Tokyo, as recompense for avenging the death of their master, Daimyo of Akō Asano Naganori.

• 1859 – German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf rediscovered the Codex Sinaiticus, a 4th century uncial manuscript of the Greek Bible, in Saint Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt.

• 1899 – An American soldier shot a Filipino soldier in Manila after a misunderstanding occurred between the two, igniting the Philippine-American War.

• 1945 – World War II: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin met at the Yalta Conference (pictured) in Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula.

• 1957 – USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, logged her 60,000th nautical mile, matching the endurance of the fictional Nautilus described in Jules Verne's novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.