Shah Jahan in 1638 transfers the capital…

Private newspapers in Ming Dynasty China are first mentioned in 1582.

The Beijing Gazette in 1638 makes an official switch in its production process of newspapers, from woodblock printing to movable type printing.

Ivan Moskvitin, first attested in 1626 as residing among the Cossacks in Tomsk, had accompanied their ataman Dmitry Kopylov to Yakutsk.

Kopylov establishes a small fort on the Aldan River on July 28, 1638, and dispatches Moskvitin in command of twenty Tomsk Cossacks and twenty-nine Krasnoyarsk Cossacks to look for silver ore further to the east.

Governor-General Per Brahe establishes postal services on September 6, 1638, in Finland, part of the Kingdom of Sweden at this time.

The Christian practice of erecting a column topped with a statue of the Virgin Mary dates back at least to the tenth century (in Clermont-Ferrand in France), but it has become common especially in the Counter-Reformation period following the Council of Trent (1545 – 1563).

The column in Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome had been one of the first.

The column itself is ancient: it had supported the vault of the so-called Basilica of Constantine in Rome, destroyed by an earthquake in the ninth century.

By the seventeenth century only this column survived; in 1614 it had been transported to Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore and crowned with a bronze statue of the Virgin and Child.

Within decades it serves as a model for many columns in Italy and other European countries.

The first column of this type north of the Alps is the Mariensäule built in Munich in 1638 to celebrate the sparing of the city from both the invading Swedish army and the plague.

The Virgin Mary is standing on its top on a crescent moon as the Queen of Heaven.

It is to inspire, for example, Marian columns in Prague and Vienna, but many others also follow very quickly.

Today, in the countries which once belonged to the Habsburg Monarchy (especially the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, and Hungary) it is quite exceptional to find an old town square without such a column, usually located in a most prominent place.

A fifth Ottoman campaign against Safavid Persia, delayed until 1638, invades Azerbaijan, occupies Yerevan, ...

...Tabriz and ...

...Hamadan, then ...

...makes straight for Baghdad, where the Turks, led personally by Sultan Murad IV in the last great feat of Imperial Ottoman arms, struggle for seven months to take the city because the Persians intend to fight to the last man.

The siege ends in a massacre of garrison and citizens alike.

Though Murad has been able to retake Iraq, Iran remains a major threat.

...Delhi.

The island of Mauritius, known to Arab and Austronesian sailors as early as the tenth century, had been first visited by Portuguese sailors in 1507, who had established a visiting base but left the island uninhabited.

Five ships of the Dutch Second Fleet, blown off course during a cyclone while on their way to the Spice Islands, had landed on the island in 1598, naming it in honor of Prince Maurice of Nassau, the Stadtholder of the Netherlands.

The island had not been permanently inhabited for the forty years after its discovery by the Dutch.

Cornelius Gooyer in 1638 establishes the first permanent Dutch settlement in Mauritius with a garrison of twenty-five.

He thus becomes the first governor of the island.