The Spaniards for their part have started…

Yue Xianyang, who serves as a senior physician of the royal court of the Qing Dynasty in Beijing, establishes Tong Ren Tang, a pharmaceutical company.

Tong Ren Tang is today the largest producer of traditional Chinese medicine.

A major cholera outbreak occurs in China in 1669.

Residents are allowed to return to their original homes in 1669, when the government lifts the ban on settlement following a request by the Governor-General of Guangdong and Guangxi Zhou Youde and Governor of Guangdong Wang Lairen.

Only sixteen hundred and forty-eight of those who left are said to have returned when the evacuation order is rescinded.

The Fortress of Kolárovo, with the inhabitants of Kolárovo fearing new attacks by Turks, is between 1662-1664 modernized again.

Inside are stone accommodation houses and stone stores for gunpowder and guns.

At this time there are one hundred and thirty mercenaries behind the walls under the command of Matej Frühwirtha.

Turkish units in 1669 burn the eastern part of Kolárovo.

The Jat people under the leader Gokula rebel against their powerful Mughal overlords.

The rebellion is a result of political provocation aggravated by economic discontent, and further aggravated by religious persecution and discrimination.

The whole district is in disorder for a year until the rebellion is suppressed by a strong imperial force under Hasan Ali Khan, the new faujdar of Mathura.

Gokula is put to death by dismemberment.

Yohannes acts harshly towards Europeans due to the violent religious controversy that Catholic missionaries had caused in Ethiopia under the reign of his grandfather Susenyos.

He convokes a church council in 1669 in Gondar, directing Gerazmach Mikael to expel all of the Catholics still living in Ethiopia; those who do not embrace the beliefs of the Ethiopian Church are exiled to Sennar.

His reign sees the execution of six Franciscans sent by Pope Alexander VII to succeed in converting Ethiopia to Catholicism where the Jesuits had failed thirty years before.

Yohannes favors Armenian visitors, whose beliefs also embrace Miaphysitism, and are in harmony with the Ethiopian Church.

These include one Murad, who undertakes a number of diplomatic missions for the Emperor.

The past twenty years of Venetian-Ottoman warfare have seen heavy fighting and much destruction in parts of western Bosnia.

Leopold I Habsburg grants the status and privileges of a university to the Jesuit Academy in Zagreb, the precursor to the modern University of Zagreb.

Antonio Stradivari, believed to have been born in 1644 in the small Italian city of Cremona, had possibly served from 1658 to 1664 as a pupil in workshops of the luthier Nicolò Amati.

At least one Antonio Stradivari label, dated 1666, reads, “Alumnus Nicolais Amati” -- student of Nicolò Amati -- but it has always been controversial as to whether he was an actual apprentice of Nicolò Amati, or merely considered himself a student and admirer of his work in a broader sense.

A crafter of stringed instruments such as violins, cellos, guitars and harps.

Stradivari is generally considered the most significant artisan in this field.

The Latinized form of his surname, Stradivarius, as well as the colloquial, "Strad", is often used to refer to his instruments.

In 1669, Stradivari crafts his first violin.

Knowledge of insects in the seventeenth century is to a great extent inherited from Aristotle.

According to this classical paradigm, insects are so insignificant they aren't worthy of the types of investigations done on fish, reptiles, and mammals.

Dutch biologist and microscopist Jan Swammerdam publishes his Algemeene Verhandeling van de bloedeloose dierkens, a groundbreaking work in microscopy as well as entomology, in 1669.

Much of Swammerdam's entomological work has been done to show that the difference between insects and the "higher" animals is one of degree, not kind.

Swammerdam is credited with the enhancement of the study of biology due to his work dissecting insects and studying them under microscopes.

Swammerdam's principal interest in this area is demonstrating that insects develop in the same gradual manner as other animals, in contrast to the notion of metamorphosis—the idea that different life stages of an insect (e.g., caterpillar and butterfly) represent a sudden change from one type of animal to another.

He has garnered evidence against this claim from his dissections.

By examining larvae, he has identified underdeveloped adult features in pre-adult animals.

For example, he noticed that the wings of dragonflies and mayflies exist prior to their final molt.

Swammerdam uses these observations to bolster his case for epigenesis in his 1669 publication, Historia Insectorum Generalis (The Natural History of Insects).

This work also includes many descriptions of insect anatomy.

It is here that Swammerdam reveals that the "king" bee has ovaries.

In addition to his research on metamorphosis, Swammerdam's entomological work stands out because he is among the first people to study insects in a systematized fashion (i.e., careful dissection, comparison of different species, and use of the microscope).

His anatomical and behavioral descriptions of bees, wasps, ants, dragonflies, snails, worms, and butterflies are major contributions to the nascent field of entomology.