Wellington becomes New Zealand’s capital in 1865.

Selangor, just south of tin-rich Perak (and the only state on the Malay Peninsula founded by the Bugis), also has considerable deposits of tin around Hulu Selangor in the north, ...

...Hulu Klang in the central area and ...

...Lukut near Negeri Sembilan to the south.

Tin mining had become a huge enterprise around 1840, under the leadership of Raja Jumaat from Riau.

His effort had soon been rewarded by Sultan Muhammad of Selangor; Raja Jumaat had been appointed as Lukut's administrator in 1846.

By the 1850s, the area had emerged as one of the most modern settlements on the Malay Peninsula apart from the Straits Settlements.

At one point, there were no less than twenty thousand laborers, most of them ethnic Chinese imported from China.

His death in 1864 had created a leadership vacuum.

Slowly, Lukut has slid backward into obscurity.

General Sengge Rinchen's pursuit of the Nien is ineffective, and the general himself is killed in Shantung in May 1865.

Thus, the last Imperial crack unit disappears.

However, with the government soon free from problems with the Taiping, Zeng Guofan, the victor of Nanking, succeeds Sengge as general and adopts a strategy of blockade.

Zeng enforces a policy of detaching the earth-wall masters from their men and of employing the latter as his troops.

The poorly equipped forces of the khanates can do little to resist Russia's advances, although the Kokandian commander Alimqul had led a quixotic campaign before being killed in May 1865 defending Tashkent, which Chernyayev, aftwer wintering at Chimkent, now captures Tashkent.

This is contrary to his instructions, and although he will be received in St. Petersburg with enthusiasm, and presented with a sword of honor by the tsar, he will not again be employed in the military service, and will retire from it in July 1874.

The main opposition to Russian expansion into Turkestan comes from the British, who feel that Russia is growing too powerful and threatening the northwest frontiers of British India.

This rivalry has come to be known as The Great Game, where both powers compete to advance their own interests in the region.

It does little to slow the pace of conquest north of the Oxus, but does ensure that Afghanistan remains independent as a buffer state between the two Empires.

Other major reforms take place in Russia's educational and cultural spheres.

Censorship, which had stifled opinion under Nicholas, had been greatly relaxed, and public opinion has found a voice.

This greatly facilitates the government's effort to eradicate corruption, red tape and inefficiency.

Universities have gained autonomy.

The Government encourages education: it is during Alexander's reign that the education of the peasant masses starts on a vast scale.

The central government attempts to act through the zemstva to establish uniform curricula for elementary schools.

Ignaz Semmelweis, who had pioneered antiseptic techniques that greatly reduced the incidence of the lethal puerperal, or childhood, fever, dies in an asylum 1865, ironically, of the same disease, his views still not widely accepted by the medical community.

Austria had imposed a repressive regime on Hungary after quashing the revolution of 1848-49, and rules Transylvania directly through a military governor, with German again becoming the official language.

Austria had abolished the Union of Three Nations and granted citizenship to the Romanians.

Although the former serfs have been given land by the Austrian authorities, it is often barely sufficient for subsistence living.

These poor conditions have obliged many Romanian families to cross into Wallachia and Moldavia—known since 1862 as the Romanian United Principalities—in search of better lives.

Romanians enjoy equal status in Transylvania for only a short time.

The need to shore up the weakening empire presses Vienna toward compromise with Budapest.

Emperor Franz Joseph of Habsburg in 1865 convenes a second Transylvanian Diet, this time with a Hungarian majority, which abrogates the 1863 legislation and endorses unification of Hungary and Transylvania.

Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza promulgates legislation that diminishes the role of the Orthodox clergy in civil affairs, thereby contributing to the secularization of Romanian society.

By initiating these changes on his own authority before seeking permission from his nominal suzerain, the Ottoman sultan, Cuza asserts the de facto independence of Romania.

Cuza's reforms have alienated both the boyars and Romania's mostly Greek clergy, however, and government corruption and the prince's own moral turpitude have eroded his popularity.

After an uprising breaks out in Bucharest in 1865, animosity toward the prince unites the leaders of Romania's two political parties, the pro-German Conservatives, backed by the boyars and clergy, and the pro-French Liberals, who find support in the growing middle class and favor agrarian reform.

The English company John Trevor-Barkley begins construction on the Bucharest-Giurgiu line, the first railroad line built in the territory of Romania.