Reuters historical calendar - December 29

LONDON, Dec 28 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on December 29 since 1900: 1911 - Sun Yat Sen became the first president of the Chinese Republic.

1940 - German aircraft dropped thousands of incendiary bombs on London's city centre, causing the nost damaging blaze the Great Fire of 1666.

1944 - Soviet tanks entered Budapest.

1952 - The first transistor hearing aid went on the market in the United States.

1965 - President Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam rejected a US offer of unconditional peace talks.

1972 - Sixteen survivors from an Andes plane crash on October 13 were rescued, revealing later they had survived by eating their dead companions.

1981 - President Ronald Reagan announced a programme of economic sanctions against the Soviet Union because of its alleged role in the imposition of martial law in Poland.

1986 - Harold Macmillan, British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, died.

1989 - Playwright Vaclav Havel, jailed by the Communists for his human rights activities and denounced as an enemy of the state, was sworn in as president of Czechoslovakia.

1992 - President Daniel arap Moi won Kenya's first multi-party polls in 26 years.

1996 - Guatemala's government and leftist rebels signed a peace accord ending 36 years of war that cost at least 140,000 lives.

1996 - Mireille, a prodigious composer of French popular songs, died in Paris at 90.

1999 - German public prosecutors said they would launch a full-scale criminal investigation into former Chancellor Helmut Kohl for breach of trust.

2000 - Diego Turbay, president of the peace commission of Colombia's Congress and five other people were killed in an attack in an area controlled by the rebel group FARC.

2001 - Almost 300 people were killed and at least 120 injured in a blaze sparked by a fireworks explosion in a shopping centre in Peruvian capital Lima.

2004 - Jerry Orbach, acclaimed as a quintessential New York actor for his work on Broadway, in films and as the star of television's ''Law&Order,'' died. He was 69.

Reuters BDP GC1118