Tank Man, or the Unknown Rebel, is the nickname of an anonymous man who became internationally famous when he was videotaped and photographed during the Tiananmen Square protests on 5 June 1989. Several photographs were taken of the man, who is seen to stand in front of a column of Chinese Type 59 tanks, preventing their advance.

A video used to be embedded here but the service that it was hosted on has shut down.

The still and motion photography of the man standing alone before a line of tanks reached international audiences practically overnight. It headlined hundreds of major newspapers and news magazines and was the lead story on countless news broadcasts around the world. In April 1998, the United States magazine TIME included the “Unknown Rebel” in its 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

* The text in this article is from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ^[1], Video is by the BBC