This month marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, a political campaign launched by Chairman Mao. The purpose was supposedly to give a new generation the experience of revolution; however, it was actually an outcome of a power struggle between Mao and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. During […]
China Under Mao
I recently stumbled across a great new blog called Everyday life in Mao’s China. Each post is a photo or photos taken in China when Chairman Mao was in power. They are very interesting glimpses of a China that is hard to imagine these days. Here are a couple of my favorites: St. Joseph’s Church in […]
An Insane Collection
I was recently talking with a Chinese friend in Minnesota who had just returned from a road trip to New York and Washington with her husband. “Tell me something interesting you have observed in your travels around the US this year,” I said to her. “Every little town has a museum,” she told me. “In […]
Two of My Favorite Things
I have lots of favorite things, but two that are right up there on the list are road trips and Chinese history. Last week I found a way to combine those two loves by listening to episodes of the fantastic China History Podcast while driving across Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana. If you are a […]
Holy Trinity Church, Shanghai
This is one of my favorite photos from this weekend in Shanghai. Holy Trinity Church, opened in 1869, was the cathedral church for the Anglican Diocese of North China. It continued to function as a church until being closed in 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution. Unlike many other churches in Shanghai and […]
Sneaking a Piano into a Labor Camp
During the Cultural Revolution, Zhu Xiao-mei, a budding pianist at the Beijing Music Conservatory was sent (along with some of her classmates) to a labor camp near Zhangjiakou, a small city about 100 miles northwest of Beijing. She would remain there for five years. Life in the camp was brutal, but security was lax enough […]
