Tag: politics

Russian Embassy, Beijing, China

Looking for something else, I happened to run across this image of the huge Russian embassy compound in Beijing. Beyond the fact that China’s relationship with Russia is in the news these days, there is no particular reason for posting this photo. It was taken in February of 2012, several months before I departed from Beijing and China for good.

For more than 200 years the site was home to the Russian Orthodox Ecclesiastical Mission, which acted as a sort of unofficial representative of the Russian government. After the Russian revolution in 2017, people fleeing Russia found refuge at the mission. In the 1950s after the establishment of the PRC, the Mission was closed and the property and buildings were turned over to the USSR. An embassy housing the USSR’s and later Russia’s diplomatic mission to China was built and opened for use in 1959.

Government House, Annapolis, MD

Annapolis is the capital city of Maryland and home to the US Naval Academy. It is a lovely, manicured, very affluent small city. The Maryland State House, the oldest state capitol building in continuous service in the US (since 1772) was covered in scaffolding while it got a facelift. So I had to make do with this photo of the entrance to Government House, Maryland’s governor’s mansion, located across the street from the State House.

In one of those historical ironies that I very much enjoy, the next resident of Government House will be Maryland Governor-elect, Wes Moore; he will be the state’s first African-American governor. The man who designed Government House, completed in 1870, was named Richard Snowden Andrews, an architect and, during the Civil War, a general in the Confederate States Army. Hope you are rolling over in your grave, traitor.

Poster Art, Ho Chi Minh City

Poster Art, Ho Chi Minh City

You see political poster art of the sort in this picture everywhere in Vietnamese cities, from billboards on the tops of buildings to posters along the walls of construction sites. This particular poster, according to a Vietnamese friend, announces the selection of a Party committee for Ho Chi Minh City for a five year term and celebrates Vietnam’s industrialization and modernization efforts. And the poster urges citizens to do their part to support modernization of the country.

Red Flag, Yellow Star, Hanoi

Red Flag, Yellow Star, Hanoi

The building in the background is the Imperial Citadel of Thang Long, part of the imperial structures that served as the capital of Dai Viet from the 11th to the 18th century. The building, very much in a Chinese style, is in the center of Hanoi. The boys in their bright tee shirts with a yellow star against a red background – the Vietnamese national flag – were part of a coed group of 20ish kids, I presume a university class on an outing. All of the boys were wearing the red tees. I rather liked the contrast: young people wearing the symbol of modern, socialist Vietnam against a traditional background representing the country’s imperial past.

 

Boston City Hall

Boston City Hall

Boston City Hall opened to a lot of fanfare (and controversy) in 1968. A lot of people saw it as a dramatic symbol of a modern, new Boston. As I recall, that is how it looked to me when I moved to Boston in 1970. Almost 50 years later, the building sure has lost its luster. It looks ugly and out of place in Boston’s otherwise people friendly, rather intimate downtown. Brutalist Modern indeed. When I visited recently, a friend told me Boston is thinking about tearing the place down and building a new city hall, something more comfortable and on a more human scale. Good idea.