Jottings from the Granite Studio

I took advantage of the sunny skies to do some urban hiking through the legation quarter, up through Tiananmen Square and back over to Wangfujing.  Some random TGIF thoughts:
Today was a BLUE SKY day.  We’re talking 蓝 freaking 天.  First one of the Games and well timed too as track and field preliminaries kicked of [...]

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Preparing for a walk in the neighborhood, I was looking at this old map of the Beijing legation quarter and playing a game to myself and trying to see if I could name all 13 legations as of 1912…US, Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Japan (those are easy), then Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Italy make a [...]

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I don’t do these every day. Frankly, even with 5000 years of history, not much has happened on some days…or at least not enough for me to break from my sloth and write about it.  August 15…well, this is one of those days when you’ve got TOO much good stuff to pass up.
In 978, Li [...]

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Even in the middle of the Olympic Games, Beijing’s urban redevelopment plan grinds on.  The Christian Science Monitor today reports on a home near Wangfujing where developers have continued to use violence and intimidation in a bid to remove the last holdouts from this valuable piece of central Beijing real estate.
(Oh, and I highly recommend [...]

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