mr-damon/history

The destruction of this 800-year-old city usually proceeds as follows: the Chinese character for "demolish" mysteriously appears on the front of an old building; the residents wage a fruitless battle to save their homes; and quicker than you can say "Celebrate the New Beijing," a wrecking crew arrives, often accompanied by the police, to pulverize the brick-and-timber structure.

But before another chunk of ancient Beijing disappears entirely, a hospice administrator named Li Songtang can often be found poking around the rubble, looking for remnants that honor what was among the world's best-preserved metropolises until a merciless wave of redevelopment gained the upper hand.

Since the 1970s, when Mao inspired his Red Guards to pummel every "reactionary" Confucius temple and Ming Dynasty statue they could find, Li has been salvaging architectural remnants and stowing them away, sometimes at considerable risk.

Manchu hitching posts. Ornate wooden doorways. A giant granite horse that graced an emperor's palace. These and thousands of other objects fill Li's warehouse and spill across the grounds of the hospice he runs in the western suburbs of Beijing.

Every item has a tale. That Song Dynasty lintel etched with a frenzy of folk scenes? Pulled from a pig sty. The lacquered screen that tells the history of a clan of scholars? Fished from the burn pile.

The most historically significant items are displayed in his private museum, where every Sunday he can be found leading tours and exhorting people to cherish the old before it is too late. "For 50 years I've been watching the destruction of this magnificent city," he'll say in admonishment. "We've been treating history like garbage."

The pyramids are proof of Egypt's endurance and what distinguishes it from modern confections, like Saudi Arabia, a nation founded 76 years ago, named after a family and built on oil wealth. But these monuments to Egypt's early ingenuity are also an ever-present symbol of faded glory. It is hard to escape comparisons between an Egypt that once led the world in almost everything and modern Egypt, where about 40 percent of the population lives on $2 a day.

"Can you believe our government can do nothing for us, and this thing that was built thousands of years ago is still helping me feed my family?" Ahmed Sayed Baghali, 49, said as he sat in a plastic chair selling postcards to tourists outside the Egyptian Museum here, which displays millenniums of antiquities. "Who would buy my things if they were not about the pharaohs? People come here from very far to see the pyramids, not to see Cairo."

Many of the men and women who live at Two Kings view the earthquake as a comeuppance for man's endless wars, the neglect of the elderly, the abuse of the environment. "You can't keep cutting down the trees and destroying the land without a response from the heavens," said Ms. Ai, as the daylight faded and the monks and nuns retreated to their tents.

Still, she said she thought some good might come from the calamity. Down in the city, she had been moved by the sight of strangers helping one another. Perhaps people will learn what she and the other Taoist devotees view as the elements of a harmonious life: self-discipline, kindness and the pursuit of simplicity. "Maybe people will learn that you cannot keep living a corrupted life without consequences," she said. "Maybe this earthquake can redeem us."

The 610-year-old southern gate to what was once the walled city of Seoul, a landmark that survived foreign invasions and wars to be designated South Korea's No. 1 national treasure, burned down Monday.

The collapse of Sungnye Gate - better known to Koreans and foreign tourists alike as Namdaemun, or "Great South Gate" - shocked the country. "The Republic of Korea could not even defend its national treasure No. 1!" one front-page newspaper headline lamented, using South Korea's formal name.


Namdaemun, made of wood and stone with a two-tiered, pagoda-shaped tiled roof, was completed in 1398 and served as the main southern entrance to Seoul, which was then a walled city. It was the oldest wooden structure in the country, an iconic reminder of old Korea in this fiercely modernized Asian city and a major tourist attraction...

Kim Young Soo, a district police chief, said investigators were looking into the possibility of arson.

Cheon Ho Seon, spokesman for President Roh Moo Hyun, called the loss "an utterly unfortunate and unspeakably deplorable incident."

"The gate has been our representative cultural asset that has been with us for 600 years," Cheon said in a regular news briefing. "All Koreans were shocked and hurt when they saw the gate crumbling in flames."

The Cultural Heritage Administration said it would spend three years and $21 million to rebuild the structure.

Namdaemun succumbed to the very thing it was designed to fight off, according to Korean legend: fire. Korean kings chose the site in the belief that the gate would protect the national capital from the fiery spirit of a mountain south of Seoul, historians say.

"The Mystery of Chaco Canyon" was produced by Anna Sofaer and The Solstice Project. The main theory is that the buildings within (and well beyond) the canyon were not settlements, but instead ceremonial structures used during solstice and equinox rituals. Evidence is provided about the cardinal axes formed by the central canyon's structures. Sites built beyond the central area are shown to have been aligned so that they marked the seasonal rising and setting points of the Sun and the Moon, as seen from the central canyon structures.



Additionally, The Solstice Project's research showed precise alignment with the seasonal transits of the Sun and Moon within the structures themselves. [Refer to "The Primary Architecture of the Chacoan Culture: A Cosmological Expression" by Anna Sofaer]

The discovery of Chacoan construction methods oriented to the Moon's motion along the eastern and western horizons was remarkable because of the time needed to observe and make plans based on such a cycle: almost 19 years. The average lifespan of the Chaco Canyon inhabitants was likely no more than 30 years, yet the construction and ceremonial observations continued for more than two centuries.

This man seemed intent on spreading the suffering and unhappiness that was written so plainly on his face.

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to "protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage." The F.B.I would "apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous" to national security, Hoover's proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under "a master warrant attached to a list of names" provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years.

"Years after the arrival of democracy, and despite the two successive liberal governments of President Roh Moo Hyun and his predecessor, Kim Dae Jung, who have made reconciliation with the Communist North a hallmark of their policy, digging into South Korea's tumultuous recent history remains a sensitive and often painful task. Although the country is modernized and prosperous, old animosities and ideological struggles still echo...

"Both sides in the war were accused of killing large numbers of unarmed civilians and of using terror to force people into compliance as villages across the country fell and were retaken.

"Although atrocities against civilians were committed by both sides, those who suffered attacks from rightist forces aligned with the United States were forced into silence during the subsequent decades of military rule. Many were subject to police surveillance, viewed as potential threats in the harsh Cold War environment.

"In the staunchly anti-communist South, children of leftist parents found themselves stigmatized in schools and the workplace.

"Victims felt freer to speak out under the liberal Roh government. Nonetheless, when Parliament created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the bill was watered down to ensure that the agency had no power to prosecute. Its mandate is to uncover the truth for the record, recommend corrections to textbooks and other records and aid reconciliation through compensation or memorial services for the victims."