Closing a Bureau, and a Dog of War

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From the blogs today, here are two posts about Beijing and history. One is poignant, the other whimsical. Evan Osnos writes at the New Yorker’s Letter from China blog about shuttering the Chicago Tribune‘s Beijing bureau, where he once worked:

As it happened, I was scheduled to meet this morning with a Chinese accountant who is handling the final closing details of the Tribune’s Beijing bureau. (What is left of the bureau fits in a manila envelope in my desk drawer.) She is a nice twenty-something woman from Sichuan province and, in the middle of the signatures and stamps, she stopped and said: “When I was assigned this case, I went back and did some research about the history of the Chicago Tribune in China. Did you know it was here all the way back on the 1930s? That it reported on the Nanjing Massacre and the Anti-Japanese War?”

And at Jottings from the Granite Studio, Jeremiah Jenne points out an old story about a Pekingese that was taken from the Summer Palace during the 1860 sacking by Anglo-French forces and eventually made its way to Buckingham Palace. They called the dog Looty.