Wednesday, July 04, 2012

New old maps!

Here is the first map.  It's about 20 years old and the colors are still very vivid.  It smells foul though.

Soviet Central Asia.

Lots of outdated information.  Zaire.  No South Sudan or Eritrea.  Yemen was still divided in two.  And check out the Saudi-Iraqi neutral zone.  Did I miss anything else?

One Yugoslavia.

Here is the second map.

 The spellings of the Chinese cities are odd.  Beijing as Peiching?!  FYI, my maternal grandmother hailed from Shihchiachuang (Shijiazhuang).

This is my grandmother's nephew, standing over where her father (my great grandfather) was buried.  The family grows millet.  They live in the village of Wu, because everyone has the same surname-- Wu.  For whatever reason, the village and the family missed out on the Chinese economic boom.  Corn cobs are used for heating and everyone uses outhouses.  They were very welcoming and generous during my visit.  As parting gifts, I received a kilo of millet in a cloth sack (to remind me of what my family does) and a couple of packs of Chinese cigarettes.

This ought to settle the dispute between China, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

1 comment:

F1Outsider said...

Great maps!

I've a friend who is a fertilizer trader and often travels to northen and western China where they extract the stuff. He says the harsh reality is that the economic boom has missed most and they live just as you described.