…which, as you wonder around the forbidden city and so on, makes you wonder how a nation can so comprehensively lose it. so i’ve read wild swans, know my basic history with the cultural revolution and so on, but nothing on this trip ever get close to me understanding how in the last century they could have just chucked all this away and replaced it wholesale with, well, not good stuff ranging from super-drab urgh architecture to the nastier manifestations of a totalitarian regime.