If you haven’t seen it, check out some of the stuff at Old China Hand, which is mostly photos and selections from “An American in China 1936-1939,” written by Long Island’s own Gould Hunter Thomas, a traveler and Texaco employee who lived in pre-Communist China and, unlike another Long Island writer with the same surname, managed to do so without getting imprisoned for drug offenses.
After that, check out these photos of stunning German colonial-era buildings in Namibia. Say what you will about the Germans, but damn, they do build a pretty building, even in the most inhospitable regions. The buildings are beautifully maintained, too, although one might suspect the fact that 30,000 ethnic Germans still live in the country (2% of the population) helps promote an interest in maintaining this heritage.
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I’m fairly certain I actually stayed the night in one of those old German houses in Luderitz. About 18 years ago, I took a bus there from the desert crossroads of Keetmanshoop, down a 200-mile road that goes through nothing but sand dunes, most of it fenced off because a diamond-sifting operation has an exclusive concession on it.
Luderitz is the single most lonely, morose, isolated place I’ve seen on this earth — an anachronism anchored to some barren rocks. The fishing and diamond industries on which it somehow survives give most of it an industrial feel. But the people are nice. After a day, I hitchhiked out.
As for preserving German cultural heritage, many Namibians are no doubt conflicted because of some past unpleasantness with the Herrero tribe.
One of the old pictures of Shanghai showed the Bund, and its funny because it didn’t look that different when I visited in 1982. Now, it’s completely changed, totally unrecognizeable.
where would one go to find out resources about particular buildings, by the way, if you’re pretty sure a building is from the colonial era but nobody who is living there knows anything about it? There’s some demolition set to begin on some buildings in my area, but I haven’t yet been able to gather many resources beyond my own photos . . .
There are actually German towns in Paraguay, too (Menonites, mostly).