Post date: 28-Jan-2014 18:49:45
I finished re-reading my father's memoir over the weekend, and have been collecting notes about the important places in his story. When I have had time, I have started placing pins in Google Earth to mark places that I remember from living in Beijing/China for 8 years, and more importantly, from visiting China with my father (and my wife Lynn) back in 1992.
Today, I took a big step forward when I figured out how to place an overlay map into Google Earth. I found a great old map of the Peking Foreign Legation Quarter in Wikipedia and managed to overlay it onto modern Beijing - it fit really well once you tinker with it. Best of all, my pin markers all made sense when combined with the old map, and the place that I figured out where I think the old family house stood . . . fits perfectly! Futhermore, another old map of the Legation Quarter shows where "Chinese Houses" for the rich and privileged were located, and the old family house falls right into that zone.
I visited the site of the old house back in 1992 but the house was long gone. I remember the street that my father took us down, with it's old shady trees on both sides, narrow road down the middle, and the low wall surrounding the property. I remember walking there from the old French bakery that was still there in '92 (we would go there for croissants in the mornings), but is now gone . . . the Novotel Hotel sits on that corner now. Sadly, all of my photos of the area from '92 have been lost in a house flood so I have nothing of my own to fall back on. The location that I figured out fits with my memories of walking there with my father, with its location with respect to the French Legation back in the day, and with its proximity to where the Legation Quarter wall would have been - as my father had a view from his third floor bedroom as a child over the wall to the Japanese parade grounds separating the foreigners from the Chinese city. I wish I could find a similar old map of Qingdao or Tianjin to overlay with those cities . . . but I don't think I will find anything.