From the Sydney Morning Herald:
WHEN Margaret Jones, the first Herald correspondent to be assigned to China, moved into a 15-storey apartment block in central Beijing in 1974, the yellow-and-white building was the acme of modernity in the Chinese capital.
The city’s first high-rise built to earthquake-proof standards, it and another matching tower in the Qijiayuan Diplomatic Compound stood over a smoky cityscape of low tenements and single-storey housing around labyrinthine networks of hutong (laneways), its foreign residents kept from contaminating the population byguards and spies.
Now, the Qijiayuan towers are examples of post-revolutionary architecture, quaint enough to feature in the Alors la Chine exhibition held in the Pompidou Centre in Paris several years ago.
