Blogger, Edge of Empire and Button Up!

Many thanks to Palouse Wargaming Journal for coming up with a potential workaround for the blogger dead feed issues (for those of you who use the built in blogger reading list gadget). The details are here: https://palousewargamingjournal.blogspot.com/2026/09/bring-in-cache-buster.html  

Essentially it involves setting up a proxy server on googles Feedburner service: https://feedburner.google.com/  for your blog, then refreshing the Feedburner feed manually which seems to kick the duff google reading list gadget into life too. I've already got a few other peoples blogs appearing in my feed now, which of course it what makes it all worhtwhile.

For good measure I also updated every blog I'm following to use https (a rather tedious manual editing job), as a lot of them were originally just http and in some cases the workaround doesn't seem to like that. Anyway, here is a bit of a test post to try some of this stuff out.

I recently read 'At the Edge of Empire' by Edward Wong, a fascinating account of his families relationship with China in the twentieth century, but also a very interesting account of the development of modern China and its history.

Edwards father was an enthusiastic communist and served as an officer in the PLA, but fell foul of one of Mao's ideological purges and was exiled to Xinjiang, politically suspect due to his family roots in Hong Kong. After being rejected from the Airforce he was assigned to a Chinese cavalry division, who knew such things existed.

I was struck by the parallels with Ai Weiwei's family while reading the timeline at his recent 'Button Up!' exhibition in Manchester.

His father was also an enthusiastic communist and even sat on the committee which designed the new PLA flag in the 1940s, but he too was exiled to Xinjiang. I've been to quite a few Ai Weiwei exhibitions, but this was the most overtly political, covering Chinas relationship with imperialism, censorship, repression and the refugee crisis as well as some observations on the loss of craftsmanship.

It was fairly monumental!

These are representations of the flags of the eight Imperial powers which intervened in China in the nineteenth century. The Opium Wars etc. 

An interesting exhibit was this 'bomb wall', with representations of various types of munitions arranged in chronological order. iirc the blurb said they are all 1:1 size and they are all made out of Lego type plastic blocks. The big one on the left is a 10 ton Grand Slam. 

The Wave done in lego blocks but with refugee rafts substituted for the original fishing boats.

I loved this sculpture made out of rather grisly skeletons, particularly with the light behind it.

Napoleon Crossing the Alps, but riding a zebra. Also made out of lego, the original image is also inverted, so I flipped it over.

I'm not quite sure what this structure was, temple or tea house? It was impressive nonetheless. The dragon flag is the original Chinese flag.

Closer view of the flags. The patterns are made of buttons, purchased from a very old British button making firm which went bust a few years ago, and of course sewn onto cotton - one of Manchesters primary industries back in the day.

The designs are very intricate, and took 33 craftsmen 281 days to sew together (so around 30 person years of effort).

Tea houses made out of actual tea leaves and resting on a bed of tea.

A huge vase in traditional style, but if you look carefully it is illustrated with soldiers, insurgents, fleeing refugees and there is even a T72 (or similar) on the very top one. 

I'm the Year of the Ox, so this is my birth animal. The originals were actually made in France and located in the old Imperial Palace in Beijing.

More of the bomb wall. The big one is a Tsar Bomba, the highest yield nuclear weapon ever manufactured. Fat Man and Little Boy are above it an to left.

Apologies as this isn't my usual fare of painting or pushing toy soldiers around, but given the rise of China as a superpower and the decline of the USA I've been keen to find out more about modern China and how it got to be how it is. Partly why I sat through all 30 episodes of the Chinese adaptation of The Three Body Problem, which had some very entertaining depictions of the west among other things.