Pic of the Week: Tiananmen Square in 1946

Paul Pennay | Nov 20, 2008 9:00 am | 1 comment | 2773 reads

Austin Ramzy over at Time's China Blog has announced that Time has teamed up with Google images so that more than 10 million images from the LIFE Photo Archive are now available via a special page on Google's image search. The archive includes quite a few images from China and also of Beiping or Peiping as LIFE used to refer to it when it published reports from here in the late 1940s. The image above was taken in 1946 by Dmitri Kessel. The two buildings at the bottom of the picture are the archery tower (with the portrait of what we guess must be Chiang Kaishek) and Zhengyangmen that make up the Qianmen complex. Looking north beyond Qianmen, you can see the area that after 1949 became Tian'anmen Square. Further to the north you can make out the Forbidden City, Jingshan Park and off to the left the White Dagoba in Beihai Park. Aside from a lot of other great aerial shots of Beijing taken in the late 40's, the archive also includes images from Nixon's historical visit to the capital in 1972.