The maritime tomb in Norway is the first of its kind to be excavated in a century.

Vikings have been plagued by a lot of misconceptions. Their mythos would lead you to believe they wore horned helmets, for example. (They didn’t.) And that they set their funerary barges alight with a flaming arrow shot from the shore. (Also untrue.)

Real Viking burials did involve ships, though not where you might expect them. Viking leaders were buried in boats that were dug into the dirt, then covered over with earth and turf, forming a tumulus, or burial mound, on the Scandinavian landscape.

In June the Gjellestad ship, in Østfold County, about 50 miles south of Oslo, is slated to be excavated—the first time in a century that a Viking burial ship will be unearthed. It’s the latest in a line of Viking burial ships found in Norway that date to between the seventh and 10th centuries.

“What’s true for all of them is they’re real ships,” says Jan Bill, the curator of the Viking ship collection at Sweden’s Museum of Cultural History. “They [weren’t just] produced for the funeral.”

Earlier finds—such as the 71-foot-long Oseberg ship and the 78-foot-long Gokstad ship—offered insights into Viking seafaring, as well as the group’s funerary customs. The Gjellestad ship’s discovery, in 2018, caused a flurry of excitement. As with other burial ships, it was found alongside the remains of houses, suggesting a permanent Viking presence at the site.

Now, that excitement has been tinged with urgency: Analysis of the ship remains shows that fungus is eating away at the remains. Working on one end of the ship, Bill’s team found that the keel had folded under the rest of the vessel, beneath the weight of the dirt piled on top of it. Some planks were missing entirely, having fallen victim to the voracious appetite of the fungi.

Archaeologists have been pushed into a race against time.

“What we could see as we started digging was that the wood in the other parts of the ship burial had completely rotted away,” Bill says. “It was visible just as a stain in the soil.”

The fungi have had a long time to make headway on the burial ship. About 70 years ago, a drainage ditch was dug near the Jell Mound—a distinctive 1,500-year-old tumulus thought to have been built for a king named Jell—that ran close to the site of the ship. Though the ship had already undergone some degradation by that point—a result of being underground for over a millennium—the ditch provided an appealing habitat for microbes, which set up shop and ate away at the wooden planks that house the burial site.

Some parts of the ship are now ghostly imprints in the dirt. Others are still holding on to their physical presence, though they continue to decay.

“You can’t see it, but you can feel it,” Bill says. “The wood is kind of mushy on the surface, and under the microscope, you can actually see the fungus.”

Bill hopes new information will come to light when the ship is excavated and studied this summer.

“I think with the excavation tech we have today, we may be able to learn new things about the ritual, and better understand the society that actually produced these burials,” Bill says. “It’s a peculiar and special rite.”

A collaborative photo project tells personal stories of the pandemic in the U.K.

As the COVID-19 pandemic rushed across the United Kingdom in mid-March, the London-based photographer Emma Mowat wondered how daily life was going to look in the weeks ahead. She wanted to see the public health crisis through other people’s eyes—so she sent 16 disposable cameras to people across the United Kingdom. By leveraging her personal network and Instagram followers, she found collaborators in such places as Newcastle, Edinburgh, Manchester, Sussex, and Stafford.

Some of the cameras shot in black and white, others in color; all had 27 exposures, which the recipients could use to chronicle their topsy-turvy new lives. The photographers varied in age and profession, from a Tesco driver who made home deliveries while wearing a mask to a general practice doctor in Manchester, who had to brush up on working with a ventilator.

After a month or so, everyone returned their cameras to Mowat, who sent off the film to be developed. She chose an image from each camera and stitched the selections together into a photo essay, “Notes From a Nervous Nation.” The subjects range from a batch of boozy drinks to a white, rumpled comforter to trees heavy with pink blooms. In April, Mowat photographed a well-coiffed woman in a mask and plastic gloves, leafing through a newspaper on a park bench. (The woman later messaged Mowat to say that she had been escorted out for sitting and lingering a little too long.)

As life presses on amidst the pandemic, Mowat hopes the series will offer a bit of comfort. “We are going through this together,” she says. “Wherever we are.” Atlas Obscura talked to her about art, crisis, and collaboration.

What inspired this project? When did you first think of it?

As we slipped into lockdown, I had a strong feeling that, although we didn’t quite know what was coming, what it would consist of, or how it would feel, things were changing. It felt instinctual to start a project that captured this time as the virus started gaining ground. I realized that the photos could provide a time capsule for the future.

What appealed to you about a crowdsourced project, and why disposable cameras?

Storytelling at a human level is always important when crisis strikes. It helps us to make sense of complex situations. For me, participatory art was important to capture how the pandemic is affecting people differently, as we all reorient our relationship with ourselves and the outside world. I was able to get an intimate insight into people’s lives by placing cameras into the hands of those who would not typically turn to photography.

It was also appealing to tap into a slower form of photo making, compared to photographs taken with phones. I wanted to encourage a more meditative approach, in which the participants were not able to edit the photos they had taken.

What instructions, if any, did you give about what to shoot, and when?

For those hunkering down at home, I suggested they focus on capturing the benign, the beautiful, and the boring moments of their lockdown experience. I wanted people to look differently at the world they are familiar with—to find a way to spark interest and creativity in their homes. I encouraged the key workers, where possible, to take their cameras with them to work to capture the unraveling of their daily experiences.

I also wanted to collect written memories and experiences of people who were participating, so I asked them to share items such as the music they were listening to, new habits, to-do lists, journal entries, and poems.

Did anything surprise you about the photos people took?

Many non-essential workers involved in the project reflected on the moments of stillness that descended upon their days, despite the dizzying headlines and fear for loved ones. A lot of people have relaxed into the rhythm of the monotony, grateful for the gift of time as spring has appeared with its blossom and chorus of birds, their tune no longer deafened as the roads and skies are clear of their usual traffic.

There is no doubt that many people are struggling with their mental health, stuck indoors and forced to find comfort in the absence rather than the presence of others. However, I would not have predicted how some people have appreciated the lull that has enveloped their lives.

What criteria did you use to choose the photos from each camera?

When you’re doing a photo essay, you’re trying to suggest a narrative. To decide which photographs to include, I was first guided by my intuition. It could be as simple as the colors within the shot, or that it felt unusual in some way. I also wanted to weave together a combination of portraits, places, and things, thinking about how the photos work together in a meaningful way. It was all about uncovering the human experience. That’s why I would say that perhaps the Tesco delivery guy with his mask has the power to tell the story of the pandemic in one shot.

Is there some aspect of life in the time of COVID-19 that you haven’t shot yet, but would like to?

It will be interesting to capture the world we will wake up to as we put ourselves back together again, not only personally but societally. For now, this project is complete. It could be interesting, however, to do a second wave as we emerge from lockdown. As we reconsider who we are and what we value, I would love to photograph the human stories that emerge from our new reality.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

By saving and swapping seeds, you can preserve agricultural heritage.

Of all the wonders in this wide world, there is none quite like the seed. With time, sun, and a little luck, a brown speck that fits on your fingernail can grow into a vast sequoia. Last year’s spit picnic seeds can become this year’s watermelon patch. And flecks from a few potato flowers can feed a nation.

It begins tentatively: A root stretches into soil, a sprout reaches toward the sun. Yet contained within each garden seed is a living record of the long-gone farmers who, over thousands of years, nursed bitter wild leaves and toxic forest fruits into the greens, beans, and grains that sustain us today. With each crop, these farmers chose the tastiest, highest-yielding plants, saved the seeds, and passed those tiny pieces of magic down to their children, eventually creating the cultivars we now know.

“Just a couple of generations ago, everybody was a seed saver,” says Ben Cohen, a farmer and founder of the Michigan Seed Library Network and Central Michigan Seed Swap. “You had to be a seed saver to grow your own food.”

Cohen started saving seeds, and swapping them with other farmers, eight years ago, when his family founded Small House Farms in rural Michigan. At first, seed saving was an economic necessity. “It was easier to save seeds than to purchase them every year,” he says. But what started in convenience quickly became a calling, as Cohen joined a vibrant community of seed savers, swappers, and growers dedicated to “freeing the seed.”

Cohen’s seed swap is just one part of a global movement. Since Congress passed the Plant Patent Act in 1930, agricultural companies have increasingly patented and profited from seeds. Many of these government and corporate research efforts have focused on increasing food production through standardized, high-yield crops, such as wheat, rice, and corn, and through the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. In the 1960s and '70s, agricultural companies, international organizations, and national governments adapted these methods in many countries in the Global South, resulting in a “Green Revolution” that massively expanded agricultural output. Businesses that invested in this agricultural research often patented their seeds, claiming that the revenue helped sustain innovation.

Yet farmers and activists, particularly those from indigenous communities worldwide, have pushed back against the environmental and cultural impact of this agricultural system. Water-intensive crops like wheat and rice have displaced more traditional crops, parching the land and resulting in less nutrient-dense diets. Meanwhile, intellectual property laws force many farmers to purchase new seeds every year, an economic strain widely associated with increased farmer suicides in India. Many indigenous groups have also protested against non-indigenous companies patenting, and profiting from, their agricultural knowledge and traditions.

In response, a movement of growers has come together over the principle that seeds are a shared human heritage, not a private commodity. From the halls of the UN to the community garden down the block, advocates are working to free the seed by growing, sharing, and promoting the use of open-source, or non-patented, cultivars. And if you have a stocked pantry, some potting soil, and a backyard or even a sunny windowsill, you can join them—and enjoy low-cost, delicious produce. Here’s a simple guide.

Cultivate a Growth Mindset

Seed saving isn’t just a way of gardening. It’s a way of looking at life—or more specifically, a way of looking for life in unexpected places.

For Cohen, industrial food systems separate us from the reality that everything we eat comes from, and connects us with, other living things. In contrast, seed saving is about considering the origins of everything you eat. “When you become a seed saver, when you become interested in your food, you start to realize that your food is a living creature,” Cohen says. “It’s not a commodity, it’s not just something to take for granted.”

You also start to realize that humans are in a long-term relationship with plants. We have played a key role in plant domestication and evolution, just as the plants we have grown and harvested have helped shape our bodies and cultures. “A lot of the crops we grow can’t survive in the wild. They’re dependent on us, just as we’re dependent on them,” says Cohen.

Cohen suggests beginning by incorporating seed saving into your everyday culinary life. Notice the plants and plant parts you use to prepare meals. Where are the seeds? Where are the roots? Are parts of the produce still alive and growing? Notice that each seemingly pesky growth on cupboard potatoes could become a new potato plant. Same thing with the green stalk on an onion at the bottom of the bag.

Search for Open-Source Seeds

Not all seeds are equally suitable for saving. Much of the produce you find in the grocery store comes from hybrid crops, the result of genetic crosses whose seeds do not necessarily produce plants that are “true to type,” or identical to the parent plant. These seeds can be planted as an experiment, but you can’t be sure whether they will express the same traits as their parents.

Your best bet for consistent results is to choose seeds that are open-pollinated, meaning they aren’t hybridized and will thus be true to type. You can save seeds from an open-pollinated plant year after year, knowing that the offspring will have similar characteristics to the parent. Heirloom produce, which you’ve likely seen in your farmer’s market or referenced in articles on Gastro Obscura, is the result of open-pollinated seeds that have been saved and passed down, typically for 50 years or more.

Nonprofit organizations like the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) promote the development of open-pollinated, non-patented seeds as public patrimony. When shopping for seeds, you can look for the OSSI label to be sure your seeds are open-pollinated.

Discover the Hidden Garden in Your Grocery Store

While grocery-store seeds are often hybrids, and thus less suited to saving than heirloom plants, your local supermarket is full of seed-saving opportunities, if you know where to look. If you ever sprouted a chickpea in a plastic bag as a grade-school science experiment, you’re already familiar with one common source of seeds.

Cohen suggests looking in the bulk aisle for dried beans or cowpeas. You can take them home and plant them directly in moist soil on a sunny windowsill. Or, you can try a “germination test” by putting them in a moist paper towel in a plastic ziploc bag, leaving the makeshift greenhouse somewhere warm, like the top of the fridge or a steamy bathroom shelf. Check them every few days for roots and then transfer the little seedlings to soil.

Tubers and root vegetables, including potatoes, onions, and garlic, are prime candidates for supermarket gardening, though technically you’re propagating the plant, rather than saving the seed. Simply cut a potato that has started to sprout into pieces with a few eyes or sprouts per piece, and plant each piece in a little soil on a sunny windowsill or backyard bed. Keep the soil moist, though not saturated, and you’re likely to have a spindly little potato plant in a week or two. You can similarly plant sprouting garlic and onions.

Some fruits, such as peppers, melons, and squash, are also good candidates for grocery-store seed saving. Cohen advises making sure the fruits fully ripen—let green peppers turn red, and melons turn fragrant—before saving their seeds. When the fruits are ripe, take out the seeds, wash all the pulp and sugar from them, and leave them to dry on a screen or paper plate for a week to 10 days. Storing them dry helps prevent the seeds from molding, allowing them to stay viable for a few years. Other seeds, including tomato seeds, benefit from being fermented before dry storage.

Connect to Local Land

Like seeds, the land we live on bears a story. If you live in the United States, the land you live and garden on is the heritage—largely stolen by European settlers—of Native American tribes. Many of our most beloved produce, such as corn and squash, are indigenous American crops. By learning about indigenous land and the agricultural heritage of your area, you can help preserve local cultivars and give due credit to the communities who created and continue to care for them.

“Local food comes from local seeds,” says Cohen. “To have a local-food movement, we need to have a local-seed movement.” You can search for regional, indigenous-led seed banks to learn more about the agricultural heritage of your area, and you can find online exchanges and companies specifically focused on native plants. Because native plants are adapted to your specific area, they often require less watering and greenhouse-gas-emitting chemical fertilizers, making them a more environmentally sustainable option as well.

Your neighborhood farmer’s market is also a great place to search for local seeds. The produce will be adapted to your region, and you can ask the grower about their offerings and how to best care for plants. “They might even have some extra seeds they’d be willing to share,” Cohen says.

Become a Backyard Scientist

Most of us learn about Friar Gregor Mendel, and his famous garden, in middle-school science class. By crossing pea plants and noting how they changed over generations, Mendel established the field of modern genetics. As a seed saver, you’re a modern-day Mendel engaged in a genetic experiment to find, plant, and save the seeds best suited to your garden and palate.

As plants mature, they either self-pollinate, meaning the plant itself has both the “male” and “female” parts required to produce fruits, or are pollinated by the wind or helpful insects. The resulting flower or fruit contains the seed.

Seed saving is simply harvesting the seeds from plants, drying them, and tucking them away for next year’s garden. For plants with edible fruits, such as tomatoes and peppers, this means extracting, rinsing, and drying the seeds from the ripe fruits. For plants like lettuce, whose edible part is the leaf, this involves letting the plant flower, and then waiting as these flowers go to seed. Depending on the plant, you’ll see the seeds emerge from the dried bud in the form of a pod or granules. Once the seeds dry on the plant, you can separate the seeds from the other plant material and store them in a cool, dry place.

By choosing the plants whose seeds you want to save, you’re selecting favorable traits—an extra sweet pepper, or a hefty watermelon—just like our early agricultural ancestors. “Seed savers in essence are plant breeders,” says Cohen. “When you select these plants, those are the traits that our gardens give back to us.” Over time, the seeds will become adapted to your particular garden (or windowsill), and after years of careful selection, you can even develop a new variety of your favorite food.

Share Stories at a Seed Swap

Nothing embodies the spirit of seed saving more than a good ol’ fashioned swap. Cohen organized his first seed swap five years ago, after a trip to a nearby living-history farm left him with more Cherokee black bean seeds than he knew what to do with.

The first year, 100 people showed up. “We realized we’d tapped into a need in the community,” he says. The gathering has only grown, and now “it’s like a family reunion.”

Swaps mean more than just seeds. They represent the stories that come with each cultivar, a living memory of gardeners, cooks, and loved ones that expands with each season. Over the years, Cohen has watched those original Cherokee black beans, and the community that saves them, multiply. “A handful of beans became hundreds of beans. A handful of seed savers became hundreds of seed savers,” Cohen says. Other sources of community seeds include seed libraries, which “lend” locals seeds with the expectation that gardeners will save and bring back seeds from their crops.

You can find local seed swaps and seed libraries through this directory, your local gardening club or library, or through social media. You can also organize a seed swap of your own—though, of course, during the COVID-19 pandemic, you should avoid gathering with others until public-health officials give the green light. Finally, especially during these times of social distancing, you can join online seed-swapping communities, and share seeds and stories through the mail, or do contactless seed drop-offs with neighbors.

“It may seem intimidating at first, like any new thing you’ve ever tried,” says Cohen. But people have been saving and swapping seeds for thousands of years. It’s a folk tradition, a tradition of everyday people, and that means it’s your tradition, too. “It’s inside all of us,” Cohen says. So start slow, pick a few seeds, learn from a few neighbors, and watch as your plants—and your communities—thrive.

You can find a free guide to saving different types of seeds at Seed Savers Exchange, or you can order Ben Cohen’s seed-saving book.

Can these unlikely bursts of beauty refresh Australia’s parched rural towns too?

Australia was bled dry. From 2017 to 2019 the sunburned country endured one of its worst droughts on record—a prolonged natural disaster that forced farmers to walk away from their land and left rural towns reeling. With no tourist dollars to depend on, such towns were in danger of being erased from the landscape.

Until the painted grain silos began to appear, that is.

In the past few years, an unlikely public-art movement has burst to life in the outback, giving visitors a reason to travel long hours on dusty roads to the middle of nowhere—and giving at least some of those remote towns a reason for hope.

The first painted silo actually preceded the drought when it appeared in 2015, in the Wheatbelt town of Northam. There, in the arid outback of Western Australia, a cultural nonprofit called FORM recruited two well-known street artists, Phlegm and HENSE, to paint eight 124-foot-tall silos owned by Australia’s largest grain exporter, a growers’ cooperative called the CBH Group. What they hoped would be Australia’s largest outdoor murals—part of an unnamed project aimed at bringing art to the country’s dusty interior—soon became much more than that.

The silos were a hit, and became the catalyst for the Public Silo Trail—a joint project of the CBH Group and FORM that brought international artists to towns in Western Australia hankering for their own enhanced silos. The towering artworks that have resulted, visible for miles around, have been a boon, with visitors spending their time and money at local pubs and lodgings.

The silo trail has since extended to other states in the country, including New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Queensland. Towns have formed silo art committees to apply for government grants, raise funds, and join the Australian Silo Art Trail, which connects remote communities through art and tourism.

Today there are 35 painted silos dotting rural Australia, many of which are owned by GrainCorp. They’re accessible via six driving trails that span 4,700 miles—a public open-air gallery improbably blooming in the outback. And there may be more soon: 25 towns around Australia are currently planning new commissions.

Each painted silo tells a story about the region, its people, and its history. These are a few of them.

In March 2019, Sydney artist Fintan Magee was selected to paint the privately owned Barraba Silos. After speaking to local residents to get a sense of the town, Magee conceived this 131-foot-tall mural. Completed in 24 days, it depicts a man searching for groundwater using a Y-shaped divining rod—a technique still widely used in Australia.

Yelarbon is a small town on the edge of a spinifex desert. Artist Joel Fergie (aka The Zookeeper), envisioned painting an oasis on the silos here, but due to health reasons was unable to complete his work. Jordache Castillejos and Jordon Bruce—members, along with Fergie, of the Brisbane group Brightsiders—took over and created a hopeful mural of a boy cooling off in the Yelarbon Lagoon with a paper boat in his hand. The artists used more than 264 gallons of paint across 19,375 square feet.

Sam Bates (aka Smug) used a cherry-picker to paint this mural of an Australian kelpie named Jimmy sitting beside a human companion—a concept the artist settled on after seeing photographs of daily life in the town. It took Bates 14 days to paint this 80-year old silo, which cost $115,480 AUD—a sum raised by the Pick My Project community grants initiative in Victoria.

This mural by Fergie and Vinson tells the story of the Boorong people. The indigenous group is known for its astrological knowledge and ability to understand the changing seasons using constellations. With a vivid, vibrant backdrop, the mural depicts a young girl swinging from a mallee eucalyptus tree, gazing out over a lake and surrounded by native animals. The project took 11 months from conception to execution, with 20 days of painting.

Melbourne street artist Cam Scale painted the 19th silo on the trail. The first stage was unveiled on Anzac Day 2018 and included two tall silos—one depicting a World War I nurse, the other a modern female military medic—painted to celebrate the centenary of the war’s end. The second stage, unveiled a year later, is a tribute to the mounted troops known as the Australian Light Horse. Painted on two shorter silos, it honors the 50 young men and women from Devenish who enlisted in the military a century ago. At the time, that meant that one in six of the town’s residents went to war.

Your awkward, rebellious stage, it turns out, is history.

Bars, parks, and schools are closed until further notice, but one British museum is making sure that we remember what it means to be young.

With millions stuck at home, within close reach of old photo albums, the United Kingdom’s Museum of Youth Culture (MOYC) has issued a call for submissions: The museum wants your childhood, adolescent, and teenage photos—in all their adorable, rebellious, or just plain awkward glory. The submissions will join the museum’s growing archive of looks, attitudes, and pastimes that have galvanized young people since the 1920s. In other words, this is your chance to claim that your old mullet was a legitimate historical document.

The Museum of Youth Culture, appropriately enough, has always been a purely digital operation. Even before the COVID-19 lockdown, its archive has existed exclusively online, and the team had been hoping to open a physical location in London sometime in 2023. (Those plans are still in place.) Recently, however, the museum has turned to crowdsourcing to bolster that archive. Previously, the curators had pulled from the collections of professional photographers who had documented youth scenes, from mod to punk to grime and beyond. But that was no longer going to cut it, as the museum realized that it has a veritable world of once-and-current youths on call—with time on its hands.

“We wanted the story we’re telling to be as representative as possible,” says Lisa der Weduwe, of the museum’s Cultural Projects team. When the museum made the decision to open for submissions from the general public, the idea was to travel to 20 towns across the United Kingdom and gather submissions through in-person engagement and events. There’s no telling when that tour may begin, but MOYC has prepared a variety of materials to help potential remote participants generate ideas.

Grown Up in Britain, as the new initiative is called, offers a “Memory Sharing Pack” for free download, which encourages users to “describe your teenage bedroom” and recall your “top tune,” or, of course, your “arch-nemesis,” among other prompts. All of these suggestions might lead you to track down that priceless, fading photo or, if none exists, describe your recollections in words. To that end, MOYC has also created a guide instructing current teenagers on how to interview their parents and grandparents about their lives as youngsters, not unlike Atlas Obscura's own. The questions range from the academic (“Do you remember a big technological advancement that happened when you were a teenager?”) to the almost surely scandalous (“What would you do in your spare time?”).

These prompts illustrate MOYC’s emphasis on the thematic, rather than chronological, dimensions of youth culture. The idea, says der Weduwe, is not to group characters together as flappers or punks, but to reveal the various continuities that link young people across history, regardless of how they dressed or acted: first loves, first jobs, school, leaving home. “We can put someone from the 1920s next to someone from 2020,” der Weduwe explains. That ethos, she adds, also informs the project’s name, Grown Up in Britain. Though it doesn’t necessarily connote youth, it’s more inclusive than “Growing" Up in Britain, which would suggest a more contemporary focus.

Der Weduwe also emphasizes that the project, despite its name, is not limited to the United Kingdom. So far, the museum has received submissions from the Netherlands, New York, and New Jersey, and the existing archive contains material from all over the world. Focusing on the United Kingdom has been a “starting point,” she says, but one that has allowed the team to experience the power of local engagement. Last year, MOYC ran a trial in the English coastal town of Clacton, which had been voted the country’s worst seaside town in a survey. After soliciting recollections from the town’s elderly residents, including those with dementia and in assisted-living facilities, MOYC helped give the town a more “positive narrative” in its archive. MOYC will continue to solicit submissions from assisted-living facilities while their residents are quarantined, hopeful that the “reminiscing sessions” will both lift spirits and build the archive.

While the museum—in its digital and, eventually, physical manifestations—focuses primarily on photography, it also catalogs other youthful “ephemera,” including ticket stubs, event fliers, and pen-pal letters. But what could be better on that front, really, than music itself? MOYC has created Spotify playlists for every decade from the 1940s—think Gene Autry and Duke Ellington—through the 2000s, featuring The Strokes, Lady Gaga, and Erykah Badu. Those are available on the museum’s website, along with the entirety of the photo archive.

“We feel that young people are incredibly innovative and creative,” says der Weduwe. Explore the archive and see for yourself—or better yet, add to it.

Forty years of satellite imagery chronicles a remarkable floral comeback.

The most explosive volcanic eruptions are striking not just for their vivid pyrotechnic displays, or for the huge clouds of ash they spew into the air. Often, the aftermath is just as jarring—the miles upon miles of ash that blanket the earth, extinguishing the life that grew there and suppressing any that was to come.

But nothing is forever. Take Mount St. Helens, whose gargantuan eruption 40 years ago—the deadliest in U.S. history—completely destroyed the top of the mountain. An earthquake first jolted the volcano into activity, causing the largest landslide in recorded history on its northern flank and sending thousands of feet of mud cascading down its southern slopes. In four minutes the cloud of the eruption was 18 miles skyward, and the force of the blast knocked over billions of board feet of timber.

Recently, the NASA Earth Observatory published satellite images of the mountain taken in the years after the eruption. Since Mount St. Helens’s collapse, life in the vicinity has bounced back. Though not yet visible from space, flowering plants like the prairie lupine have been seen on the Pumice Plain, a distinctive stretch of hostile volcanic sediment on the northern slope, the area that saw the worst devastation.

In the 1980s, greenery had already begun to return to some of the farthest reaches of Mount St. Helens’s blast zone. By the turn of the millennium it had crept closer. In satellite imagery of the mountain, you can see the initial damage radius of the eruption, then watch as the surrounding areas slowly turn a more confident shade of green, even as a white cap of snow coats the crater from which the way-beyond-boiling lava once spewed.

There’s plenty more ground left for life to take back from the eruption of 40 years ago. But no matter the recovery time, time does heal all wounds—and NASA satellites will be there to capture its progress.

A strict lockdown has meant a spike in homebrewing.

On March 15, the day before South Africans were plunged into a lockdown which prohibited sales of alcohol, cigarettes, and takeout food, lines outside liquor stores spilled into the streets. One bottle store owner told me he did a month’s trade in a day.

Three weeks later, when President Cyril Ramaphosa made it clear the booze ban wouldn’t be lifted anytime soon, South Africans started to get desperate. Bottle store break-ins and drone-assisted drink deliveries made the news across the country. Then came the tenfold leap in pineapple sales: from 10,000 a day to nearly 100,000.

Thirsty South Africans have turned to making their own beer out of pineapples. In normal times, you can get sloshed on pineapple beer at the Big Pineapple, a 56-foot fiberglass construction in subtropical Bathurst. But these are not normal times. Luckily, pineapple beer—which is technically more of a wine or cider, as there’s no boiling involved—is easy to make, and can even be quite pleasant to drink.

You can turn any fruit (even a carton of fruit juice) into booze, says Greg Casey of Cape Town’s Afro-Caribbean Brewing Company. Here’s his hard-to-forget summary of Brewing 101: “Yeast eats sugar, farts CO₂, produces alcohol.” Pineapple, as it happens, is one of the easiest fruits to ferment because it contains lots of sugar, and its skin is packed with natural yeasts (you can sometimes even see the white stuff growing on the skin.)

Pineapples hail from Latin America, and pineapple beer, called tepache, is a popular drink in Mexico. Despite the fact that pineapples were only introduced to South Africa in 1860, pineapple beer is made by most segments of the Rainbow Nation. My own grandmother, the daughter of an Anglican vicar, was famous for her particularly potent brew. Stoffelina Johanna Adriana de Villiers’ 1951 Kook en Geniet, the bible of Afrikaans gastronomy, includes a recipe for pynappelbier, and there’s even a traditional Zulu version known as mfula mfula, which dates back to an old law banning Black South Africans from purchasing or consuming alcohol.

After instruction from both Casey and cult winemaker Chris Alheit, whose first forays into fermentation involved “a nasty Tupperware of pineapple skins under my bed in high school,” I set about making my own. After paying top dollar for two pineapples (prices have more than doubled due to the homebrewing trend) I removed the spiky green bits and diced the rest, unwashed skins and all, before bunging it all in a plastic container. To this I added a cup-and-a-half of sugar, a gallon of water, and a sachet of regular baker’s yeast.

This last addition is slightly contentious. Alheit first argues that the natural yeasts present in the skin should be allowed to work their magic. But he does eventually concede that “a tiny sprinkle” of store-bought stuff will see to it that the ‘good’ natural yeasts win out over the ‘bad’ ones that can give the beer a funny taste or make you slightly ill. Casey, meanwhile, says the best way to achieve a pleasant end product is to use brewer's yeast, which won’t impart any undesirable flavors, and to pasteurize the mixture by boiling it.

But he’s the first to admit that this goes against the whole idea of cheap ‘n nasty lockdown hooch. “We’re not following the German Reinheitsgebot here,” he laughs, referring to the law limiting what can be put into beer. “We’re just throwing a bunch of stuff together to make pineapple-flavored alcohol.” In the spirit of the lockdown regulations, some brands have even pulled brewer’s yeast from the shelves to keep it from being used for homebrewing.

After giving my concoction a healthy stir, I closed three corners of my plastic tub’s lid, leaving the fourth one open. Sealing the vessel tightly would end explosively, but leaving it open to the elements would attract fruit flies. To sidestep this issue, I popped the whole thing in a large cooler box, which I closed and moved to a cool bathroom. Both Casey and Alheit tell me that keeping the mixture at around 18°C (or 64°F) for the duration of the ferment is key to achieving a desirable brew.

Three days later, I strained the mixture into a jug and poured it into clean plastic Coke bottles. Glass might be the classier option, but given that I have no idea how much CO₂ is being farted out by my concoction, putting the fermenting mix into glass bottles could turn them into grenades.

The bottles can now go back in the bathroom to continue fermenting and carbonating. To avoid explosions, Casey advises checking on them daily and releasing a little gas if they feel too hard.

After three days at room temperature, the bottles should be moved to a fridge for a final 48 hours, as liquid absorbs CO₂ more easily at colder temperatures. While it might be tempting to skip this step (especially if your bar has run dry) it could be the difference between barely-drinkable and quite-nice pineapple beer. When I cracked my first bottle, I was rather pleased with the results: it tasted dry and rather sophisticated, somewhere between a sparkling wine and a cider. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s about 4% alcohol.

But others haven’t been so lucky. Kirsten Morreira, an editor friend who ran out of booze long before I did, has already made a few batches, with varying success. “My main problem is often that it’s too sweet, because not all the sugar has fermented,” she says. (Casey says this might be because she killed the yeast by letting her brew get too warm.)

With so many variables at play, both Alheit and Casey admit that their own efforts at making pineapple beer have been rather hit or miss. But when I raise the possibility of killing yourself with a bad batch of pineapple beer, Alheit laughs at me. Casey is similarly dismissive, but he does stress the importance of keeping everything clean, as bacteria are far more dangerous than booze. (“Don’t play with raw chicken while you’re making it,” he warns.) The consensus? If you’re brave enough to make your own sourdough, you can definitely try this.

Which brings us back to Morreira, the only one among us seriously brewing pineapple beer to drink. “None that I’ve made has been so great that I'd offer it to anyone else,” she concludes. “But it’s generally drinkable, and just alcoholic enough to make it worth it.”

Zhanjiao futou, or hats with "wings," became a common accessory during the Song Dynasty.

Last month, as children in China started returning to school after COVID-19 closures, an ancient hat from the Song Dynasty came back into fashion. At a primary school in Hangzhou, pupils donned handmade headgear that they fashioned out of paper, balloons, and other crafts, with protruding arms that spanned one meter. These eccentric hats were intended to help them adjust to social distancing measures, the South China Morning Post reported, and they were modeled after hats once worn by Chinese officials. Photographs of the students have been circulating on the internet, and so has a popular legend: that the hats were designed to keep officials away from each other, so that they couldn’t whisper and scheme with one another.

According to a scholar of art history and Asian studies, however, the “social distancing” function of the Chinese hats is rooted in “an unfounded speculation.” Jin Xu, an assistant professor at Vassar College, writes in an email, “Modern scholars trace the origin of the rumor to a 13th-century Chinese scholar who's known for his shoddy scholarship.”

The original headwear was made of somber black cloth and was called futou, or more specifically zhanjiao futou—zhanjiao meaning “spreading feet or wings.” Early futou were simple cloths wrapped around the head, and wearers eventually padded them with wood, silk, grass, or leather, writes the scholar Mei Hua in Chinese Clothing. In the Tang Dynasty (618-907), as futou gradually took on the appearance of a more fitted, structured cap, officials began adopting them, adding two long wings made of stiffened ribbons.

Futou became a common accessory during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), although most of them had less cumbersome extensions—more feet than wings. People of all classes wore these hats, and there were five styles that individuals donned, according to their status or for various occasions, notes Liu Fusheng in A Social History of Medieval China.

“Some warriors wore the ‘curved-feet futou’ or ‘flower-like futou with feet curved backward,’ or the ‘cross-feet futou,’ and musical instruments players in the imperial music office liked to wear the ‘long-feet futou,’” Liu writes. “On some special occasions, such as longevity ceremonies held for the royal family or imperial court banquets, officials would pin flowers on futou ... And there were lustreless futou and white crêpe futou worn at funerals.”

The shape of the wings indicated the wearer’s rank, and the longest were reserved for the emperor and other high-ranking officials. Yu Yan—the hapless scholar who first speculated about the “social distancing” function of these hats—made his dubious claim in his four-volume text, The Pedantic Remarks of the Confucians. The purpose of futou, he scribbled, was “perhaps to avoid [the officials] whispering to each other when having an audience with the Emperor,” Liu writes.

The futou that Yu Yan described were likely made of plain or lacquered muslin, with extended ribbons that were reinforced with iron wires or bamboo strips. One style of wings was particularly narrow and long, “projecting as much as two feet from either side of the wearer’s head,” Alexandra B. Bonds, a professor of costume design at the University of Oregon, writes in Beijing Opera Costumes: The Visual Communication of Character and Culture.

Variations on futou cropped up during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), but new headwear entered the court after the Manchus took power and established the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). Since that time, the hat has resurfaced in paintings and theatrical costumes, and different versions of it can still be spotted on stage during Beijing Opera performances. “The wings are mounted on springs, and the actor can make them quiver to expand their expression,” Bonds writes in an email. “Each style represents rank or sometimes personal characteristics.”

Individually crafted and embellished, the hats of students in Hangzhou are similar expressions of personality and style. Bonds adds that she’s delighted by how the pupils have repurposed this object from their cultural heritage. “Whether the headdress was originally intended to prevent courtiers from plotting sedition or not, the wings certainly would have precluded private conversation,” she says. “They can serve the same purpose today by reminding the students of the space required for social distancing, while also teaching them about their history, and giving them an art project. What more could a teacher want from an assignment?”

Their words speak to the legacy of a lost community.

Gabriel Rosenbaum was walking through the streets of Cairo one day when he heard a familiar word, zahub, coming from a nearby shop. The word sounded awfully close to the Hebrew word for gold, zahav, and as an Israeli, he was intrigued: The Arabic word for gold (dhahab) is similar, but zahub’s presence here seemed unusual. Rosenbaum, a professor of Arabic language and literature at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, decided to turn into the shop.

Rosenbaum found himself among the goldsmiths of Cairo, who use trade-specific terminology for their business dealings. Many of the phrases they use, as he soon discovered, are reworked Hebrew terms, remnants of a time—from at least the 16th century through the early 20th century—when Egyptian Jews were central to the jewelry trade. The find was startling not only because of the intrigue of such “secret” trade languages, but because Jews have not worked in the Egyptian goldsmith market since the 1960s. Their language has outlived their community.

“In the Egyptian Jewish community, as in many Jewish communities, some elements of Hebrew vocabulary embedded within the Egyptian Arabic vernacular served as a secret language,” Rosenbaum wrote in the 2013 edition of the Encyclopedia of Hebrew Languages and Linguistics. Profession-specific languages allowed merchants to discuss trade topics and private matters in front of customers. “The most highly developed secret language is that of the goldsmiths, which was used for centuries by the Jewish (mostly Karaite) goldsmiths in Egypt and was later adopted by their Muslim and Christian colleagues, many of whom use it to this day.”

Many of the phrases Rosenbaum discovered combine Hebrew roots with Arabic grammar. For example, some merchants would warn one another about a possible thief by using the word “ganneb.” The term comes from the Hebrew verb ganab, to steal, but is in Arabic’s declarative second verb form. As Rosenbaum would write, “Another term for warning against thieves is enaymak, which is a combination of the Hebrew word עינים=/enayim (eyes) and the Arabic suffixed possessive pronoun -ak for the second person.” Translation: Watch out!

Rosenbaum was not the only scholar to chance upon this odd linguistic phenomenon. Gabriel Khan, a professor at the University of Cambridge, published a 1997 article on the subject. He noted that goldsmithing seemed to have been “one of the most common professions among the Karaites of Cairo” and that their trade argot, or insider business phrases, retain the syntax of Egyptian spoken Arabic, but are clearly rooted in Hebrew terms. Khan writes that he is unsure when these phrases became widely accepted by goldsmiths throughout Egypt, but that by the late 20th century, his own fieldwork and sources reveal, there was widespread use of these phrases in the trade among Muslim and Christian goldsmiths as well.

In the 20th century, almost all Egyptian Jews lived in either Cairo or Alexandria, and they dominated the gold markets. The trade was particularly concentrated among Karaite Jews, a minority off-shoot community which today exists mostly in Israel. Over the course of the mid-20th century, after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and the rise of Arab pan-nationalism in Egypt under President Nasser in 1954, the Jewish population of Egypt more or less vanished, as political tensions forced many to flee or face arrest and discrimination. There might have still been a few Jewish goldsmiths in 1967, when the Six Day War broke out between Israel and several surrounding countries including Egypt, but by then the country had long become inhospitable to its Jewish citizens, and the few remaining Jews were expelled. By 1970, no Jewish goldsmith shops were still operating. Today, fewer than 10 Jews of the once 85,000-strong community in 1950 remain. Where once the goldsmith quarter of Cairo rang out with school boys selling kosher snacks for lunch, today the Jewish presence lives on only in the few scattered, Hebrew-derived phrases still in use.

The story of why this language remains in Egypt, long after the community in which it originated fled, is a story of many theories and few answers.

The entrance to the Cairo goldsmith quarter is easy to miss. Just off the Khan el-Khalili market, right by the Al-Azhar mosque, the seemingly nondescript side street quickly gives way to a cluster of alleyways, hosting hundreds of family-owned stalls and small jewelry shops. The storefronts glitter with everything from mass-produced gold bangles and pendant necklaces to rare, finely worked earrings, vases, brooches, and decorative gold statues.

Interspersed within the heavy retail businesses are the goldsmith stalls, mostly owned by Coptic Christians. Many of the shops have pictures of Christian saints on the walls. They often hang alongside a portrait of the shop founder, usually the father or grandfather of the current shop owner. The stalls might technically have addresses, somewhere, but most are known simply by sight and name.

In the early 1900s, the goldsmith quarter was also home to Cairo’s large Jewish population, which had resided in Egypt for millennia. The departure of the Jewish community in the 1950s and 1960s was swift and sudden, leaving many Jewish goldsmiths to abandon their businesses or hastily gift them to their non-Jewish assistants and colleagues. Few shop owners operating today will openly discuss this period. It’s not known what percentage of shops in the 1950s would have been Jewish-owned.

The evolution of an insider trade language is not unique to the Egyptian Jewish goldsmiths, but one example of a global trend. Scholar Miriam-Esther Wagner notes that the rise of these linguistic phenomena in Jewish communities is widespread, given the preponderance of such languages in minority communities in general. “In the case of Jewish traders, high literacy in a second language, Hebrew, unknown to the majority group made it much easier to develop such common coded language,” she says, adding that such coded language also helped foster a group identity.

In her book, Merchants of Innovation, Wagner, a professor at the University of Cambridge who began her career studying mercantile correspondence in Yiddish and Judeo-Arabic, discusses how dealers of expensive goods developed their own languages. She notes that the pragmatic focus of writing in trade contexts—which was often unconcerned with literary flourishes and instead existed somewhere between written and spoken language—meant traders were often the first to introduce spoken variables of language into the written word. This linguistic trendsetting was particularly true of trades that cultivated a group identity—goldsmiths being a prime example.

“Different kinds of traders develop particular speech forms to delineate their group from outsiders, to keep trade secrets hidden from outsiders, and also to create a linguistic group identity,” she writes in an email. “Horse traders in Germany developed their own jargon, the so-called rotwelsh, partially based on Yiddish and other jargons, in order to keep trade secrets. Jewish traders of Prague developed codes to guard secrets in Yiddish.”

But horsetraders in Germany today are not known to still be speaking rotwelsh, which is a Germanic-based language influenced by both Yiddish and Judeo-Latin, an ancient Jewish language spoken in the Roman Empire. Presumably, the language moved on with the Jews.

This is what has made the goldsmith trade speak in Egypt so intriguing to scholars: The lingering use of these phrases long after the departure of the Jewish community.

Some scholars have emphasized the preponderance of Karaite Jewish goldsmiths in the industry as a critical factor. As it turns out, the Karaite Jews had a unique relationship to Arabic, which some posit might be one reason their trade phrases integrated so widely within the broader, non-Jewish goldsmith population.

“There were not many Jews in Egypt who used Arabic exclusively for every aspect of their lives,” explains Katharine Halls, a scholar of Egyptian Jewry and Arabic-to-English translator who has lived on and off in Egypt for several years during her career. “Egyptian Jews often spoke French, like many wealthier Egyptian families, or Alexandria it was Italian for a while, but the Karaites were generally mono-lingual in Arabic, which made them virtually unique among Jews in Egypt.”

Karaite Jews also rarely spoke Hebrew outside the synagogue. This means that the use of Hebrew phrases, by the early 20th century, was likely not an organic development by goldsmiths who spoke both languages interchangeably, but already an established part of the trade lingo, which likely entered the trade centuries earlier with Jewish communities that still spoke in Hebrew in everyday life. Over time, the Hebrew phrases of these communities would have developed into new forms, and gained an identity as simply trade terms, mixing with other trade-specific jargon used by the Egyptian goldsmiths to refer to their tools, metals, and various trappings of the profession. The Karaite Jewish goldsmiths likely would have freely trained their non-Jewish staff in the use of such terminology.

But even such a timeline remains, at best, conjecture, particularly in an industry that remains somewhat guarded.

Halls had first come across the idea of the goldsmiths’ use of Hebrew in her academic research. She studied Arabic and Hebrew at the University of Oxford and later moved to Cairo, where she was curious about what remained of Jewish life and visited as many historical sites as she could. It was only by coincidence that she found out the goldsmiths' argot was not just a historical curiosity, but still in use.

“I had a fair bit of silver jewelry that I wanted to get gold-plated,” she says, explaining that it was much easier, and cheaper, to gold-plate jewelry in Egypt. After asking around, she came across a tiny shop run by two brothers, and ended up returning again and again to have her jewelry fixed. As they resized her rings and fixed broken necklace catches, she chatted to them about their business and their lives. Eventually she asked about the Jewish goldsmiths and their secret language.

"Sure, we still use that," one of the brothers told her, and began reeling off a list of numbers and phrases that they might use to point out an untrustworthy customer, or surreptitiously discuss prices. Some were unfamiliar to Halls, but others were clearly based on Hebrew roots and numbers. She asked them more questions. Like most goldsmiths, the brothers had heard stories, of course, about the Jews, from the older generations. But they were too young to remember much themselves.

Travel down the Road to Productivity, go on a bear hunt, and hope you get to see Super Island.

As many of us find ways to explore the world from inside our homes, maps can be a source of comfort and inspiration. Recently, we asked you to be the cartographers by creating maps of your own. The results were a fascinating mix of real and imagined worlds, and a few that charted the ground between those spaces.

Some submissions were filled with dizzying details and abundant alliteration, while others were beautifully simple, leaving room for the reader to fill in interpretations. Each gave us a glimpse of something unique: a fond memory, an obstacle to overcome, a familiar view.

While we couldn’t include all of the artwork we received, we’ve brought together a few of our favorites here, along with notes from their creators. If you still want to try your hand at mapmaking, we’d love to see what you create. You can share your maps with us in Atlas Obscura's forums or by emailing places@atlasobscura.com.

Thanks to everyone who contributed! We hope you’ll keep an eye out for other challenges and activities from Obscura Academy.

Champ Turner

Austin, Texas

It's titled "The Road to Productivity" and it maps the many things that stand in our of getting things done, even now when many of us have even more time on our hands to do it. It's inspired by several of the maps from this article.

I also got my grandma to draw a map of her life these days. The first drawing shows how she now enjoys much more Netflix in bed on her iPad. The second shows the view of the place she would most like to be right now, the beach.

Linda-Marlena Ross

Montreal, Québec

Here are a few ... called "drifting stations" (referencing both sea levels rising and the ships in the polar seas researching magnetic north).

Kees de Jager

Christchurch, New Zealand

I personally love maps and being a keen tramper/hiker I spend a lot of time looking at them. Today my daughter Georgia, who is four, and I went for a bear hunting expedition in our local hills here in Christchurch. We don't have bears but my daughter watched a movie about them and I thought it would be a good way to get her excited about getting out for a walk with me. Once home we both worked on creating a map of our trip together.

Melinda Thompson

Los Angeles, California

I teach two Chinese children English over Zoom every week. Kolisa and Joe live in separate houses in Shanghai, and I live in Los Angeles. I loved your idea of making a map and thought it would be fun for the children and me to make a map together in class using Zoom. Because we don't meet in a physical place, I wondered how they would imagine our meetings. We meet in the Party Room on Super Island!

You can't travel, but you could probably use a drink.

Maybe you were supposed to go to New Orleans this summer to see what Nicolas Cage’s pyramid tomb was all about. Perhaps it was Kenya to visit a mansion for giraffes. Or else it was Myanmar to see the island that inspired Neverland. We may not get to travel the world this summer as planned, but that doesn’t mean we can’t drink like it.

Dust off the cocktail shaker, push aside the regulars at the front of your liquor cabinet, and dive into a world of beverages beyond your go-to nightcaps. From Philadelphia social clubs to the meat stalls of Addis Ababa, the drinks on this list tell stories that can transport you. For the most part, they can be made with ingredients you already have or can pick up on your next grocery-store run, as well. There’s a frosty, accidental Oklahoma cocktail, a Mexican brew made from up-cycled pineapple peels, and a Slovakian Christmastime favorite that unironically includes bacon.

The flights are canceled and the bars are closed. Belly up to your counter, make a drink, and get yourself out there.

Ramos Gin Fizz

New Orleans, LA

If you want to make Henry Ramos, the Father of the Gin Fizz, happy, you’ll shake his prized, century-old variation for a full 12 minutes, until the gin, dairy, and citrus conspire to betray a sip that is as frothy as it is floral. Most experts today insist five minutes is sufficient.

However long Ramos’s designated “Shaker Boys” spent on each drink, you wouldn’t have wanted a seat at the bar during 1915 Mardi Gras, when 35 of them shook feverishly from day to night at his nightclub, The Stag Cafe, and still failed to keep up with demand.

If you’ve got some gin in your cabinet and time on your hands, you too can party like it’s 1915. Toss 2 ounces of gin, ½ ounce of heavy cream, ½ ounce each of lemon juice and lime juice, ¾ ounce of simple syrup, ½ teaspoon of orange flower water, and an egg white into a shaker, and shake anywhere from 5 to 12 minutes. Add ice and shake again to get the now-silky concoction cold. Serve with a splash of club soda.

Panther Milk

Barcelona, Spain

You may think college students and the military go together about as well as gin and milk, but this century-old Spanish cocktail is here to show you they can coexist—and you don’t need to milk a panther to make one yourself.

Panther Milk, or Leche de Pantera, was created by an elite Spanish military unit in the 1920s as a cocktail that could be mobilized quickly and easily. Calling for a simple mix of gin, condensed milk, and water, the drink helped keep drab, far-flung dispatches a bit more colorful.

The drink fell into obscurity by the middle of the 1900s, but was revived in 1975 when a veteran of Spain’s military opened a Barcelona bar selling the long-lost Panther Milk. A competing bar caught wind of the fad and added a touch of grenadine for color, birthing the drink's signature pink. It was overwhelming demand from nearby college students that eventually put the cocktail back on the map.

Whether you’re pro-military, pro-pink, or pro-actively looking for a new way to drink gin, you can make Panther Milk at home, with this recipe adapted from Steve the Bartender: Combine 1 ounce of gin, 1 ounce of white rum, 1 ounce of condensed milk, 5 ounces of milk, and a teaspoon of grenadine for that splash of pink color. Shake well with ice, strain into a glass, and sprinkle with cinnamon.

Pegu Club Cocktail

Yangon, Myanmar

Perhaps the only enduring positive outcome of 124 years of British rule in Myanmar (previously known as Burma) was this cocktail. The bitter, citrusy gin drink sent refreshing chills down the sweaty napes of many military officers sweltering in the Pegu Club, an expansive, Victorian-style gentleman’s club on the outskirts of Yangon that could have been called a sore thumb if it were remotely as useful.

As the British empire receded, the drink became popular throughout the world, or at least the world’s cocktail bars. The sun now sets on England; this cocktail, less so. Mix 2 ounces of gin, ¾ ounce of orange liqueur, ½ ounce of lime juice, and 2 dashes of Angostura bitters in a shaker with ice and shake well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and serve with a lime peel.

Tepache

Mexico

When it comes to the origins of the fermented, mildly alcoholic pineapple beverage known as tepache, culinary historians are split. Some believe Aztecs were experimenting with the process long before Spanish conquest; others believe it came from conquistadors’ attempts to make New World cider with pineapples. Whoever started it, the fruity, effervescent drink is now a staple of the Mexican street-food scene.

There’s more than one way to carry out the centuries-old process, and more than one way to cause an explosion if you do it improperly as well. Start by dissolving a cup of brown sugar in two quarts of warm water. Add the peels and core from a ripe pineapple along with a stick of cinnamon and three cloves to a pitcher. Pour the sugar water into the pitcher, cover it with a cloth, and set it aside for 24 hours, or until a layer of foam has collected along the surface of the water (do not leave the mixture to ferment in a closed container or bottle—it could explode). Strain the mixture and add sugar to taste. Drink with ice.

The Lunchbox

Oklahoma City, OK

The first rendition of this frosty, citrusy, almondy “beer-tail” was an accident. The millions made afterward were not.

Edna Scott, the namesake proprietor of Edna’s Bar in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was trying to make a separate drink altogether when she stumbled across this summertime elixir in the late 1990s; The state of Oklahoma couldn't be happier that she failed. “The Lunchbox” is now made throughout the South and has even spawned regional varieties.

To make the original cocktail, place a shot-glass full of amaretto inside a frosted beer mug, fill the mug three-quarters of the way with Coors Light (or any light beer you have on hand), and top it off with orange juice. As Edna’s daughter has said, the drink has “a little bit of everything you need,” assuming food and shelter are already in place.

Turbo

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

If you ask 10 people in Addis Ababa how to make Turbo, you’ll get 10 different answers, and technically they’ll all be correct. That’s because rather than a recipe-based cocktail, the drink is more of a loose tradition, born among the casual, plastic-table eateries abutting the capital city’s many butcher-houses. If you’re drinking a light, sweet, boozy beverage with smoky grilled meat, you’ve got the right idea.

While there are countless variations, most involve a mixture of beer, wine, and soda. It may not be groundbreaking, but it does speak to a distinctly Ethiopian approach to gastronomy known as spris, Amharic for “mix.” Ask for a spris in a cafe, you’ll get half coffee, half tea. Ask for it in a juice bar, you’ll get a blend of the day’s fresh fruit. As for the butcher-house special, equal parts amber beer, white wine, and Sprite should do the trick.

Canelazo

Andean Highlands

If anise-kissed cocktails are your thing, canelazo will be right up your alley. If it’s not your thing, there are enough other spicy, sweet flavors going on in this South American cocktail to keep you distracted. For those who've spent winters in the Andean highlands, however, none of this should be news.

Canelazo, from the Spanish canela, or “cinnamon,” is a popular holiday beverage along the west coast of South America where cinnamon trees are cultivated, though it’s most popular in the Ecuadorian capital of Quito (the highest capital city in the world). With such a broad range of influence, recipes vary, but the drink generally marries warm spices, citrus, and unrefined sugar in a pot of hot water alongside the cane-based, licorice-adjacent aguardiente for a cozy sip on long, breathless Andean nights.

Whether or not you have access to aguardiente, you can bring the flavor of navidad home by following these steps, adapted from a recipe by The Spruce Eats: Add 1⅓ cups of brown sugar, a juiced lime, 1 teaspoon of whole cloves, 5 cinnamon sticks, and a pinch of salt to 3 cups of boiling water, then simmer for about 7 minutes. Remove the pot from heat and add ½ cup of orange juice and 4 ounces of aguardiente or rum. Strain and serve while it’s still hot.

Grasshopper

New Orleans, LA

Despite its conspicuous hue, the history of this drink is mostly shrouded in mystery. It popped its tiny green head into existence for a cocktail competition in New York City in 1919, where it debuted as a simple, creamy, mashup of chocolate and mint. While it somehow lost the competition, the drink returned to New Orleans, the home of its inventor, and amassed a local following as it was served clandestinely throughout Prohibition. Ironically, the drink came to inspire the flavor of many sweets for kids, from pies and ice cream to cookies.

Part of what made the drink so Prohibition-friendly (or averse, depending on your approach to federal crime) was its simplicity: equal parts crème de cacao, crème de menthe, and heavy cream, shaken with ice and served in a martini glass. To sip like a true speakeasy patron, drink it out of a mug and don’t tell your roommates.

Fish House Punch

Philadelphia, PA

Before the Civil War, before the Constitution, before George Washington was fully potty-trained, a sovereign state was declared in modern-day Philadelphia. This state had “citizens,” all of them fishermen, and these proud anglers invented a drink so strong, it allegedly put more than a few historical figures under the table.

In 1732, the Schuylkill Fishing Company, otherwise known as the State in Schuylkill, signed a treaty with the indigenous Lenni-Lenape tribe, securing land and fishing rights along the banks of the Schuylkill River, inaugurating what is today the oldest social club in the English-speaking world. They still perform 18th-century fish-tossing rituals and offer a pre-meal toast to George Washington, an honorary member who was said—as a fully potty-trained adult—to be quite fond of the club's Fish House Punch.

The punch is neither for the impatient, the intolerant, nor for the ill-provisioned liquor cabinet. If you’ve got a well-stocked bar, follow these instructions, adapted from Food & Wine's recipe: Mix ¾ ounce each of dark rum, cognac, and peach brandy, as well as ½ ounce of simple syrup, ¼ ounce of lime juice, and ½ ounce of lemon juice in a shaker with ice and shake well. Pour the drink into a tumbler, garnish with a maraschino cherry and a wedge of lime, and toast to G.W.

Dawa

Nairobi, Kenya

It was on a trip to Brazil that a Kenyan restaurateur came up with the idea for Carnivore, Nairobi’s answer to the churrascarias of the Pampas region. Instead of beef, pork, and chicken, the restaurant grilled giraffe, wildebeest, and impala; in place of the caipirinha, the restaurant’s long-time bartender, Simon Kivenge, alias “Dr. Dawa,” claims to have invented the dawa, a bracing, sweet and sour, vodka-based cocktail.

While dawa means “health” in Swahili, there’s no curative properties to speak of, outside of claims from Kivenge that the drink helped ready adventurous stomachs for large portions of grilled game meat. What can be said of the drink is that after the Kenyan government banned the sale and consumption of endangered species, the popular cocktail helped keep the restaurant in business. Nowadays, Kivenge moves from table to table with a cigarette-girl party tray, making dawas fresh to order while patrons dine on less-endangered entrees like crocodile, ostrich, and rabbit.

While you may not have any rare meats to pair it with, it’s easy to make your own dawa at home. Muddle one quartered lime with a teaspoon of brown sugar in a tumbler before adding 2 ounces of vodka and a handful of ice. Dip the muddler in honey and muddle again until you’ve achieved a desired sweetness. You probably won’t receive a surprise delivery of grilled ungulate, but it doesn’t hurt to be ready.

Hriatô

Slovakia

It might not be Christmas, but it’s also not so hot that you can’t experiment with this bacon-based Slovakian wintertime cocktail. You have the time, no one’s watching, and what else are you doing with your plum brandy?

If anyone was going to incorporate pork into a cocktail, it was going to be the Slovaks: The majestic hog plays an outsize role in their national cuisine, and it’s one of the few flavors that can tame the ubiquitous slivovitz, a plum-based brandy often clocking in at over 50 percent alcohol. The potent porcinity pairs perfectly alongside a dollop of rich honey, with the potential to warm Slovakian Christmases and late-spring quarantines alike.

The trick is to drink hriatô quickly before the bacon fat solidifies, so be ready to imbibe before you start the following process, adapted from a recipe by Bake Your Slovak Roots: After dicing two strips of bacon, fry them in a pan over medium heat with extra bacon lard, if you have any. Once they’re crispy, add a tablespoon of honey. As soon as everything starts bubbling, remove the pan from heat and add a shot of whatever brandy you have (though plum is ideal). Return the pan to heat but don’t let it boil. Stir the contents of the pan a bit and pour into a heat-safe mug, including as much of the bacon fat as you feel you need in these uncertain times.

For more tips on how to turn unloved kitchen clutter into wondrous cocktails, check out Pantry Potables, an online experience with drinks expert Meryll Cawn on Saturday, May 23, 2020.

Look, document, but please don't touch.

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, on the northeast shore of Lake Michigan, has become a haven for families that want to stretch their legs and get some fresh air as a break from hunkering down. Though the place isn’t as busy as it would be in a typical spring, “We’re seeing lots of traffic and people out and about in the park,” says Merrith Baughman, a park ranger and the chief of interpretation and visitor services. Park staff and law enforcement officials have been steering visitors away from barricaded trails such as the popular Empire Bluff path, which leads out to an overlook too narrow to accommodate social distancing, and instead nudging guests toward the park’s 35 miles of shoreline on the mainland. (An additional 30 miles ring the Manitou Islands, which sit about seven miles offshore.) When the trails reopen on Friday, May 22, Baughman says, the beaches will still offer “lots and lots of places people can spread out.”

The influx of coastal visitors poses opportunities for archaeologists who study and protect the region’s shipwrecks. Manitou Passage Underwater Preserve, just off the coast of Sleeping Bear Dunes, is home to roughly a dozen wrecks. In all, the state of Michigan’s waters are home to at least 1,500.

Wayne Lusardi, Michigan’s maritime archaeologist with the Department of Natural Resources, gets it: Beachcombers thrill at the thought of finding a bit of a wrecked ship. It’s tempting to think that any water-slicked, sand-crusted, old-looking thing that washes ashore must be storied; he frequently fields inquiries from people who think that they’ve found something remarkable. In Michigan, the current coronavirus pandemic happens to coincide with pleasant weather and unusually high water levels, which can erode shorelines, turn up wrecks, and fling fragments ashore. That can be dicey for archaeology: Exposed fragments are prone to drying out, or being hauled away by people. But these conditions also make it an oddly perfect time to help archaeologists keep an eye on known shipwrecks, and inventory possible odds and ends and other artifacts that are freshly visible.

Some of Michigan’s wrecks and associated debris are stable enough to be marked by interpretive plaques, while others play peekaboo. Under any circumstances, the shoreline around Sleeping Bear Dunes is “very dynamic,” says Laura Quackenbush, the park’s retired curator and historian, who spent about a decade tracking shoreline shipwreck fragments. “Things come and go constantly and move up and down the beach.” That’s partly because of the wind, Lusardi says: The prevailing breezes blow in from the west or southwest, slamming water hard against the shore.

Where Lusardi lives and works, near the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary on the eastern edge of the state, wreckage tends to snag or nestle near bedrock outcrops, and stay put more. Things are wilder over on the western border, he says, where “things tend to be very mobile.” A fragment—or even a large slab—that’s glimpsed on shore one day “may not be there tomorrow, and it may come back two weeks from now,” he says. “Five years from now, it may be 10 miles down the shore.”

Lusardi encourages people to pipe up when they see something, because it might not be around for long. By the time he or one of his colleagues can visit something that’s been reported, it may have vanished again. Conditions at this moment are good for shipwreck-seekers: Lake Michigan has splashed near or above record highs for months. In its latest forecast, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimated that the May water level in Lake Michigan would be 34 inches above the long-term average for the month, seven inches higher than the same time last year, and three inches above its record May high, set in 1986.

High water can aid wreck-seekers in a few ways. It can expose wreckage that has long gone unnoticed, buried in the sand. “You’re walking over it every day, all the time, and you don’t have any idea it’s there,” Lusardi says. When the water rushes up higher and strips away the sand, he adds, it essentially digs the wreck out: “Bam—there it is.” Higher water levels can also shove near-shore debris all the way to the beach.

Because shipwrecks are in constant flux and no single team is tasked with doing regular rounds on all of them, insights from beachgoers can be really useful, Lusardi says—particularly when it comes to logging fragments, which may ride a wave to the shore. “A wooden vessel that’s, say, 130 feet long can be comprised of hundreds, maybe thousands of individual objects, whether they’re nails or planks or whatever,” says Lusardi. That’s a lot to keep track of, and Lusardi could never scour each of the state’s shorelines every day. “The local citizens are the ones who are the eyes and ears,” he says—and he finds that average folks are often eager to pass along information about what they see.

Around seven years ago, when water levels were much lower across the Great Lakes, about a half dozen people a week were calling Lusardi to report shoreline fragments and larger pieces of wrecks that hadn’t been exposed to the air in a long time. Unfortunately, the details were often patchy: People fumbled size estimates, sent blurry or maddeningly zoomed-in photographs that were missing key context, or took photos through the water, where sunlight danced across the frame and warped the appearance of the object itself. Lusardi recognized that he had a window of opportunity before water levels rose again, so he put together a checklist to be filled out by any beachgoer who stumbled across something interesting. (These artifacts should always be left in place, not picked up.) The form asked people to take dimensions with a tape measure, sketch a picture, provide coordinates, and determine the material; Lusardi recommends bringing a little magnet on beach walks, to help gauge whether a fragment contains iron.

Over the past few weeks, Lusardi has noticed another uptick in reports of possibly fascinating flotsam. Across the Great Lakes, Lusardi says, there are upwards of 10,000 boats that wrecked or were deliberately scuttled—though that doesn’t mean that any debris on the shore necessarily came loose from one of them. A bit of cylindrical wood, for instance, is more likely to be a piece of an old dock or a fishing net stake, instead of the mast of a long-submerged ship. In Bay de Noc, on the Western side of the state’s upper peninsula, “I’ve seen a telephone pole laying on a beach that was identified as an ancient mast, but it still had the aluminum tag identifying the pole number—and you could see pressure-treated wood, boot marks going up, that sort of thing,” Lusardi says. “I’ve never seen a mast ashore, ever.”

Still, even if a find is fairly mundane, Lusardi says, “I would prefer that everybody reports everything.” Those bits of dock could still be historic cultural resources, and it’s better to err on the side of recording too much, instead of too little. The staff at Sleeping Bear Dunes are considering handing out the form to beach monitors who survey the state of the shore, and maybe to visitors, too. If you’re going to be roaming Michigan shores this spring, get in touch with Lusardi and request a copy of the form to bring with you, just in case. You never know.

For centuries-old bars, a pandemic is nothing new.

“I’ll buy you a beer when this is all over,” declares Christo Tofalli, the landlord of Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, which lays claim to the contentious title of Britain’s oldest pub and is no stranger to pandemics. While closed, Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, in the historic city of Saint Albans, has become a Community Supply Point, providing much-needed groceries and offering free delivery to the elderly. They are even delivering Sunday Roast dinners to residents in lockdown. The threat posed by coronavirus may feel unprecedented, but Tofalli, who manages the pub, says he has been looking to the past for inspiration.

In the summer of 1348, which was some hard-to-specify number of centuries after Ye Olde Fighting Cocks served its first beer, the Black Death appeared on the southern shores of England. By the end of 1349, millions lay dead, victims of what medieval historian Norman Cantor describes unflinchingly in In the Wake of Plague as “the greatest biomedical disaster in European and possibly in world history.”

Medieval society could muster little response, Cantor writes, except to “Pray very hard, quarantine the sick, run away, or find a scapegoat to blame for the terror.” Nobility and wealth was no defense: Princess Joan of England was struck down on her way to marry in Spain, while the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury perished shortly after being ordained by the Pope. The plague even halted (temporarily) the perpetual conflict between the French and English.

This pestilence returned repeatedly too; Cantor writes that “there were at least three waves of the Black Death falling upon England over the century following 1350.”

According to historian Robert Tombs, author of The English and Their History, one of the many repercussions was especially pertinent to establishments like Ye Olde Fighting Cocks: the rise of pub culture in England.

When the plague arrived in 1348, drinking beer was already a fundamental component of Englishness. In his tome, Tombs writes that the English fighting the Norman invaders at Hastings in 1066 were suffering from hangovers. Drinking was even enshrined into the Magna Carta of 1215, which “called for uniform measures of ale.”

Drinking pre-Black Death, though, was comparably amateurish. In Man Walks Into a Pub: A Sociable History of Beer, beer journalist Pete Brown writes that “Society revolved around popular celebrations known as ‘ales’: bride-ales, church-ales ... were gatherings where plenty of alcohol was drunk, and they frequently degenerated into mayhem.” Anyone could brew up a batch of ale in their home, and standards and strengths varied wildly. Homebrewed ale was advertised with “an ale stake,” Brown adds, which consisted of “a pole covered with some kind of foliage above the door.”

By the 1370s, though, the Black Death had caused a critical labor shortage, the stark consequence of some 50 percent of the population perishing in the plague. Eventually, this proved a boon for the peasantry of England, who could command higher wages for their work and achieve higher standards of living. As a result, the alehouses that were simply households selling or giving away leftover ale were replaced by more commercialized, permanent establishments set up by the best brewers and offering better food.

“The survivors [of the Black Death] prioritized expenditure on foodstuffs, clothing, fuel, and domestic utensils,” writes Professor Mark Bailey of the University of East Anglia, who also credits the plague for the rise of pub culture, over email. “They drank more and better quality ale; ate more and better quality bread; and consumed more meat and dairy produce. Alongside this increased disposable income, they also had more leisure time.”

Not every establishment looked like a modern pub: Alehouses were often still literally brewers’ homes, inns offered ale and accommodation, and taverns were a sort of medieval wine bar, a lasting legacy of the Roman Taberna.

In spirit, though, the pub was there. Peasants had the time and money for better food, drink, and leisure. “More ale was drunk, and beer (with hops) was introduced from the Low Countries. Brewing became more commercialized, with taverns and alehouses for drinking and playing games,” writes Tombs. “The English pub was born.”

Over time, parts of all three combined into the idea of the “public house,” regulated by authorities. In place of the simple ale stake, Brown writes, Richard II made it mandatory to erect a sign. “Gradually, commercial brewers started to build bigger houses that became busy meeting places, hence the term ‘public house’ … If you look at pubs today, you can see the community aspect that is the legacy of the alehouse, the architecture and sense of national heritage of the inn, and the tavern tradition of spending the evening with your peers getting slowly rat-arsed and talking about nothing with increasing conviction as the night wears on.”

This communal legacy can be felt in the food deliveries keeping the staff of Ye Olde Fighting Cocks busy today. “Booze and food have been on offer here through the centuries,” says Tofalli, “even in times of war, panic, and disease.” Other traditional pubs, which face similar stresses of having to stay closed and pay rent, without knowing when they can fully re-open, are hosting virtual trivia nights and staying involved in people’s lives in other ways.

For Brits, a pub has always been more than just a place that sells beer, and the threat of closure is keenly felt for reasons beyond having a drink. “This goes beyond heritage,” Tofilla says, “it goes right into the core of our society.” For Brown, “The pub itself defines this country, remaining a focal point for our social lives even among nondrinkers.”

But even a millennia of longevity can’t provide any certainty. “No one really knows what’s going to happen,” says Tofilla. “We can just put our best foot forward, do the right thing.”

In the march toward equality, these were among the first (dainty) steps.

Women who wanted to be fit in 19th-century Britain had their work cut out for them. Not only did they do cardio routines in the confines of their homes; they had to deal with an entrenched patriarchal society that sought to control their bodies.

Literature on women’s exercise at the time was written almost entirely by men, and women were expected to work out in the outfits du jour—literally, dresses. Many of the exercises were therefore constrained, suited for those with carefully crafted tresses on their heads and corsets around their waists.

“The[se exercises] are strongly recommended … for obviating such defects of figure as are occasioned by confinement within doors,” wrote Signor G.P. Voarino in his 1827 Treatise on Calisthenic Exercises, noting that by virtue of their roles in society, young women are “unrelieved by proportionate and judicious relaxation.”

In the Victorian era, calisthenics didn’t mean sit-ups. It meant a lot of careful limb movement, focusing less on building muscle or breaking a sweat and more on just making sure individuals were moving around (slightly).

Exercises detailed in Voarino’s book included skipping, walking in patterns, and focusing on balance, and often involved a cane as a prop in calisthenic work.

The women’s rights movement was in its infancy when Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837. Just five years earlier, the first petition for suffrage was presented to Parliament. Alongside these initial moves toward greater self-sovereignty were steps to improve women’s health, a major barrier to which was the concern that exercise was simply dangerous for females.

Some women did reform the systems outlined by men like Voarino (who, to his credit, was one of the more forward-thinking men of the day when it came to women’s bodies). Catherine Beecher (the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe) campaigned schools to add calisthenic programs, and vehemently opposed the corset writ large, believing that it deformed women’s internal organs.

Indeed, Beecher wrote her own calisthenic manual, marketed to educators and families. She didn’t mince words either, noting in her preface that “[m]ost school-books on this subject are so encumbered with terms needed only by professional men, as to render them repulsive, and double the labor both of reading and study.”

Written about 30 years after Voarino’s, Beecher’s work is a bit more engaging, involving pliés, shoulder-whirling, and tossing weights to partners some 20 feet apart. Marching to music was common, and stretching was a regular feature.

Needless to say, it’s very possible to exercise at home today as a Victorian woman did. But on second thought, maybe skip the corset.

Inscape Arts takes its name from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS.

When Jayashree Krishnan was 21 years old, she walked through the doors of an imposing government building in Seattle’s Chinatown, hoping to become a citizen of the United States. The Immigration and Naturalization Service building had bars on its windows; it determined the fates of countless people, issuing green cards and passports while also detaining and deporting thousands. “The first time I was here, it felt very impersonal and cold,” Krishnan says.

The building now stands transformed. What was once a hybrid government office and immigration jail—and before that, a gold-weighing and assay station dating back to the gold rush—is known as the Inscape Arts and Cultural Center. When the INS building closed in 2004, the Department of Homeland Security moved detainees to a privately run detention center. A few years after the move, the city sponsored a loan to purchase and develop Inscape, and today the hulking structure is filled with artist studios.

Krishnan, who originally came to the U.S. on a spousal visa from Bangalore, India, has the unusual distinction of maintaining a studio in the same building where she interviewed for citizenship. She received a green card in 1994 and citizenship in 1999. In 2015, Krishnan became a full-time artist.

Krishnan’s neighbors at Inscape include printers, tarot readers, theater companies, and the Tibetan Nuns Project. The building houses the workspaces of such high-profile Seattle creatives as Lindy West, author of Shrill, and Nate Gowdy, a photographer known for his images of 2016 Presidential candidates. Just a block or two from CenturyLink Field and the landmark Uwajimaya market in Chinatown, these artists can rent studios starting at $1.10 per square foot.

Jeff Babienko, an architect who emigrated from Canada, also received his green card in the old INS building. Babienko is of Ukranian descent and had a very similar experience to Krishnan’s. “I had to wait in line in the rain like everyone else,” he says. The room where he was interviewed for his green card is now a theater.

Babienko and his architecture firm are now housed in the Inscape building, and he says that he loves the community and collaborative spirit that the building fosters. “We were some of the first to move in,” he says. “We had a hand in designing our own space.” He also appreciates the construction of the building itself: The pilings are so effective in Seattle’s coastal soil that the building has stayed at virtually the same elevation since its construction, even as a walkway out front sank over time.

Some of the art here takes the Inscape Building’s difficult history as a starting point. Christian French installed “The INS Game,” a set of satirical board game squares, in the floor of various hallways. These Monopoly-style game squares include instructions such as, “National Holiday. Sing the national anthem or lose a turn.” “No clerks speak your language. Lose a turn.” “Your name appears on a terrorist watch list. Draw a legal card. Lose 2 turns.” The squares are now so worn from foot traffic that some visitors wonder whether these were actual messages on the floor of the former immigration center.

A few blocks to the northeast, the Wing Luke Museum houses an archive of immigrant stories and collaborates with Inscape on a permanent installation, Voices of the Immigration Station: 72 Years of Immigration on 5 Floors. The partnership keeps these voices alive in several installations. “Detained,” a nonfiction graphic novel by Eroyn Franklin, preserves the stories of Many Uch from Cambodia and Gabriela Cubillos from Mexico. Metal panels throughout the building record the stories of the named and nameless. The panels have a matte finish that does not reflect much light; the image of the onlooker, like the identities of many who have been detained or deported, is erased by the metal.

In the Inscape Building basement, printmaker Elisa Dore creates woodcuts and screenprints as part of Print Zero Studios co-op. “It’s impactful to be aware of the history, not to just be in a nameless building,” Dore says. Born and raised in Atlanta, Dore’s work focuses on feminine and specifically Latina experiences. “When I was a kid my mom used to tell us, ‘You’re half Puerto Rican,’” Dore goes on. “My family used to ask me, ‘Which half?’”

For one current project, Dore creates prints from a woodcut depicting a woman, dressed simply and standing in front of a modest house. In a touch of surrealism, tropical fronds grow into and out of the house, but only on one side. The composition is nearly symmetrical, cut down the middle by a stark line. What’s white on one side of the image is black on the other.

The building retains many other reminders of incarceration. A yellow line runs the length of a dank hallway in the basement; according to Mike Donnelly, the building manager, this marked the queue where people would stand for “processing.” Decades of graffiti, mostly names and nations of origin in a myriad of languages, can be found on a courtyard wall. Signs throughout the building mark locations such as “Confiscated Materials,” “Control Room,” and “Detention Cell.” One of the most harrowing historical features is that of two painted handprints on the wall. Here, immigrants were searched as they placed their hands in the designated space and spread their legs. The building, like so much of Seattle and the surrounding area, still exists on Duwamish tribal land that was occupied without treaty.

Krishnan, who is self-taught, came to the Inscape building because she was dissatisfied with her former studio; it had no ventilation or windows, which limited the paints and other materials she could use. “I did not remember that this was the same building until I applied,” she says. “When I got here, that’s when I realized that I’d been here a couple times before.” For her current oil series, nine dancers posed for Krishnan, each exemplifying a different emotion. Krishnan frequently paints portraits of Asian women, pointing out that they remain underrepresented in the art world.

Although she says the building’s history is meaningful to her, it’s not a direct inspiration for her work. She seems far more interested in the building’s present—a common sentiment among the Inscape residents. “There are so many creative people in this building,” she says, “and everyone’s busy doing something.”

The slew of ephemera was tucked in a copper box behind a cornerstone at Arlington National Cemetery.

Tim Frank was stressed out. Once conservators pried the time capsule open, he feared, they might find a mangled mess: a tattered flag, shredded papers, and a rollicking party of flies or silverfish. “My heart was racing through the whole thing,” he says.

Frank is a historian at Arlington National Cemetery, the military burial ground in Virginia just outside Washington, D.C. On October 13, 1915, when construction was beginning on the Memorial Amphitheater, a memorabilia box was sunk behind the cornerstone to fete the project. The copper box was stuffed with ephemera, including postage stamps and six coins; a U.S. flag; a Bible signed by the building’s architect; copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; a photo autographed by then-President Woodrow Wilson, who was on hand to place the cornerstone; and a handful of local newspapers, including the Evening Star.

The same day, that paper ran a series of stories about the construction. One headline read “CARE TAKEN TO PROTECT PAPERS IN MEMORIAL CORNERSTONE,” and the accompanying article zeroed in on all the ways that the people who’d prepared the time capsule had armored it against the elements. The story described it as finicky, exacting work—the task of an “anxious” crew committed to rethinking some of the procedures that had guided “all cornerstones heretofore laid in government buildings.”

The time capsule didn’t spend a century entirely undisturbed: Several decades ago, when the amphitheater underwent some renovations to accommodate growing crowds, the box was removed and hauled off to the National Archives for a while, then eventually reinstalled under a replica cornerstone.

But this March, more than 100 years after it was assembled, the time capsule was extracted for good. When historians, archivists, and conservators opened it in April, they found that all of those earlier efforts had paid off. Frank needn’t have worried: Everything had aged remarkably gracefully.

No one could blame him for fretting, though—a lot can go wrong inside a time capsule. Some risks come from the microclimate sealed inside, says Caitlin Smith, a conservator at the cemetery. Too much oxygen or water vapor inside a box at the moment it’s closed up can lead to oxidation, or corrosion; mold spores and other microorganisms locked in there can run amok. Loose seals allow water to seep through, or invite pests to wander in. And some of the materials inside can damage the ones around them, Smith says: Over time, many mass-produced newspapers emit vapors that create an acidic environment.

Copper memorabilia boxes were common at the time, Smith says. The Library of Congress installed one inside its cornerstone in 1890, for instance, and the mayor of Detroit placed one at Old City Hall in 1901. But this box was somewhat special. It was a series of two copper containers, in fact, purpose-built, with sides folded up like cardboard boxes. The boxes were separated by glass plates, and lids set into grooves, and then soldered shut with lead-tin. The capsule was installed in a cavity behind the cornerstone, instead of in a hollow space on top of it—all in a very determined effort to create an air gap that bars moisture from entering.

To prepare the team to open it this spring, Smith consulted with other conservators about what they’d be likely to encounter, and Frank compiled historical notes. (He also watched several YouTube videos of other time capsules being pried from cornerstones, to get a sense of different tactics. Some took a gingerly approach, while others just bashed the thing to hell with a sledgehammer.)

The Arlington team was cautious, and once the box had been freed from the cornerstone, carted it over to the Welcome Center’s X-ray machine to get a sense of what was sitting where, and where Smith should cut. (“Since this is in the middle of a pandemic, it was the MacGyver way of doing things,” Frank says.) Smith drilled some pilot holes in the upper corners, inserted a borescope to check the placement, and then used tools including hacksaws, rotary tools, and metal snips to access the contents inside.

Frank hung back, to give Smith room to work, but his anxiety spiked again. “When I heard someone say, ‘Oh, is that water at the bottom?’ I felt like my heart was going to explode,” Frank says. “I’m sure my face went pale. All I could picture was opening up a box full of mushy papers.”

There was a bit of condensation, puddling, and verdigris here and there —on the outside and inside of the outer box, and on the outside of the inner one. But, happily, the inside of the inner box, where all of the ephemera was, seemed to be spared.

Far from floating in standing water, “everything inside was, as far as we could tell, dry,” Smith says. “No signs of mold, most objects were wrapped or tied, everything appeared to be okay.” The silk flag was swaddled in paper, and the Bible was wrapped in something resembling wax paper or oil cloth. There were signs of mice having nested in the cavity of the cornerstone, but they seemed to have kept a respectful distance from the box; there were no signs of them, or any other pests, inside. With the exception of a few ties that had begun to degrade and some architectural papers gone slightly brittle, “the papers were mostly still soft, with no staining,” Smith says. Overall, the items “are in great condition, and didn’t show too many signs of aging.”

Sometime later this year—COVID-19 has thrown a wrench in the exact timeline—the staff will place a new time capsule in the old one’s stead. And this time they’ll do a few things differently. For one thing, the new capsule will be made of stainless steel and stuffed with items donated by folks who have a hand in the day-to-day operations of the cemetery—chaplains, horticulturalists, tomb guards, and others. For another, the items will be tucked inside individual containers, bags, or envelopes, and flanked by desiccants and oxygen absorbers. The box will be flushed with dry nitrogen for good measure, and sealed in a cool, low-humidity space. Hopefully, in a century or so, the contents will still be looking good.

If you’re looking for something to do to pass a long, socially distant afternoon, you could make your own time capsule—no shovel-wielding necessary.

“There is a mystique to burying a time capsule,” says Smith. “But knowing all the risks—future construction, fluctuating environmental conditions, [changing] groundwater levels—I think I feel safer installing my time capsule above ground, in a structure. Or even hiding it away in my home and passing it down through the generations.”

Paper, metal, glass, and ceramics are easier to preserve than electronics, textiles, or food, she adds. And the Library of Congress, the American Library Association, and the Canadian Conservation Institute all have step-by-step guides. Whether you tuck something into the soil or just pack it away on a shelf, you’ll be planting a seed for someone else to have a future relationship with the past.

“One of my favorite things about architectural conservation and [Arlington National Cemetery’s] own memorabilia box is finding fingerprints that have survived for a century and placing my hand in the same location,” Smith says, “remembering that what I am touching was put in place by another person, also just doing their job, and knowing that we are both connected to this same place, albeit many years apart.”

And offer tranquility among "living fossils."

The tufted, velvety green surface looks like a chenille pillow. Upon closer inspection, there are flecks of bright color embedded among the rows of green. The colorful bit are tourist boats leisurely meandering through waterways created by the neat rows of trees at Luyang Lake Wetlands Park in Yangzhou, in the Jiangsu province of China, one of many artificial “water forests” that now dot the country. This bird’s eye view obscures the towering scale of the pond cypress, bald cypress, and unique dawn redwood the visitors move between.

Dawn redwoods (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) are native to China, and were once thought to be extinct for more than five millions years. Fossils, some about 150 million years old, have been found from North America to Russia to Japan. The surprising discovery of a small group of live specimens in a remote part of China during the mid-1940s made the unusually deciduous redwood a “living fossil.” Though still considered critically endangered in the wild—only a few isolated natural stands of them exist—conservation efforts and distribution of seeds have given the regal, adaptable, fast-growing metasequoia trees another life.

Such artificial, unusually orderly forests are part of a larger reforestation effort across China. The overall environmental impact of such projects is not entirely known, but they certainly do provide a unique experience for visitors: consistently tranquil, from the lush green of the warmer months, to feathered reds, pinks, and golds during autumn.

Abstract Wonder is a series in which we explain and examine stunning photographs of places and things that surprise us—because they were shot from above, or through a microscope, or with a creative eye.

You might be able to tell where you are by what happens if you set one ablaze.

A symbol used to represent something powerful or influential—a person, a sports team, a religion—also makes itself vulnerable to destruction. It isn’t easy to, say, destroy a country, but you can destroy a symbol of that country fairly easily, and there’s no symbol more identified with a nation, and thus more commonly destroyed in protest, than a national flag.

In the United States, the Supreme Court has been clear and consistent in the opinion that the desecration of the Stars and Stripes is an American right, enshrined in the First Amendment. To change this, as has been continually proposed, would be extremely difficult, requiring—from a viciously divided Congress—a two-thirds vote on a constitutional amendment, followed by ratification by at least 38 fractious states. In short, it’s not likely.

How countries treat the destruction of their national symbols varies around the world. That the United States has such strong protections for flag burning makes it rather unusual. Most other nations, including many generally perceived as progressive and permissive, have some kind of flag-desecration laws on their books. These laws are, often, a fascinating blend of the seemingly arbitrary and the desire to suppress legitimate protest.

The concept of a national flag, or even a nation in general, is not particularly old. Nations as we think of them didn’t really exist until the 17th and 18th centuries; prior to that, there were territories, kingdoms, empires, and various other polities and geographic entities, but no universally recognized concept of nationhood, with specific borders and governments and rules for communication with each other. Flags themselves are very old, of course, but until the Age of Sail they were mostly used for communication, or to identify more localized groups, such as a specific family line or military unit. As national symbols, they didn’t begin to emerge until the mid-1800s, and it was a while longer before they became a seeming requisite for statehood.

Because flags are fairly recent developments, the concept of flag burning, or flag desecration of any sort, is a fairly recent idea as well. Effigies were a much more common form of big-concept protest prior to the modern era. In the United Kingdom, it has been a tradition to burn an effigy of the Pope, or of failed Catholic plotter Guy Fawkes, for hundreds of years. Leaders embodied the state, so in the absence of other symbols of a legal territory, people burned representations of specific people.

Flags have several advantages over effigies. They’re cheaper and easier to acquire than a reasonable likeness of a human—and fairly flammable, depending on material. Flag burning really became a go-to tactic in the United States in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, but around the world, burning a flag has long been a simple, effective means of protesting a federal government.

Governments have some stake in this, as flag burning is most obviously a form of protest against them, often conducted by persecuted minority groups as a means to raise awareness (or by irate people in another nation). Governments don’t generally want negative publicity, or people angrily pointing out their shortcomings. In that sense, banning the action is not so different from actively breaking up a protest march with tear gas or worse. “If it's a crime to burn the flag because it's the flag, the only reason the government is doing that is because it disagrees with the message the protester is trying to convey,” says Brian Hauss, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who focuses on free speech issues.

There are other reasons for these laws as well. Denmark, for example, bans the burning of any flag, with one exception: the Danish flag itself. According to Danish law, burning the flag of a foreign nation is a provocation that can hurt Denmark’s status in the world community. Burning the Danish flag, though? Fire it up; some even say that burning is the accepted way to dispose of a Danish flag in Denmark, though that doesn’t specifically appear in the law.

Australia is one of the few nations, along with the United States, Canada, and Belgium, to explicitly allow flag burning. As in the United States, this hasn’t stopped legislators there from attempting to ban the protest act, or at least provide the political appearance of attempting to ban it. During the violent 2005 race riots known as the Cronulla riots, a Lebanese-Australian teenager burned an Australian flag. He was charged and prosecuted, too; not for burning a flag, but for stealing and destroying personal property. This use of other laws to prosecute acts of flag burning is a common practice: Charges may include disturbing the peace, theft, destruction of property, arson, and other crimes, in lieu of symbolic desecration.

China, on the other hand, is going hard in the other direction. In 2017, the nation passed an amendment that dramatically increases the penalties and the scope of its symbol-desecration laws. Offenders can be hit with jail terms of up to three years for acts such as mocking the national anthem by singing it in a sarcastic voice. Burning, defacing, or stomping on the national flag is covered, too.

A lot of the countries that have such laws on the books don’t usually bother with the enforcement side. France, on the other hand, actually prosecutes. In 2010, an Algerian man, furious with the extremely bad customer service he was receiving at a local government office, grabbed a Tricolore and snapped its wooden pole in half. He was forcibly restrained and fined—not for destruction of property, but for “insulting” the flag.

“Insult” is a broad brush. India prefers bonkers specificity, with laws so granular that they cover much more than actual desecration. The country legislates which side of a room a flag must be installed in, what kind of material is allowed, who can mount a flag on a vehicle (only government or military personnel, and only some of them), the order in which the Indian flag must be placed when displayed with other national flags, and the specific weight of one square foot of flag material. Violate any of these and you’re already afoul of the flag laws. Sometimes it doesn’t even take a flag at all; in 2007, a petition was filed against cricketer and national hero Sachin Tendulkar for cutting a cake that had the flag on it.

Israel is another country with an aggressive stance toward symbolic protest involving flags. The government, in 2016, dramatically raised the financial penalty for conviction. Inflation and not one but two separate new currencies make it hard to track just how much it went up, but the new penalty is a maximum fine of over $16,000 and up to three years in prison. Last year, a Palestinian protestor stomped up and down on an Israeli flag as part of a protest against the Israeli army shooting people through the Gaza fence. He is not nearly the only one to be prosecuted for flag desecration in Israel.

Those fines will hurt, but sometimes such forms of punishment are as symbolic as a flag itself. In Mexico, flag desecration is illegal, but not often prosecuted. A notable exception came in 2008, when, after a very long legal battle, famed poet Sergio Witz was found guilty of desecrating the Mexican flag—in verse. In 2002, he published “La patria entre mierda,” or “The Motherland Among the Shit.” “I clean my ass with the flag,” he wrote, along with “I dry my urine on the flag of my country,” and a couple of lines about how the flag produces nothing but nationalist vomit. Witz has later conceded that the poem is not his best work.

In any case, in 2008, a judge gave Witz a symbolic fine of 50 pesos—about $2.50—as a “warning” to those who abuse freedom of speech, according to an article in El Universal. Witz has said the fine is ridiculous, and he refuses to pay it.

For a long time, the United States was all of these places and none. Before 1989, a whopping 48 of 50 states had some type of flag-burning law on the books. But a case called Texas v. Johnson, in which a young protester was tried for burning the American flag during the 1984 Republican National Convention, settled things. In a 5–4 decision in 1989, the Supreme Court declared flag burning to be protected political speech under the First Amendment, immediately invalidating those 48 state laws.

It’s not difficult to see a pattern connecting some of the countries that are serious about their flag-desecration laws—they have governments noted for active, even aggressive, responses to dissent and protest. Take note, in case the United States ever does pass a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning.

This story originally appeared on September 12, 2019.

The blastoff this week on a SpaceX rocket—the first ever private launch—could be a big step toward commercial space travel.

For those of us of a certain era, Cape Canaveral evokes thundering, historic liftoffs of rockets into space. The Apollo 11 mission that landed the first men on the moon, in 1969. The dawn of the space-shuttle age with the launch of Columbia, in 1981. And the subsequent end of that era, in 2011, when NASA retired the shuttle program and started sending astronauts to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in the former Soviet Union, for rides aboard Soyuz spacecraft.

If all goes as planned, NASA’s send-off for its next two astronauts, scheduled for May 27 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will mark the return of manned launches to U.S. soil. It may also herald a new era of commercial space transportation, offering trips for private citizens in addition to servicing government missions.

“There’s a certain amount of American pride that goes along with this,” says Roger Launius, formerly a chief historian for NASA and curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, noting that for many years the U.S. and Russia were the only two nations capable of launching humans into space (China joined this elite company in 2003).

The coming mission is a crucial test of NASA’s shift to commercially designed spacecraft: The rocket and capsule that currently sit on the launchpad are products of SpaceX—Elon Musk’s private enterprise, which, along with Boeing, was contracted to develop ways to transport astronauts for NASA’s Commercial Crew program. A successful run would be the final step before NASA can approve SpaceX’s equipment for shuttling crews into space.

For nearly a decade now America’s space agency has had to rely on Russia to send astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), using the very facility that was once the heart of the Soviets’ top-secret space program. The Baikonur Cosmodrome, in fact, was so named to disguise its actual location on a desert steppe some 200 miles away from its namesake, a mining town in present-day Kazakhstan. This was the place where Sputnik 1, Earth’s first artificial satellite, inaugurated the space age when it launched in October 1957. It also won the Soviets another key first: the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, who lifted off from Baikonur in April 1961.

But since the Cold War thawed, in the early 1990s, the U.S. and Russian space programs have cooperated to the benefit of both, notes Launius. The collaboration has hit occasional bumps, but endured for nearly three decades with no major policy shifts—a significant achievement considering the fierce rivalry that defined the birth of the space age, and the political flare-ups since.

Most notably, the U.S. and Russia have worked together to build and send crews and supplies to the ISS (other partners include the European Space Agency, Canada, and Japan). And they remain, along with China, the only countries currently able to rocket humans into space.

In his memoir, Endurance, about his unprecedented year living in space (2015–16), Scott Kelly poignantly describes the sense of international cooperation aboard the ISS and his experience in Baikonur, with its storied history. “For an American who grew up and trained as a Navy pilot during the tail end of the Cold War,” he writes, “it will always feel a bit strange that I’m invited into the epicenter of the former Soviet space program to be taught its secrets.”

In the book he remembers the area as a harsh and desolate place, where “packs of wild dogs and camels scrounge in the shadows of aerospace equipment.” And of the multinational crews that leave Earth together from Baikonur, Kelly notes, “We are former enemies remade as crewmates, on our way to the space station we built together.”

Today, the retired astronaut says he expects that international flavor to continue as crew launches resume in the U.S. “It’s incredibly important,” Kelly said in a phone interview, recalling his work with colleagues from multiple nations throughout his career in space. “I miss the people and the job—the sense of fulfillment you get from doing something that is challenging, risky, and important.”

Bill Barry, NASA’s current chief historian, affirms that once SpaceX’s system for manned flight is certified, multinational crews will again be able to launch from either the U.S. or Russia, as they did before the shuttle program ended. “It’s important to have more than one way to get people up,” he says.

Wednesday’s scheduled launch returns the spotlight to the historic launchpad known officially as Launch Complex 39A, scene of the unforgettable Saturn V blastoff that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Like Baikonur, it’s been the fiery starting point for legendary and routine missions alike, from Apollo 11 to the final space shuttle flight, in July 2011.

Fittingly, the pilot that day on the shuttle Atlantis was Doug Hurley, who returned to the Kennedy Space Center last week for final preparations of the NASA/SpaceX mission. This time he and astronaut Bob Behnken will lift off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule. It’s the first time NASA will be using non-government spacecraft to send humans into space—a further step toward transforming Kennedy into a future spaceport for both government and commercial use.

Nearby, at Launch Complex 39B, NASA is making other preparations for the 21st century. The sister launchpad will be used for Artemis missions—an ambitious program to enable long-term human exploration on the moon and Mars. The goal includes launching the first woman to the moon—which, if achieved, would make this corner of the Earth fitter still for a new era of dreams.

It started life as a jadeite boulder in modern-day Myanmar. Now it's a celebrated part of a Chicago museum.

Almost a century ago, 150 Chinese artisans spent a decade carving and polishing a sculpture of unparalleled craftsmanship. They shaped miniature doors, balconies, and bells; they cut eggshell-thin chains and 400 uniform pillars. The finished piece, an exquisite jade pagoda, stands nearly five feet tall atop a teak altar.

Hundreds of thousands flocked to see this delicate work when it debuted in 1933, first at the Chicago World’s Fair and then in several other major American cities over the next two decades. Some described it as the Eighth Wonder of the World. But over the last 50 years, the pagoda has largely faded from public consciousness, having alternated between storage and a lower-level gallery in a California museum.

“This is the largest jade carving outside mainland China,” says Tongyun Yin, curator of Asian Art at the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art in Illinois, which acquired it in 2018. “But sadly, not many people today know about it.”

Now, nearly 90 years after it was completed, the pagoda and its altar is on prominent display again. In November, the Lizzadro Museum reopened in a new building, in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, and introduced the sculpture as the centerpiece of its permanent collection. “This piece is of strong interest to us because of its size, technical mastery, and sophistication, but it also has a very strong, established provenance,” Yin says. “We know every detail about its life.” (The museum is currently closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, though its museum shop is offering curbside pickup.)

Known as the Altar of the Green Jade Pagoda, the gleaming artwork is the remarkable result of one man’s lifelong quest for perfection. Chang Wen Ti was born in 1886 in the Chinese city of Suzhou. In Shanghai, he became a master jade carver and collector who dreamed of creating the world’s finest jade sculpture. He wanted to show the potential of this treasured stone, which is traditionally used to make jewelry and other ornaments.

In 1915, Chang found his opportunity. A jade dealer won a bidding war over a record-breaking jadeite boulder from a quarry in present-day Myanmar, and he invited Chang to come see it. The stone was a stunning apple-green and weighed 18,000 pounds; the dealer had it cut into 13 pieces, and Chang chose the best five. Ox carts hauled the treasure, weighing 7,000 pounds in all, to Thailand and then Hong Kong, where it boarded a train to Shanghai.

With his material secured, Chang had to decide on a worthy subject. According to The Magnificent Chinese Jade Pagoda, a book by his daughter Mae Chang Koh, he aspired to replicate an unmistakably Chinese emblem of rest and peacefulness. “In his words, ‘Pagodas in China were built in memory of heroic people who became great because they championed peace and kindness,’” Koh recalled.

Chang traveled across China to observe the architecture of pagodas and record their best features. “He wanted his pagoda to be the epitome of all pagodas in design and beauty,” Koh went on. With support from investors, the carver recruited 150 of the best jade artisans to transform his prized stones.

The resulting pagoda and altar included more than 1,000 carved pieces and were finished in April 1933. The central tower resembles the ancient Lunghwa Pagoda in Shanghai in contour, but it reflects Chang’s own distinctive vision. It is hollow, so that light can enter and illuminate the majestic green tints, and each of its seven levels feature eight windows with intricate balustrades. From every corner of each sloping roof hangs a tiny bell carved from the same piece of jade as the eaves. Chains hang gracefully from the pagoda’s apex, and gleaming staircases and terraces surround its base. A 16-inch-tall, triple-arch gateway stands before it, flanked by two guardian lions.

The U.S. Consulate in Shanghai at the time, Julean Arnold, published a pamphlet about the pagoda to introduce it to the world. “In this wonderful collection, Mr. Chang has assembled what is probably the finest group of green jade works of art that has ever been produced throughout the four thousand years of jade craftsmanship in China,” he wrote.

By then, Chang’s commission was on its way to Chicago for display at the Century of Progress International Exposition, where visitors could even purchase souvenir pagoda postcards. That same year, it was disassembled and sent to New York City for an exhibition at Rockefeller Center, and then sent back to Chicago for the Exposition’s second year. In 1939, it traveled to San Francisco for the Golden Gate International Exposition, followed by a tour along the West Coast in the 1940s and 1950s, which raised funds for orphans of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Chang ultimately immigrated with his family to Los Angeles, where his reputation as a jade expert grew. In 1961, he died of a stroke, in the process of planning one more display of the pagoda at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. That journey never came to fruition. Seven years after his death, his family donated the Altar of the Green Jade Pagoda and Chang’s personal jade collection to the Oakland Museum of California, as a gesture of friendship between Chinese and American people—but a bitter battle ensued over its display. “The collection was never placed in an area it deserved,” Koh wrote in 2017. “Over 50 years of pleading, it has remained in the basement of the museum despite the requests of the family for it to be moved to a more prominent spot.”

In 2018, the Oakland Museum invited other American institutions with major jade collections to acquire the historic pagoda, and the Lizzadro Museum was chosen after a long process. Now, the Altar of the Green Jade Pagoda sits in a custom glass case, surrounded by other magnificent Chinese jade objects. The stately display marks the end of a decades-long, transcontinental odyssey. “It made its debut in Chicago, and now it has come back to what will be its permanent home,” Yin says of the pagoda. “It has kind of made its life circle.”