The Titanic and a very dark place in China

This week saw the 109th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic and a blog post on Thursday 15 April marked this. The post came with the photo above, which shows a lovingly made scale model in a large bottle depicting the sinking, complete with icebergs and little lifeboats. I spotted this gem at the Shipwreck Museum in Cuxhaven, northern Germany. The Titanic post also included nine further photos taken around the world. Several were from Belfast, Northern Ireland, because that’s where the Titanic had been built. The old shipyards where she had been laid out and the dry dock in which she was outfitted are now all part of the so-called “Titanic Quarter”. Its core attraction is the purpose-built modern “Titanic Belfast Experience”, a kind of museum that chronicles every aspect of the Titanic, from the planning and building of the ship, her maiden voyage and the sinking to the aftermath, the discovery of the wreck and the famous James Cameron movie “Titanic”. It has quickly become Belfast’s No. 1 tourist attraction.

Other places featured in the post included Cherbourg in Normandy, France, which is where the Titanic called to take aboard more passengers after having set sail from Southampton. Cherbourg’s Cité de la Mer maritime museum therefore has a section about the Titanic too. One photo was from Halifax, Canada, namely of Fairview Lawn Cemetery, which is where many of the bodies of those who perished in the sinking are buried. Some photos, including the one above, were taken in places not directly related to the Titanic, but where e.g. artefacts exhibitions were held, such as in Las Vegas. The final photo showed a dining room at a hotel in Alnwick, Northumberland, England, whose interior is a recreation of the first-class lounge of Titanic’s sister ship, RMS Olympic. When the ship was decommissioned and scrapped in the late 1930s, the interiors were sold at auction, and the hotel’s then owner managed to obtain the wooden panelling and columns from the lounge, so that you can to this day dine in style at this place feeling like you’ve time-travelled back to 1912. My wife and I did so five years ago.

And on this past Wednesday, we marked the evening before the sinking with a home-cooked dinner (in 1912 it would have been the “last supper”) of three courses, all using recipes from a Titanic-themed cookbook I had bought at the “Titanic Belfast Experience” in 2012. We even dressed up in period style for the occasion!
  

So much for the blog. On my main website I added a short new chapter about an especially dark place, namely Unit 731, the Japanese biological weapons research centre set up in the late 1930s in then Japanese-occupied Manchuria, China. Here the most cruel “experiments” were conducted using live human guinea pigs. Gruesome stuff, making even Josef Mengele appear almost harmless in comparison.

I added this stub chapter because I was contacted by a fellow blogger who currently lives in north-eastern China and visited the Unit 731 Museum recently and put a post about it on his blog. So I felt compelled to close this important gap on my website too. You can find the link to that other blog in my new Unit 731 chapter as well.

So much for this time.

Have a good week and stay safe!

Best

Peter