letsbuildahome-fr:

Wadi Al-Salaam: The Largest Cemetery in The World via Amusing Planet

Wadi us-Salaam, which literally means the Valley of Peace, is an Islamic cemetery located in the holy city of Najaf, Iraq. The cemetery covers an area of 1485.5 acres and contains millions of bodies, making it one of the strongest contender for the title of the largest graveyard on earth. Najaf itself is one of Iraq’s biggest cities, with a population of nearly 600,000. But the adjoining city of the dead holds the remains of millions, stretching for up to 10km along the valley. Wadi Al-Salam cemetery is also the only cemetery in the world where the process of burial is still continuing to day since more than 1,400 years.

Source: ryanpanos

Love lingered - by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life, by way of deep and intimate kindnesses they developed toward each other, by way of their laughing at the same absurdities and thinking the same things noble and the same things sad.
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned

watershedplus:

After the Great Storm of 1900 hit Galveston, Texas, the city protected itself with a seawall, and the town was raised to a new ground level. Everything was raised, houses, churches, offices, trees, gardens.
Dredged sand was used to raise the city by as much as 17 feet (5.2 m) above its previous elevation. In the seven years operation 2,156 buildings were raised on jacks, manually and with the use of mules . Catwalks were built connecting houses and buildings, and canals were dug through town to allow the dredge barges to bring in the sand.


From Here, via BLDGBLOG and Pruned
More here

(via sprocketgirl)

Source: watershedplus

abandoned-playgrounds:

This is the Mutsuura Ammo Factory used by Japan during World War II. A military bunker located in the Kanagawa Prefecture in the Kanto Region of Japan. Carved out through muddy tunnels this is truly a relic, found only by a whole that cut down into the ground and led into tunnels filled with Mukade, a large centipede.

For now it is mostly left alone except for visits from the wandering adventurer.

Photographed by Jordy Meow

(via abandoned-playgrounds)

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but for ever new and unprofaned part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbour, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him.
Henry David Thoreau - Walden

matteoricci:

Kunyu Wanguo Quantu

Matteo Ricci’s complete map of all the nations of the world from 1602.

The map (Chinese 坤輿萬國全圖, pinyin: Kūnyú Wànguó Quántú which literally means A Map of the Myriad Countries of the World) was printed at the request of the Wanli Emperor. It is a xylograph (wood block print) on six panels of fine native paper (made with bamboo fiber), in all measuring approximately 182 x 365 cm. The large scale, Ricci explained, let the viewer “travel about, as it were, while reclining at ease in his own study.” 

Li Zhizao (1565-1630), a Chinese mathematician, astronomer and geographer, was the cartographer who engraved the map, it took him and his assistants an entire year to carve the wood blocks! The first versions of the map were printed by Zhang Wentao of Hangzhou, possibly an official printer of the Ming court. Although printed in great quantities, today only six complete examples are known to exist.

Ricci’s monumental work is as elusive as it is legendary. Popularly called The Impossible Black Tulip because of its rarity, or Map of the Ten Thousand Countries of the World, it is the oldest surviving Chinese map to show the Americas. To create it, Ricci resourcefully drew from both Western and Eastern cartographic traditions. He relied on 16th-century Dutch atlases, and also consulted Chinese scholars just as he made use of Chinese maps and land surveys. As the map was completed one year after Ricci was allowed to roam in the Forbidden City, he most likely had access to a copy of Zheng He’s map in the imperial archive. For Ming period Chinese to know the comparative size of the three largest oceans (Pacific, Atlantic and Indian) and draw the map, they must have circumnavigated and returned safely. It is thus beyond reasonable doubt that Ricci actually uncovered and redrew a Chinese world map of Zheng He’s era (1405-1433), proving that Chinese were the first to start the Great Discovery Age. 

The main map shows an oval shaped world map, and includes insets of astronomical and seasonal maps. On top right is “Seventh Heaven” chart; on bottom right is “Armillary sphere”; on top left is a map of “Northern Hemisphere”, “Solar and Lunar Eclipse” chart; and on bottom left is a map of “Southern Hemisphere”, map of “Chinese 24 seasonal segments calendar” and “Quantity-day ruler”.

Wikipedia has a good account of the entire history of the original and the derived copies here. Interesting academic on-line discussions on the origins here and here.

1. Version of the map attributed to Giulio Aleni, 1620 @ Vatican Apostolic Library Collection, see here

2. Version of the 1602 map belonging to James Ford Bell Trust

3. The James Ford Bell Trust map exhibited @ University of Minnesota, good optical exploration tool here

4. Small scale north polar projection map at the top of the first left panel

5. Copy of the Giulio Aleni version, 1620’s

6. Version of the original map created by Li Yingshi in 1603 @ Liaoning Provincial Museum in Shenyang.

7. Unattributed  two page colored Japanese copy of the original, from 1604.

(via fuckyeahcartography)

Source: matteoricci