AFTER THIRTY-FIVE years, Jon Sigurdson has returned to the courtyard house close to Tiananmen Square where, as a young Swedish diplomat, he recorded the sights of the Cultural Revolution with his camera. Some of the area is still recognisable, some not.
'It is still there, the character has changed a bit,' he said. 'The old ladies walking on bound feet have gone.'
The militant demonstrations against American capitalism by groups of workers seem unimaginable today.
Now a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics, he was among the last 200 or so foreigners who remained in Beijing in 1966, and among the very few to have made a photographic record of those tumultuous and bewildering days.
'Red Guards filled the small streets around our house. I remember how they waited in the early winter mornings, many without socks, sipping hot tea served from canteens,' he said, recalling the preparations for the great parades on Tiananmen Square.
His small courtyard house was just four minutes walk from the rostrum on which Chairman Mao reviewed the Red Guards' parades. More than a million of them filled the square on eight occasions.
