Today’s random post of old Chinese memorabilia will include a pin from inside the Potala Palace, which I got in 2008—ten years ago now. And the second one is an old pin from 北京师范大学, or Beijing Normal University. It looks really old, so it’s possible that it’s from a long time ago, like the 1980s. My grandfather, whose name is Liu Mo 刘漠. His birth name was actually Liu Ren’an 刘仁安, but because it was fashionable at the time he chose a different name as an adult. I am assuming that the reason he chose Liu Mo is because it sounds like Flowing Ink, or 流墨, and also because the second character, Mo, is 漠, the character for desert, and at the time, he would have lived in the desert… because it was Yan’an, and the year was likely to have been around 1935- around 1938.