Potsdam is a town outside of Berlin. Inside this town, there's a huge UNESCO site in Germany. Besides the most frequently visited Sanssoucci Palace and its garden area, the Cecilienhof Palace also has a very important historical meaning as it was the location where Churchill, Truman and Stalin met and issued the Potsdam Declaration, deciding how to partition Germany and defining the conditions of the Japanese surrender.

Sanssouci was a summer house of King Frederick the Great. However, he ignored his architect's advice to place the grand principal floor upon another low ground floor, and because the palace was built further inside instead of at the edge of the top level above the garden, the windows are devoid of views. When I first saw it in 2007, I got the impression of a flattened layer cake (see photo 18). It would have looked much more prominent if the palace was built with one more level.

The Chinese House is a cute piece of architecture, relatively small especially compared to the New Palace inside the same site. During my first visit to Potsdam, it was pouring. The second time, May of 2012, I was with a tour from Warsaw to Berlin. It was a side-trip mainly to see Cecilienhof, with no time to see the Chinese House. I flew back to Berlin a few months later to meet with my good friend Amelie and her husband Bernhard, and they kindly drove me to make a quick stop at Potsdam in the early evening. This time I got to photograph the Chinese House and the New Palace which was still under renovation since I first saw it five years ago.

(All rights reserved)