A bride and groom jump over a skipping rope as they pose during a wedding photo shoot at a park in Pyongyang on April 18, 2019. (Photo by Ed Jones/AFP Photo)

A subway worker walks away after a train departed the station in central Pyongyang, North Korea May 7, 2016. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

Two railway workers chat in front of a flower mural inside a subway station visited by foreign reporters during a government organised tour in Pyongyang, North Korea October 9, 2015. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

A soldier eats ice cream as she visits a zoo in Pyongyang, North Korea, September 12, 2018. (Photo by Danish Siddiqui/Reuters)

Soldiers pose for a photo during the flower exhibition marking the 105th birth anniversary of the country's founding father, Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang, North Korea April 16, 2017. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

People carry the body of a man they uncovered from under the rubble of houses destroyed by Saudi airstrikes in the old city of Sanaa, Yemen, Friday, June 12, 2015. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.

On July 7, Chinese archaeologists from the Academy of Social Sciences announced that they have reconstituted a 5,300-year-old Mongolion pottery statue found at a relic site in North China, according to Xinhua news agency.