For quite a while, I’ve been wanting to go to Longquan, a city of 252,000 people located about 4.5 hours southeast of Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province. Why Longquan? They’re famous for kilns that make Longquan celadon porcelain:
Longquan celadons were an important part of China’s export economy for over five hundred years, and were widely imitated in other countries, especially Korea and Japan. Their demise came after they were overtaken in their markets by blue and white porcelain from Jingdezhen. (Wikipedia)
I’ve seen celadon all over Asia (in shops and museums in Singapore, Japan, and Korea), and it’s pretty stuff. I wanted to see where it came from. So that was the first destination on our family road trip.
See below for 21 photos taken on the road to Longquan.
Zhejiang Mountains
Now that I live in a country that’s not an island measuring 31 miles by 16 miles (*cough cough* Singapore), I can much more easily experience my favorite type of natural scenery: mountains!
Rest Stop
Okay, so if you ever want to feel like a celebrity, here’s what you do:
Be a non-East Asian individual. Or group.
Go to a highway rest stop in China.
Heads will turn. Enjoy being stared at!
We used the toilets. We bought iced coffee. We walked up and down the hallway and drank it. We ignored everybody. But they didn’t ignore us!
No, but seriously… In my experience, Zhejiang has really nice rest stops. They’re like mini shopping malls with several fast food restaurants (some Chinese and some Western), a convenience store, gift and clothing stores, a coffee shop, and even a fresh fruit stall. (On another trip, we stopped at one that had a bookstore!!!) The bathrooms are large and fairly clean, and they have Western-style toilets. And there are English signs.
That being said, the English isn’t always perfect! Here are some amusing language fails I noticed at the Dongyang rest stop.
Infrastructure
China’s infrastructure is amazing. So much has been built, all within the last thirty or forty years. And they’re still building. Case in point:
Clouds and Mountains
I mean, you don’t usually get mountains without clouds, and I love clouds too.