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.
