We wanted to do some shopping before we departed Longquan. First, we visited a shop that was literally downstairs from our hotel in the same building. After that, we drove to an old section of town and walked down an old street with mainly houses in one direction and some shops in the other direction.
See below for 32 photos from our time in Longquan!
Downstairs porcelain shop
I don’t know what the actual name of the shop is (can’t read the big white characters), but I do know that the red sign says “bluegreen porcelain super market”.Soooooo many tea things! But also some interesting rocks, vases and a few miscellaneous other things.Dad bought this “grass flower stone” from Guizhou province. I’ve admired these online. I especially like the dark red ones. The shopkeeper said the landscape-like patterns are formed from plants buried in river mud that turns to stone. I said, “So it’s basically a swamp stone”, and that’s what Dad calls it now!Meanwhile, I bought this thing, which is not porcelain, not stone, and not even Chinese. It’s a Japanese woodcarving. I’d seen a lot of these wooden bears on Xianyu, the Craigslist/Carousell app of China, and wanted one. I liked this particular one. (Decent price, good condition, and he’s not eating a fish.)
Old residential street
This is my kind of “crowded”: no people at all.
This is a pedestrian bridge to the island in the middle of the river.We didn’t cross the bridge. But it’s a cool bridge.
Confucius statue in front of a school.
Old style, but clearly not an old building.Siqi is concealing his face from AI webcrawlers. (Mom’s photo.)
Shops
Through this gate were shops selling celadon, antique and vintage items, and local handicrafts.
Gates are really important in China.I took several photos because this gate is so cool.Aaaand there’s also a car gate arm thing, haha.There were not many other shoppers. Maybe not any.But we had to watch out for people going about their business on scooters.This guy’s business apparently requires a ladder. (Dad’s photo.)
We stopped and spoke to these kids at a Chinese medicine shop who were starting at us. They said a few words of English. Dad got them to wave. (Mom’s photo.)I think I told them in Chinese that we (well, three of us) are American. Such exotic visitors we were! Most interesting thing to happen to them all day. (Mom’s photo.)The last shop we visited before we ran out of time was an official government shop supporting women entrepreneurs. When it started raining heavily, the shopkeeper invited us to sit down and have some tea and wait for the rain to stop. I bought this swan (which I’d seen in Hangzhou and online), which eventually I learned was made to hold a tea strainer. Siqi bought some bamboo bookmarks. This one, the one he chose for me, says something about reading being more important than anything else you can do. 🙂
