Category: China

I am American. I moved from Singapore to China in 2022.

Mild Spring Boutique Hotel, Huangshan

Our plan for visiting Yellow Mountain was:

  • arrive in the city and stay overnight at Mild Spring Hotel
  • be transported to Yellow Mountain (leaving the car and most of our luggage behind)
  • enter the park, walk to a hotel inside, and stay there overnight
  • walk back out of the park, be transported back to the city, and stay in Mild Spring Hotel overnight again
  • leave to drive back to Hangzhou.

Transportation to/from Yellow Mountain and the overnight hotel stay inside the park were booked together as part of a package. I chose Mild Spring after looking at various hotels online. This one seemed to have an interesting character… and I was right! I’m happy with my choice and would definitely recommend it to any English-speaking foreigners looking for a place to stay in Huangshan. The only caveat is that your car/van/taxi can’t pull up to the front of the hotel directly, because it’s in a rather interesting retail pedestrian zone (called Liyang Old Street). Fortunately, the staff can help bring bags over from the street or parking garage if necessary.

There are way more and way better photos of Mild Spring Boutique Hotel on Booking.com, Tripadvisor, and Agoda. But here are 19 of ours:

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Longquan celadon swan

Item description / significance
I saw swans like this for sale on Xianyu, the Chinese second-hand marketplace app, then I saw one in person in when my colleagues and I went to Xixi Wetlands to have tea. But I decided I wanted to buy one in Longquan itself if possible. I succeeded!

Bought where
in a shop in Longquan, where they make this kind of porcelain stuff

Age and origin
new, Chinese

What I like about it

It’s a bird. I think I’m generally less interested in water animals than I am in land and sky animals, but water birds can go wherever they want. I like anything with wings.

The color and texture. I find celadon porcelain soothing: it’s smooth and detailed at the same time. I picked the greener of the two color options in the shop.

See below for product photos of similar swans for comparison.

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Longquan Old Town

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!

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Longquan celadon plum blossom bowl

Item description / significance
This is a blueish Longquan celadon rice bowl with a flowering tree pattern on both sides.

Bought where
at the gift shop in the sword factory in Longquan during the road trip I went on with my husband and my parents

Age and origin
new, Chinese, from Lonquan, Zhejiang Province

What I like about it

The pattern. I grew up with a blue-and-white porcelain bedside table lamp that had this kind of pattern. It is variously known as meihua, hawthorn, prunus mume, or plum blossom.

The shape. I collect small little bowls. I like some shape profiles better than others; I tend not to like rims that flare out like a bell. This is a good shape!

The color and texture. I find celadon porcelain soothing. It’s smooth and yet also detailed.

Longquan Sword Factory

Swords are the other thing that Longquan is known for, so Mom, Dad, Siqi, and I visited a “sword factory.” Didn’t look much like a factory to me! It was a bit like a theme park, and would normally have involved demonstrations by craftspeople. Unfortunately, nobody was making anything, I think because it was supposed to rain and they weren’t expecting many visitors. To be fair, they didn’t get many visitors, so we walked around and enjoyed the gardens, the architecture, the displays, and the shop in remarkable peace and quiet. Entry was free. And we didn’t get rained on. I call it a win.

See below for strangely few photos of swords but lots of photos of a sprawling complex of Chinese buildings and gardens.

Continue reading Longquan Sword Factory

Longquan Celadon Museum

I went with my mom, dad, and husband Siqi to visit the Longquan Celadon Museum, which tells about the history of  celadon, a type of green-glazed porcelain or stoneware.

The museum is a big building on a hill that’s part of a larger campus devoted to supporting porcelain art.
Siqi accidentally wore an appropriately blue-green t-shirt.

Off to the museum we go to be tourists!

(Siqi doesn’t want spiders and bots to find photos of his face online so I’ve put sunglasses on him.)

See below for 14 more photos of our visit to the celadon museum.

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To Longquan

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.

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The Werts parents visit us in China!

My mom and dad came to visit me and my husband Siqi in China. My parents visited China and saw the sights in Shanghai, Suzhou, and Beijing some years ago, but I’m so glad they came to see where I live now and spend time with me and Siqi. We had a great time together!

Mom and Dad flew from Atlanta to Shanghai (via Seoul) and stayed in Shanghai overnight. A van brought them to Hangzhou; we hung out at home and then ate dinner at the local mall. Starting the next day, Siqi drove us in a big circle from Hangzhou to Longquan to Huangshan and back to Hangzhou, and then we all spent a little time together to Shanghai before my parents flew off again. Phew!

Our road trip looked more or less like this:

(We did not drive for 14 hours continuously.)

I have soooo many photos from our time together (though not as many as my dad)! So I’ve split them into 18 separate posts. Enjoy!

 

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Xixing Ancient Town, Binjiang District, Hangzhou

Siqi and I went with his parents for a walk in Xixing Ancient Town. It’s a historic neighborhood surrounding an old canal that used to be important. A couple of old houses have been renovated and decorated as trendy coffee shops, and we saw a few people posing for photos on an old bridge like tourists, but it’s largely still a pretty quiet residential neighborhood (according to the Wikipedia page for Binjiang, inhabited since the Spring and Autumn period, which ended in 481 BCE), complete with unmentionables and other laundry hanging out to dry. There are a few signs in Chinese and English describing the landmarks.

See below for 18 photos from our stroll.

Continue reading Xixing Ancient Town, Binjiang District, Hangzhou