09/18/2015

Busiest day ever. Period.

Canal Boat Ride. Late. Couldn’t  make it. Missed it.

But that was a good thing because I didn’t expect the Chinese Pavilion was that far away from the city center (1 hour).

Adventure to the World Heritage sites!

Kanto House

Made it on time for the free guided tour. Chinese Pavilion was not built by the Chinese, nor does it have anything to do with the Chinese people living in Sweden.

Having Chinese decorations was considered luxurious back then (well, of course, now everything is made in China lol). Some king decided to build this pavilion for his wife as a birthday present.

The decorations were not all from China. In fact, most of them were created from the imaginations of the exotic China that they had never been to, which made it kind of interesting because they didn’t really know certain kind of trees do not exist in china, or like Chinese people don’t look like a certain way.

Back then when the kings and queens were in place and interactions with the eastern part of the world was restricted and limited, imports from China were considered exotic and could be seen as a sign of extinguish status.

This canto house was owned by some noble as a gift to his wife as a summer cottage. Many of the smaller decorations here were in fact directly imported from China through smuggling and other means. However much furniture and bigger paintings were only replicas of the originals and even depictions of what they think the exotic world was like because Chinese goods were really rare back in the days.

As you can see here, the people on the painting actually had European features (esp. their eyes). Painters during that time often times didn’t get to encounter Asian people. To draw this kind of painting, they had to use their imaginations to imagine what China looked like and as a result, the painting was a mixture of Europeans and Asians objects. (If you look carefully, roses also appeared on the picture because they had no idea what kind of plants grow in Asia) It is always fascinating to see how Asians were depicted in Europeans’ eyes.

Random Chinese Character Calligraphy

For people who don’t read Chinese, the following Chinese characters make no sense because they were just random characters copied from some Chinese literature.

Music Room

Great echoes here.

Drottningholm Palace

Like the Chinese Pavilion, Drottningholm Palace was also a part of the world heritage program. However, I don’t find it particularly interesting mostly because I have already seen palaces like this before.