A visit to Jingdezhen with Bo Gyllensvärd, in 1992

Thursday 17 September 1992
Evening farewell dinner with Dr. Liu

In the evening we had prepared a farewell banquet at the Hotel for Dr. Liu and his colleagues that had taken care of us so well. The dinner were above expectations. The kitchen and the elegant little lady I had entrusted with the arrangement took care of everything magnificently.

Basically, I just gave her the general outline and asked her to serve whatever she felt was appropriate. Actually so much so that I think that the entire kitchen staff was also well treated in the background. If so, they were most welcome.

The Chinese reciprocated our pleasantries and mentioned two Swedish publications they had learnt something from as in Bo's doctoral thesis on Tang Gold and Silver and the Gustavsberg sponsored Song Shards by Palmgren, Sundius et.al. that actually had been finalized by Bo after Palmgren's death.

There are a lot of threads that are now converging.

Happy children

The most positive thing about the whole trip is after all these hordes of small children who happily tried out on us their only English word - Hello!

This is my diary as it was written in Jingdezhen and Beijing the 4-24 September 1992,
after an invitation and journey to study the recent findings from the excavations of the Imperial Ming Kilns at Zhushan and other aspects of the ceramic history of China, in and around the city of Jingdezhen. My travel mates beside professor Bo Gyllensvärd were Jarl Vansvik and Erik Engel. My eternal gratitude goes to them, Dr Liu Xinyuan and all our friends at the Archaeological Institute of Jingdezhen. Text and photos on this web page are copyright as published © Jan-Erik Nilsson, Gotheborg.com, Sweden 2014.