Drottingholm

Monday I visited Drottingholm Palace and surrounds. Drottingholm is the best example of an 18th century royal palace in Sweden - some of the buildings are considered to be of such importance that the site is on UNESCO's World Heritage List.

I took a tour through the palace (which is the official home of the Swedish Royal family) which was full of paintings, sculptures and interesting bits of furniture. This building dates from 1662 (the previous palace on the site having burnt to the ground) and the history of the dowager Queen who commissioned the building was fascinating.

Behind the palace is a huge public park and more interesting buildings. One of the buildings is the Chinese pavilion - one of the world's best-preserved rococo environments with Chinese elements. It was built at the time of Europe's fascination with China & Japan, when not much was known about the mysterious orient! The building was constructed for the royal family to experience family time away from the confines of the court. The Chinese Pavilion is compsed of five pavilions with one main  and four smaller single roomed pavilions all arranged symmetrically.

You can only enter the main pavilion (although you can peak into two of the small ones). It was a beautiful building, with fragile, faded hand painted wallpaper (on silk and on rice paper) and dramatically painted rooms of lovely proportions.

One of the rooms had Chinese like characters painted on the walls. Several people on the tour were of Asian heritage and were looking at the characters in a confused manner, until the guide explained that the characters were Swedish copies or interpretations of Chinese characters and that it is completely unreadable (at which point several faces looked less confused, nodded and laughingly agreed that you couldn't read it)!