The Wood carving Museum at Wuzhen

This doesn't look oriental, but this smiling carving graces the museum.

The carvings in this museum date back hundreds of years and some are extra ordinarily intricate. It is hard to imagine how much time and effort that would be required to complete such works. There were many wonderful exhibits of wood carving in this museum.

Today we visited Wenzhou which is north of Hangzhou. We had heard that Wenzhou tourist spot was a water town, and sure enough it was, but there was much more to it. It is quite a large place, and many buses arrived while we were there, so it was very crowded, mostly with Chinese people.

There was plenty of English explanations of the many interesting places there. It is a place that you could spend all day visiting, but as usual the crowds of people are off-putting.

The town dates back to 2000 BC - and it is quite obviously old. Strangely enough much has been preserved, though it appears that white ants and/or timber rot is present in some of the wonderful ancient buildings.

There were 9 places to visit within the complex and we did not see them all. It was too crowded and we had other things to do.

The features? A Bed Museum no less. A remarkable place with many beds on display one of which I think was 1300 years old. It was obvious that wealthy people lived in the big house, and many rooms were amazingly created to give a good picture of the long history there.

I would have thought, (before I had seen this display) that a museum of beds might be a bit boring, but the display was incredible with each bed having an English translation of its age, its use, and oddly on each display its dimensions. There's no doubt that it was far from boring with extra ordinary carvings and decorations on the beds.

Many of the rooms of the museums displayed full life sized models of people from history and the clothing they wore. There was so much to see and so well done.

At another part we saw wooden carvings - intricate clever wonderful wooden carvings many of them going back to the early days of Chinese history.

See the report on the cotton dyeing.