19 January 2018, Cloud Forest, Gardens by the Bay and Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore

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From the Flower Dome it is a very short walk to the Cloud Forest.

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Some of the flowers are similar but the arrangement is very different.

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The “cloud” part comes from a cloud of spray released every couple of hours but we were not there at the right time top see this.

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There is a similar dome which here window cleaners are cleaning from the outside.

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The arrangement is much more vertical with great cascading walls of greenery.

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People down below were performing ritual activities with small rectangular objects.

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Perhaps a form of Tai Chi….

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More of the “green wall”.

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Overall, I found it more artificial and less satisfying than the Flower Dome.

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Perhaps my opinion would have been different had the spray been operating.

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… And we look up to those above us….

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We then left for a brief stop at the hotel where I dropped off most of my camera equipment, then headed for the Asian Civilisations Museum.

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I had decided it was not going to rain and didn’t take my umbrella.  I was wrong.  We are walking over a bridge and rain is fast approaching.  We just made it inside the museum before a deluge hit.

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One of the main displays was of the contents of the wreck of a ninth-century ship, here shown as a scale model.  The bowls are some of the sixty thousand retrieved from the wreck.  The ship originated from the Abbasid Empire in the Persian Gulf.  It had sailed via India to China and was returning when it was wrecked in the Java Sea.  It was built entirely without nails.  Wooden planks were sewn together with coconut rope and caulked with wadding.

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Here are some of the Chinese jars from the wreck.  On the left is a fully restored one showing its ash glaze technique; the unrestored jars on the right show how much effort must have gone into restoration.

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This painting particularly caught my attention and shows lots of interesting detail if you click on it for a larger view.  Painted by a Chinese artist, probably for a foreign trader, it shows a square in Guangzhou (Canton), China and some of the people depicted can be identified.  It is 1807 and is at the time of a trial of sailors from the ship Neptune who killed a Chinese man in drunken brawling.  After several days of adjudication, one seaman incurred a small fine.

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This is Singapore harbour in around 1850 by an unknown Chinese artist.  Three European ships dominate the foreground and some of you may notice some difference from the aerial shots of Singapore a couple of posts ago.

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This looks like a giant floating marble boulder but is a sculpture by Eng Tow (2015), based on a grain of rice.

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16th century bronze Buddha from Lan Na, in Northern Thailand, stylistically influenced from Sri Lanka.

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A Bodhisattva from 4th century Ghandhara (between Pakistan and Afghanistan).  It shows the influence of the West (ancient Greece and Rome) on Buddhist art.

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Chinese far from Jingdezhen, around 1700.  The man on the crow’s nest of the ship could be General Xue Rengui, who invaded the Laiodong Peninsula for Tang Emperor Taizong.  The Laiodong Peninsula is just north-west of North Korea and is where in the nineteenth century Port Arthur was located.  The war was against Goguryeo in 644AD.  Goguryeo was a Korean kingdom incorporating what is now North Korea, the northern half of South Korea and the southern and central parts of Manchuria.

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Chrysanthemum dish from Jingdezhen in China, 1723-1735 (during the reign of Yangzhen, the third Qing or Manchu emperor).  Based on the naturalistic style of Yun Shouping (1633-1690), this is an example of what became the characteristic style of the Yangzhen period.

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